How Fredrik Backman helped me get over my reading slump, again

Indian Express

5 days ago

In a time where everything has a screen and every screen has a stream, where even your refrigerator might suggest a cooking reel and your watch buzzes with breaking news—how do books stand a chance?
We are living in an era where content is currency and attention is collateral. Your car has a dashboard that plays YouTube. Your speaker has an opinion. Even your mirror might soon start narrating the news. Everything is evolving–smarter, sharper, louder. The quiet, deliberate act of reading feels almost… archaic. In this hyper-stimulated ecosystem, where even Marvel is now more movie than comic, it's no surprise that the written word often loses the battle for our attention. Words on paper? They don't auto-play.
So, like many of us, I too got sucked into the vortex of videos. One reel turned into twenty. One video essay became four. And just like that, my once-beloved habit of reading quietly slipped through the cracks, swallowed by what we now officially call the brain-rot era.
And this, dear reader, is what bibliophiles refer to as: the reading slump.
My first real slump lasted over two years. Books gathered dust. Bookmarks remained frozen somewhere between page 8 and page 12, abandoned like half-hearted New Year's resolutions. Then, one idle day in 2019, while aimlessly wandering through a bookstore in a mall—a rare enough act now to almost feel vintage—I stumbled upon a hardcover edition of Anxious People by Fredrik Backman.
At first glance, it was the chapter lengths that drew me in. Tiny, digestible, two-to-three page chapters. 'Small accomplishments,' I thought. Back then, I needed any win I could get. Reading ten pages felt like climbing Everest in flip-flops. But Backman's structure made each chapter feel like a checkpoint in a video game—quick, satisfying, and motivating.
What I didn't expect, however, was that his writing would do far more than just coax me back into reading. It gripped me, made me laugh, then made me feel things I wasn't ready to feel.
A bank robbery. A hostage situation. A deeply absurd cast of characters. All of it absurd on the surface, but within it, so much humanity. So much messy, unfixable, and beautiful humanity. As Backman writes in Anxious People: 'This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots.'
It was. Idiots just like us, trying to love, trying to be better, failing most of the time, but trying anyway. Through his prose, Backman didn't just write stories. He created spaces, warm, messy rooms filled with people who could've been your friends or your neighbours. And somehow, through these fictional strangers, I found comfort. The reading slump broke, gloriously.
What followed was a reading renaissance. In the years 2020 through 2022, I devoured nearly 60 books. I became that annoying person with Goodreads goals and colour-coded bookmarks.
But as they say, what goes up…
Life got busy. Or maybe I got lazy. Probably both. I tried dipping my toes back into different genres—sci-fi, romance, literary fiction. And don't get me wrong, many of those genres are the go-to slumpsavers for most readers. The adrenaline of a good thriller. The comfort of a cozy romance. The escapism of well-built fantasy. But for me, nothing clicked. I would start reading, then remember an email I hadn't replied to. Or a Netflix show I had half-finished. Or sometimes, I'd just doomscroll until my thumb ached and my brain was mush.
The worst part? I kept buying books, somehow thinking the purchase itself would jolt me into reading. (Spoiler: it didn't.) My 'TBR' shelf became less of a to-do list and more of a guilt museum.
Eight months. Not a single book finished.
Then came Lucas.
A few weeks ago, while I was mindlessly scrolling through Amazon—because that's the most reading I had been doing lately—I stumbled upon a short story by Fredrik Backman I hadn't read before. Titled The Answer Is No, it was just 68 pages long, available only on Kindle and audiobook. The length, again, was my hook. The author was the clincher.
I downloaded it immediately.
Backman's story introduces us to Lucas, a man who has perfected the art of living alone. Not in a tragic, brooding, tortured-artist way. In a calm, curated, pad-thai-and-wine kind of way. Lucas's evenings are spent exactly how he wants them: with video games, routine, and absolutely no human interaction. He's not hiding from the world—he's just very sure he doesn't want to be part of its chaos.
And honestly, I got it. Entirely. In Lucas's resistance to social demands, in his meticulous life of boundaries and avoidance, I saw a version of what many of us have become—content in our curated bubbles, fiercely guarding our 'me time,' replacing human conversations with algorithm-fed content.
But of course, life—Backman-style—has other plans.
What begins as a mundane event in Lucas's apartment building spirals into a surprisingly sharp, quietly hilarious, and deeply human narrative about community dysfunction, unwanted responsibility, and the emotional pile-up we all try to ignore. Lucas, despite himself, gets dragged into the mess, socially and otherwise. And through a string of wonderfully absurd characters and unexpected moments of connection, he's forced to reckon with something more disorienting than chaos: the possibility of needing other people.
Without ever preaching, The Answer Is No gently prods at themes of loneliness, reluctant empathy, and what it means to set boundaries without shutting the world out completely. It's a story laced with Backman's signature warmth, dry wit, and knack for revealing our deepest vulnerabilities through the simplest of setups. And as I reached the final page, I realised something: I hadn't just finished a book, I'd finished it without checking my phone once.
That's no small feat in this age of infinite distractions.
What is it about Fredrik Backman that gets to me?
It's not just that his chapters are short (though that definitely helps). It's that he makes the ordinary feel sacred. He writes about people who feel like your mother, your awkward co-worker, your best friend who moved away, your angry neighbour who just needs a hug. His words aren't flashy. They're honest. And sometimes, that's far harder to write.
His stories don't demand your attention, they earn it, gently. Backman is not the kind of writer who yells to keep you reading. He whispers. And you lean in.
And while other genres rely on plot, twists, world-building to keep you turning pages, Backman builds emotional gravity. You turn the page not to know what happens next, but because you don't want to leave the character alone in their grief, their joy, their vulnerability.
In Anxious People, he writes: 'We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we're more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.'
That's what reading his books feel like, hope wrapped in heartbreak, delivered with warmth and wit.
I won't lie to you. This might not be my last reading slump. Life happens. Screens will keep glowing. Attention will keep fracturing.
But now I know where to go when I need to come back.
Sometimes, you don't need a 500-page epic or a bold new genre to get you reading again. Sometimes, all it takes is a Swedish author with an extraordinary understanding of ordinary people. Sometimes, all it takes is a short story and a quiet boy named Lucas.
And sometimes, that's enough to remind you that reading isn't just a habit, it's home. So here I am again, back from the void, thanks to Fredrik Backman. And guess what? I am already onto my next book.
(As I See It is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word.)