Reading has always been a mostly solitary pursuit – until now. Time to step away from the fairy-light reading nook you flaunted on #booktok and venture out. Don’t worry: you can still read.

Enter reading parties. The post-Covid craving for human connection is well-documented, and in an age of algorithm-driven misinformation, paper books are enjoying a very real comeback.

But let’s rewind. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, knowledge lived with royalty, clergy and oral tradition. Print blew that world wide open – publishers became cultural gatekeepers, mass media connected nearly everyone to the printed word. Then the internet happened, and print’s reign began to crumble.

In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, Jeff Jarvis argues that the internet closed the era of print and nudged us back toward conversation as the dominant mode of sharing ideas – a trip to the past that feels oddly comforting. But digital life also shredded our attention spans and strained our social ties, wounds deepened by Covid. And yet… maybe hell isn’t other people after all.