12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Peter Mendelsund lost the desire to read, and is still awash in books
Perhaps pleasure reading had come to seem like a busman's holiday? 'I didn't used to feel that way,' Mendelsund said during a recent visit to his home in Manhattan. 'It's a very strange thing. I think it's a combination of reading so much during my life and then working in the industry for a while and just seeing the churn.'
During the pandemic, depressed, 'I read Proust for the first time, the whole shebang, and then I finished it, and I just sort of felt — done.'
And it wasn't just that 'In Search of Lost Time' felt so perfect and complete, or that it was such a long undertaking. 'I just couldn't pick anything up anymore.'
Still, despite his diminished appetite for prose, Mendelsund's sizable apartment remains awash in books. 'The piles are eventually — I think — going to be something. I don't know what. I have to make some order,' he said. He distributed cups of coffee, then showed us around.
