I’m Ritzvana, an English literature graduate and founder of PushToRead.

My Backstory: Like so many of us, I watched my mind and the world around me slowly get eroded by social media. In some ways, the world has traded rich literature for constant scrolling. A book is hardly in people's hands.

Reading used to be a collective enjoyment for pure entertainment. We’ve now entered a post-literate era. Reading is in decline, and as an English Literature major in college, this deeply saddens me.

Post-literacy - this is the blaring reality we are facing

We're living through a drastic decline in focus and critical thinking.

No one reads. You might have heard people blasting, “Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t read. We’re worried.” But honestly, that's true of every generation right now, even the Boomers. Yes, my 84-year-old grandma even has her face in the phone!

Literacy levels and reading comprehension rates are dropping like my credit score while daily screen-time viewing is at an all-time high. Nobody reads.

And in a world where data is everything, Big Tech’s need to steal our attention and waste our time is built into every facet of our lives now.

They feast on our attention.

Complex books and silence have been replaced by cheap & easy dopamine hits, algorithmic feeds, and cheap, mind-numbing entertainment. It’s as if their objective is to hyper-accelerate the brain atrophy already developing in people today because they don't read.

When we stopped reading long-form literature, we lost our patience for deep thought, our capacity for critical reflection, empathy, and the quietness of our own minds. We’ve lost the ability to sit with ourselves.

And more alarmingly, our brains have had enough; we just don’t know how to stop it.

I’m sure we've heard the barrage of people complaining about how they can’t remember things well or have trouble explaining their thoughts. And reading solves all of this. It’s healing in so many ways.

PushToRead is an intentional stance against this growing anti-read society.

What You Receive

Free Subscribers:

• The Sunday Essay: Honest reflections on digital burnout, attention restoration, and reclaiming quiet focus through books.

• The Open Friday Roll Call: A low-pressure community check-in inside Substack Chat where anyone can share what page they’re on in whatever book they’re reading that week.

Paid Members ($5/month or $50/year):

• The “Read Along With Me” Club: Access to focused, guided reading journeys. We pick a specific book together (starting with propulsive page-turners) and break it down chapter by chapter.

• Sentence & Chapter Breakdowns: Deep-dive posts analyzing narrative tension, what keeps us hooked, and why the scenes grab us.

• Interactive Prompts & Exercises: Thought-provoking discussion questions and creative prompts for each chapter chunk.

• Exclusive Club Chat & Comments: Full access to discuss the assigned book chapters, share annotations, and complete reading prompts together with me.