In G2 today and on the Guardian's books blog, Stuart Jeffries is writing about reader's block. He also solicits the views of a few writers: do they ever suffer from it? what do they do, if so? etc.
I think at least three different things are mixed up in the various contributions. One is not wanting - not having enough interest - to continue with a book you've started. A second is not being in a reading frame of mind for one reason or another: being busy with other stuff, worried, tired. And the third is not being able to find anything to read that you can work up an interest in. In my opinion, the first two are not properly described as reader's block. If the book doesn't interest you, it doesn't interest you. So what? Unless you have to read it for some reason. (And then, poor you; that's a bit like marking.) But the problem isn't in you as a reader. The sensible thing would be just to leave the book aside. Similarly, if your mind or your time is elsewhere, and you don't want to read, there isn't really a reading problem, though there may be another sort of problem in your life, but that's something else. Not being able to find anything that will interest you enough to read it with interest, now that is reader's block.
The writers here are all asked to 'recommend a book to get people reading again'. Treating this as a meme, I shall go further and recommend a dozen books. I won't say I found them un-put-downable. I'm a slow reader and I don't think I've ever read a book in one sitting in my life - however short they were. I tend to read for an hour, an hour and a half, two max, and then I do something else. But these are all books I've read this year, which, when I wasn't reading them, I really looked forward to getting back to:
Summer by Edith Wharton, Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Amongst Women by John McGahern, Have the Men Had Enough? by Margaret Forster, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell, Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy, The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor, Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor.
I don't understand reader's block. There is always more than one book that I want to read next.