The shifting mode of teaching reading comprehension from offline to online due to COVID-19 pandemic has changed the EFL students' anxiety and attitude toward reading. Studies on this topic particularly in the context of Islamic Higher Education have not been much explored. This paper is then aimed at revealing the EFL students' anxiety and attitude toward reading and the implication to their reading performance. This descriptive quantitative was done by distributing an online questionnaire to seventy-five students of an English Department at a state Islamic University in Tulungagung East Java Indonesia, who attended reading courses online mode dan had ever joined offline reading comprehension classes. The online survey was carried out from Mei -June 2021 when the pandemic was at its peak. The collected data which were qualitatively analyzed and interpreted exposed three important points. Firstly, the pandemic that leads to physical and social distancing is believed to be able to reduce anxiety among EFL undergraduate students when they are reading English. It is also believed to improve their positive attitude toward reading English, even though reading is not anymore perceived as their hobby. Moreover, their reading anxiety and attitude after the pandemic implicates reducing their performance reading for some conditions, i.e., the increasing number of school tasks, the time limitation, boredom, and the decreasing focus on online reading. The research results are pedagogically implemented to build a positive attitude and reduce anxiety in online or offline reading.