One day, my daughter told me about a young man we’ll call Alex who used to work with her. His father, a professor of literature at a prestigious American university, instilled in him an almost unyielding love of reading. Alex would go to the beach at around seven o’clock at night and stay there with a book until two in the morning during their joint summer internship in California. The following day, he would arrive at work at around eleven. It didn’t seem to bother anyone. His reading spoke for itself in a subtle way, just as his work did.
A young man on a beach at midnight, engrossed in Gabriel García Márquez as the tide approaches, is an image worth pondering for a moment. This is not how most people envision the “reading crisis.” Perhaps that’s the point. The love of reading has not disappeared. It has simply become unevenly distributed, culturally lopsided, and entangled with history, class, and what a society deems important.
Alex’s personal interest in reading began, of all things, with a TED Talk in which the speaker made the case that reading books from foreign nations could broaden one’s perspective on the world. Alex started reading almost as a discipline, pursuing the recurrent themes of love, loss, and hope across a wide range of literary works, suggesting that this idea struck a deep chord. Even when that impulse comes from something as contemporary as a TED Talk, it’s difficult to ignore how old it is.
In contrast, over a hundred libraries with an average of three thousand volumes each were constructed by miners in the Welsh coalfields during the 1930s. One hundred thousand books were in circulation at the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute alone. These weren’t casual readers trying to relax after working underground. In a tradition more in line with Frederick Douglass’s description of literacy as a form of freedom, they read for improvement and self-mastery. Between Alex’s beach chair and the lamp-lit libraries of the miners, reading changed from being a moral requirement to more of a lifestyle choice that people could choose to give up with little social cost.
The data clearly reflects that change. According to an OECD survey of 160,000 adults in 31 countries, reading proficiency has declined nearly everywhere over the last ten years, with the exception of Finland and Denmark. It’s tempting—and becoming more and more popular—to attribute this to smartphones. Neil Postman’s caution that entertainment was depleting public conversation is frequently invoked by critics. Even though it makes sense, that explanation seems a bit too easy.
Vanishing attention worries are nothing new. A German publicist bemoaned the fact that his compatriots were no longer reading as their fathers had in 1792. Moralists of the nineteenth century were concerned that women reading novels could destroy society. The anxiety doesn’t change, but the vocabulary does. It’s arguable that confidence—a cultural ambiguity about what, if anything, truly merits ongoing attention—is what’s different now rather than technology.
In the past, universities used to provide authoritative answers to that question by giving students whole books to read and expecting them to be difficult. As Allan Bloom foresaw decades ago, many classrooms today rely more on brief excerpts, and library stacks are becoming more like cafés than study spaces. It’s really unclear if that’s the cause or the symptom. Campaigns to increase “wellbeing” by encouraging people to read for ten minutes a day, however, seem a little insufficient in comparison to the requirements of something like Crime and Punishment.
Whether it’s a beach in California or a miners’ institute in Wales, reading endures wherever a community still views it as worthwhile. It’s possible that cultures haven’t really diverged as much as it appears. The number of places where that argument is still made aloud has changed. As this develops, it appears to be more about societies gradually losing the ability to persuasively argue that some books are worthwhile than it is about phones destroying books.
