In a letter to American women, Edith Wharton described the French as living closer to full adulthood, while her own countrywomen were still trapped in what she bluntly referred to as “the kindergarten of life.” She was referring to French social sophistication in general, not reading in particular, and that was in 1919. However, whenever someone discusses how reading is treated differently on the other side of the Atlantic, it’s difficult to avoid hearing that same comparison. Americans read a lot. Observing from a distance, what reading is supposed to accomplish and how other cultures casually incorporate it into daily life seem different.
In search of something more akin to survival than tourism, Baldwin departed for Paris in 1948. Baldwin’s early letters home are filled with discomfort, a yearning for simple American comforts, and a kind of culture shock that took years to subside. What he discovered was not the comfortable literary sanctuary Hemingway had described a generation earlier. However, during that transition, he learned something about how the French viewed books and ideas—not as endeavors to better themselves, but rather as casual discussions that were debated in cafés in a manner similar to how Americans might debate sports. Perhaps the difference in tone is more important than any literacy rate statistic.
Because the numbers don’t provide a compelling narrative on their own. Americans do not completely avoid books, nor are they illiterate. For years, Pew Research has monitored American reading habits, and the results show a decline in sustained reading rather than complete abandonment. Something more akin to posture is more difficult to quantify: whether a culture views reading as leisure time crammed around responsibilities or as a fundamental expectation woven into everyday social life, similar to how a long lunch is in much of Southern Europe.
Langston Hughes provides an entirely different kind of lesson, one that emphasizes urgency over leisure. Hughes was surrounded by poets and volunteers who saw literature and political conviction as inextricably linked while reporting from Madrid during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Ninety African American volunteers risked their citizenship to fight fascism overseas by joining the Lincoln Brigade, and the writing that came out of that era seems to have been written by people who thought that words had consequences. Manufacturing that from the outside is more difficult. In contrast, American reading culture frequently views books as a place to escape the news rather than engage in debate.
Something more subdued but equally instructive can be found in Martha Gellhorn’s war reporting. Her Spanish prose almost completely eschews sentimentality, describing tragedy at the human level without taking any emotional short cuts. Actually, that restraint serves as a kind of reading lesson in and of itself, serving as a reminder that some of the most powerful writing is predicated on an audience that is willing to endure discomfort rather than demand an immediate resolution. That kind of patience isn’t always rewarded in American publishing, which is increasingly focused on quick hooks and instant gratification. It’s worth considering what is lost in that trade.
The way younger expatriate characters—real or imagined—describe becoming completely lost in a foreign language is also noteworthy. In Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner’s narrator struggles through poorly understood Spanish conversations, creating meaning when his comprehension fails. Somehow, this confusion teaches him more about language than fluency could have. In contrast to reading comfortably in one’s native tongue, reading in translation or while slightly disoriented appears to sharpen attention. It’s possible that Americans, who are mostly monolingual by international standards, are virtually completely missing out on that specific sharpening.
Specifically, none of this implies that Americans should be ashamed of their reading habits. It’s more that observing these foreign writers struggle in strange places highlights the extent to which circumstances, such as a lack of paper, a civil war, a language barrier, or a café designed for lingering, influence reading culture. Different factors, such as suburban sprawl, longer commutes, and a market fixated on bestseller lists, contributed to the formation of American reading culture. It’s genuinely unclear if it’s too late to adopt habits developed somewhere else. However, it’s difficult to ignore how many of the authors on that reading list discovered something overseas that they were unable to find back home—not necessarily better books, but a different perspective on reading itself.
