The Future of Reading
Our sacred practice can flourish even if very few of us are doing it
There has recently been another bout of anxiety about the future of reading, after a study reported a steep drop in the percentage of Americans who read for enjoyment. Similar patterns have been found in numerous other countries; reading appears to be in decline everywhere. A few months back, I wrote an in-depth essay about this trend for First Things magazine, which I can now republish here.
My take differs from most others in three ways. First, I emphasise that, if we are heading for a world in which only a small proportion of us can read proficiently, then were are just returning to the historical norm. The era of mass literacy was the anomaly. Second, during that era of mass literacy, many people read only for news, entertainment, and distraction – the same purposes for which they later turned to TV and then smartphones. So when we think about the consequences of declining literacy, we should remember that there were relatively few “serious” readers to begin with (which doesn’t mean the consequences won’t still be very significant). Finally, I argue that the practice of reading, and literature more broadly, can still flourish in the future, even if only a very small part of society engages with it.
You, of course, can be part of that wise minority who keep the sacred flame of reading alive. And why not start now, with my essay on the future of reading?
More is read now in a year than was read before in a hundred years.” So declared Lectura Popular, a Catholic publication aimed at the working classes of Chile, in September 1889. Such was the public’s appetite for written materials, the magazine warned, that “readings are devoured and that is why people become sick.” Peasants moving to the cities were adapting their traditional forms of poetry, orally transmitted for generations, to cover politics, scandal, and social commentary. These lira popular, or “people’s lyres,” were printed on cheap leaflets and hawked in the markets and train stations of Santiago. A contemporary account captures their resonance:
The announcement of a new broadside by Guajardo circulated throughout the morning in the warehouse district . . . and by the afternoon one could see a group of men, huddled in a corner of a street or a building under construction, smoking cigarettes and reading unhurriedly, as if to savor down to the last detail the emotions of their small Homer.
It was in response to this unruly print culture, notes University of California professor Juan Poblete, that social reformers launched publications such as Lectura Popular, hoping to channel mass literacy toward respectable ends.
What was happening in Chile was happening across much of Europe and the Americas in the latter half of the nineteenth century: a dramatic growth in the practice of reading. It was a development without precedent in history. Whereas reading had previously been confined to an educated minority, it was now being taken up by an expanding middle class and even by the laboring poor. As Jonathan Rose has documented, there were by the early twentieth century formidable strands of intellectual culture within Britain’s working classes, based on the efforts of individual autodidacts, mutual help societies, and eventually cheap editions of the classics. Factory workers, domestic servants, and policemen read and discussed Shakespeare, Milton, Thomas Carlyle, and Thomas Hardy. As one Welsh miner recalled, “guidance in the choice of good books came to me deep down in the pit, in the darkness and dark dust of a narrow tunnel more than a thousand feet below the earth’s surface.”
This great reading boom started going into reverse with the arrival of television in the mid-twentieth century. Today, the decline is accelerating. The most startling changes are observable in higher education, including at prestigious universities. College students have an unusual amount of time to read and encouragement to do it, allowing them to establish intellectual habits for later life. For a number of years, though, I’ve heard professors complain that students can no longer cope with their reading assignments. Last fall, a widely shared report in The Atlantic, by Rose Horowitch, highlighted the problem at elite colleges in the United States. Academics say that, for the current generation of students, “the reading load feels impossible.” They have difficulty concentrating for extended periods, following plotlines, and registering details. They arrive with “a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have.” Some were never required to finish an entire book in high school.
Surveys suggest a steady erosion of reading in developed countries. Twenty years ago, a group of sociologists summarizing the latest evidence could report that “most Americans and Europeans read during their leisure time.” Seventy percent had read novels, short stories, poems, or plays over a twelve-month period. In the U.S. today, by contrast, less than half manage at least one book per year. Between 2004 and 2018, those reading for pleasure on a given day fell from 28 percent to 19 percent, and the average American’s daily reading time is now around fifteen minutes. In the UK, meanwhile, the median person read just three books during the past year, and 40 percent read none. Studies in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines report that reading is on the wane.
The picture among school pupils suggests that further declines await. Last year, the National Assessment of Education Progress in the United States found historically high rates of thirteen-to-fourteen-year-olds and nine-to-ten-year-olds with “below basic” reading skills, with negative trends evident across race and class lines. In both the United States and the UK, fewer children and teenagers are reading for enjoyment.
These developments deserve serious attention, but we should remind ourselves what an unusual activity reading has been throughout most of history. Discerning literacy rates for earlier eras is an imprecise business—especially as there are many forms and degrees of literacy—but it is safe to say that, in the vast majority of societies that have existed, most people had neither the ability nor the opportunity to read, and would have found literacy of little use anyway.
To be sure, literacy was necessary for societies to grow beyond a rudimentary stage of complexity. By the second millennium b.c., writing had sprung from three separate sources—in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China’s Yellow River valley—and was being used to manage the resources of royal palaces and to record various other things: law codes and legal agreements, loans and dowries, rituals and medical recipes, prayers, spells, divinations, and astrological ideas. Yet this work required only a tiny elite of scribes and priests; the vast majority lived and worked on the land. Even in the Roman Empire, a sophisticated society with a considerable literary output, rates of literacy were as low as 10 to 15 percent, and in some regions much lower. Reading was concentrated, again, in centers of commerce and bureaucracy: cities, coastal regions, and military frontiers.
The ability to print text mechanically, rather than copying it by hand, helped literacy to expand—but only to a point. Before the modern era, the idea of educating the masses did not much appeal to rulers or to the literate minority, who tended to be jealous of their skills. The first boom in printed literature occurred in China under the Song dynasty, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries a.d. Historians have credited the Song dynasty with fostering a common culture across a large territory, but it did so mainly by creating a vast civil service steeped in Confucian scholarship, “a governing elite,” as Michael Wood puts it, “that was unique in world history and would be for centuries.” Likewise unusual in the Middle Ages was Judaism, which encouraged all men to read and study the Torah. In medieval Christendom, by contrast, Bibles, books of hours, and psalters were revered as objects, but it is probable that, in 1400, only about one in ten Europeans was fully literate (and still fewer could read Latin, the language of intellectual life). The arrival of printing increased literacy only gradually, as people usually listened to texts being read aloud. By the early eighteenth century, most inhabitants of England still could not sign their names.
The decline of reading in our day represents a move toward the historical norm, not away from it. The new element is the circumstances in which the decline is happening. The effect of networked digital devices is brutally obvious. During the 2010s, readers seemed to share an almost universal realization that to read in a deep and sustained way required of them more effort than it once had. We felt our brains being rewired in real time, our attention becoming weaker even as powerful new demands were placed on it. Social media platforms are exciting centers of discourse, the lira popular of our time. They are also akin to a drug epidemic, with interfaces designed to hijack the limbic system and make the mind dependent on their rapid patterns of stimulation. Nor is this the only way smartphones override deeper thought processes. Their constant proximity means that social networking, entertainment, and the demands of work are not so much in your pocket as always in the back of your mind. In France, a recent study found that half of young readers now engage with other media, such as sending messages or watching videos, while they read.
But we need to look beyond a simple economics of attention to understand why reading is embattled today. For one thing, written culture is part of the content overload. In terms of sheer volume of words and sentences, we probably read more than ever—the problem being that text messages, emails, and social media posts calibrate our minds to the fragmented and ephemeral. In a subtler way, serious reading and writing have been sucked into a high-volume, low-status digital model. A depressing portion of the “books” I consulted for this essay were PDF files that I skimmed with tired eyes on a laptop screen; the university library where I have a membership has almost entirely stopped stocking new titles in physical form. This development may reflect the fact that, in the academic world, far too much is published for even fellow specialists to appreciate. A good deal of reading now feels like a listless Netflix binge. At Substack, a platform that allows writers to build audiences through subscriptions, high output is regarded as a good strategy for growth, leading to a glut of blogs and essays that ultimately devalue their own art.
Meanwhile, the wider framework of customs and ideals that once supported reading is crumbling. The moments in which people used to open their books—the advent of railway travel contributed to the growth of reading—are being overwhelmed by less structured, more frantic and distracted lives. More important still, reading formerly had prestige as a means to becoming an educated person, in the sense of cultivated rather than merely credentialed. Great literature was rightly regarded as providing intellectual resources for a meaningful life, just as a wide and active reading habit provided tools for citizenship. Today, a different set of attitudes toward knowledge and self-worth are making reading seem superfluous. In my experience as a teacher of British teenagers, many schools treat literature as an ordeal to be negotiated by means of approved formulaic responses. Jonathan Malesic, another professor who has drastically cut his students’ reading assignments, notes that “for decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else,” while absorbing from the broader culture a sense that “success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies.” With these assumptions, Malesic asks, “why should they make the effort to read?”
The loss of reading proficiency among students is of particular significance because they would otherwise represent the bulk of future readers. In 2005, commenting on the declines in mass reading that had been apparent already for half a century, the sociologist Wendy Griswold emphasized that “reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites.” There was, she said, “a reading class,” a “self-perpetuating minority” of educated people whose reading habits were both more prolific than, and independent of, the casual forms of reading typically found in other sections of society. This reading class is now shrinking. In some ways, however, it is also becoming more conscious of itself as a group.
According to Horowitch’s Atlantic article, students regard their peers who read books as members of an anachronistic subculture, like collectors of vinyl records. Many of these young readers no doubt see themselves in the same way, especially as virtual spaces like BookTok provide them with a berth amid social media’s constellation of niche cultural identities. Reading has also become a marker of the conspicuously cultured middle-class consumer, a species whose preferences are reflected in the trappings of the typical bookshop: good coffee, progressive politics, expensive stationery, and tote bags. Latent in these conjunctions of reading with lifestyle and media is a phenomenon that Jessica Pressman calls “bookishness,” a tendency toward “exploring and demonstrating love for the book as symbol, art form, and artefact.” Rather than receptacles of knowledge or literature, books are becoming objects of aesthetic desire in their own right. This no doubt reflects a wish to save reading from the uninspiring morass of digital content, but it also suggests how, increasingly, one might acquire a book in the way one acquires designer furniture—as something to associate oneself with and to savor the thought of, but not necessarily to use very often.
Corresponding with these shifts, we see a tendency to frame the benefits of reading in personal and therapeutic terms. Proponents of reading often make it sound like exercise or a healthy diet. “Quite simply, reading is good for you,” says the CEO of one charity. In a detailed study of women’s reading groups, María Angélica Olave emphasizes that fiction provides opportunities for emotional growth, reflection, and “self-care.” Many of her respondents talk about reading as a luxury or indulgence, reflecting the deep pleasure they find in it as well as their perception of its intrinsically private nature.
Such findings may not be fully applicable to male readers, since the sexes have quite different relationships with reading. From an early age and across many societies, women tend to read more, develop more sophisticated literacy skills, and form a greater preference for fiction. Nonetheless, the decline of reading has surely been exacerbated by its drift over time into the domain of personal leisure activities, leaving us without ready arguments for its social and public value. The flight of young people away from humanities subjects over the past decade not only reveals a more hard-nosed attitude to employment qualifications; it also reflects a general perception of literary pursuits as pointless and somewhat decadent. Yet as Olave observes in her study of fiction lovers, the imaginative “enchantment” involved even in middlebrow reading has profound social implications. Individuals who engage with the lives and thoughts of others in a sustained way have an enriched perspective on the world. They may be better equipped to model the experiences and motivations of people around them, to develop their own beliefs more coherently, and to grasp intuitively the depth and complexity of human affairs.
This raises the question of the wider consequences of the decline of reading. Adam Garfinkle is among those who argue that it is undermining the political culture on which democracy depends, most notably by fueling the growth of irrational populism. Garfinkle is especially concerned about the loss of “deep literacy,” a competence earned through careful engagement with longer texts, whose benefits include “nurturing our capacity for abstract thought, enabling us to pose and answer difficult questions, empowering our creativity and imagination, and refining our capacity for empathy.” The transition from deep literacy to social media, as Garfinkle portrays it, is driving us into mental prisons of unexamined prejudice and tribal emotion, where we are prey to manipulation and incapable of independent thought.
Intuitively, it certainly seems as though the mental powers we develop through certain kinds of reading—powers of questioning, supposing, forming connections, interrogating our own responses—are valuable for societies that aspire to self-government, and especially societies that face formidable pressures of propaganda and groupthink. As is often pointed out, the language and intellectual rigor with which we conduct politics today are almost absurdly impoverished by contrast with even a single lifetime ago, when the utterances of public figures were routinely strewn with literary references. Such prowess in rhetoric and debate was surely not window dressing. And yet, the question remains whether “deep literacy” was ever very widespread. Was it achieved, for instance, by the workers reading lira popular in Chile at the turn of the twentieth century? No doubt many countries had some equivalent of the British miners quoting Shakespeare at the coalface, but how common were these autodidacts?
A 1957 report by the British academic Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, criticized working-class newspapers and magazines in terms remarkably similar to those leveled at social media today. According to Hoggart, this popular culture left its readers unable to engage in abstract argument, to look beyond their personal perspectives, or to be sufficiently skeptical. “There must be no connected sequences of any length,” he complained. “Everything is interesting, as interesting as the next thing, if only it is short, unconnected, and pepped-up. . . . One doesn’t read such papers; one ‘looks at’ them.” Broadly concurring with Hoggart’s analysis of the press, Ross McKibbin adds that, in England before the Second World War, “there was no common literature and the reading public was remarkably segmented,” with men’s fiction being “almost exclusively sport, sex, . . . crime, and violence.”
It may be, in other words, that in its heyday, the appeal of reading for much of the population was similar to that of the audiovisual media that later supplanted it. Of course those who did become precocious readers of highbrow literature might still, within the complex workings of the body politic, have contributed something significant. At the very least, though, we should be careful not to overstate the importance of reading for democracy, political liberalism, or other modern developments that we associate with intellectual autonomy and maturity. It is a predictable conceit of those who spend a lot of time with books to underestimate the importance of the active life—of commerce, innovation, material resources, and common sense. Besides, one need not look far to find literacy implicated in fanaticism and oppression.
In Europe, the high point of reading in the first half of the twentieth century coincided with its most destructive outbreaks of organized violence, conformity, and mass hysteria. The written word can indoctrinate as well as liberate. The most printed book in history, with the exception of the Bible, is Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. Joseph Stalin, who referred to authors as “engineers of the soul,” is said to have responded thus when confronted about the mass rapes perpetrated by Red Army soldiers during the Second World War:
You have, I know, read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing is man’s soul, his psyche? Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade—over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones. How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his amusing himself with a woman, after such horrors?
Even if these remarks were delivered cynically, there is an important lesson here about the evils that can be rationalized through literary virtues such as emotional insight and appreciation of human complexity.
Whatever the long-term consequences for society, the current crisis of reading might not be a bad thing for the practice of reading itself. A future in which proficient, active readers continue to decline as a share of population, perhaps returning to a historical norm of one in ten, or even less, may still be a world in which the literary arts flourish.
If this sounds paradoxical, consider that there are more ways of judging the health of a cultural form than numerical participation. Downsizing can be traumatic, but what matters is the vitality of what emerges from it. The world is full of activities and skilled disciplines that thrive with relatively small numbers—in music, sports, artistic and craft practices, and countless other fields. Scale is not irrelevant, but beyond some minimum cultural footprint, scale matters less than the ability of such undertakings to provide their practitioners with a path to beauty, satisfaction, and accomplishment, and with a community that shares in the pursuit of those things.
Will reading, in an increasingly post-literate world, support such a practice? The answer is surely yes. For those with the means and inclination to read, there will still be excellent reasons to do so. Literature has provided so many important themes and ideas that cultures will continue to ring with references to them, and their unfamiliarity will make them all the more alluring. Once discovered, the extraordinary riches of this literary inheritance will justify the time and effort needed to enjoy them. Developing a reading habit will probably require even more discipline in the future, as it falls further out of step with the surrounding culture. If new communication technologies place less emphasis on written messages—replacing them, for instance, with audio formats—many people will do no reading at all on a regular basis. But it is precisely this effort, and this sense of cultivating a rare faculty, that will give reading a sacred quality for those who commit to it.
The ongoing saturation of life by media will no doubt influence the kinds of literature that people choose to read, and to write. The provision of information will become less important; style, charisma, and richness of thought will become more so. If writers no longer need to appeal to a wide audience, then literature could well become more esoteric in style and more elitist in outlook.
The social standing of this literate minority is difficult to predict. Much depends on the degree of prestige accorded to reading in education and elite circles. In earlier societies, in which literacy was rare, it had a high practical value as an instrument of administrative and ideological power. It is difficult to imagine readers of the future achieving mandarin status of this kind, but they may prove to have qualities that are desirable in certain roles or as a form of social distinction. Nor should we overlook the ancient association of literacy with religious functions. That reading enables a kind of communion with ancestors is an uncanny detail we tend to overlook but which may appear more significant when fewer people can do it. Assuming such positions will not be filled by the descendants of ChatGPT, familiarity with scriptures and histories could again be regarded as a priestly calling. Alternatively, the technological society may result in a perception of reading as entirely obsolete, both as a skill and as a mark of status.
In the nearer term, I would bet that reading will evolve into something analogous to classical music. Though it retains a presence in the broader culture, its primary audience skews toward the educated, and though it remains lively and has avant-garde elements, it is also rooted in history. Surveys from the U.S. and UK suggest that just over 10 percent of people play a musical instrument, and just under 5 percent do so in front of an audience (though admittedly this statistic includes all forms of music, not just classical). These figures could plausibly correspond to future numbers of occasional and serious readers. Just as a much larger percentage listen to classical music, there will be a wider sphere of people who maintain some contact with literary culture and ideas, perhaps through audiobooks or adaptations.
Even if the audience becomes very small, people will continue to write. The economist and tech evangelist Tyler Cowen recently advised authors that their work should be aimed not at human readers but at artificial intelligence. Since algorithms will manage access to knowledge in the future, our intellectual legacies depend on them. Our descendants won’t want to “page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas.” This is probably true in a broad sense, but the depressing prospect of writing to impress some tech company’s software is a useful reminder of where literature’s real, transcendent value lies. It lies in the special bond between author and reader, established in the course of their dialogue through the written word. This bond gives literature the character of a gift, and as long as there are readers to appreciate it, some will want to become authors and give in turn.