We’re told no one reads for pleasure any more, but the popularity of Middlemarch in Silicon Valley and the rise of “booktok” give a glimpse of hope, says Phoebe Arslanagić-Little
A new study has found that the percentage of Americans who report reading for pleasure over the course of an average day has declined from 28 per cent in 2003 to 16 per cent in 2023. Frankly, I am impressed that this many Americans are still reading for fun (I doubt we’re much better), but it’s worth dwelling on just how much has changed.
In his fiery polemic on how TV changed American minds – Amusing Ourselves to Death – the academic Neil Postman devoted an entire chapter to showing how bibliophilic American society has historically been. Postman paints a picture of an intensely bookish Colonial America where, at least among White Americans, reading was extremely widespread rather than considered an elitist activity. In 1772, one commentator wrote: “The poorest labourer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar… Such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind, that almost every man is a reader.”
And consider that in 1776, Common Sense by Thomas Paine, a pamphlet calling for the independence of the American colonies, sold 100,000 copies in two months, in a population of only 2.5m, and at a cost of roughly $16 each in today’s money. An American book published now would have to sell more than 10m copies in the same timeframe to match the proportion of the population who bought Paine’s book. By comparison, Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, a best-seller, has sold 6m copies across the entire world since its publication in 2023.
An increasing number of cultural commentators are now returning to Postman’s analysis in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Published in 1985, its predictions that we are becoming a “trivial culture” feel eerily prescient to many and chime perfectly with concerns that our attention spans are becoming shorter or that we ourselves are simply less intelligent than we once were.
Bleak outlook
On Substack and X and in various magazines and newspapers, a new genre of article may be found. Generally written by an exasperated academic, they describe in pleasing vividness how dumb the modern university or college student is: “Our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read,” one anonymous academic despaired. Such accounts from the frontline of the American higher education system generally complain that students can’t – or won’t – read short, assigned texts, let alone Anna Karenina or The Iliad. These articles make remarkably enjoyable reading. First, because they make one feel intelligent and second, because they offer a satisfying opportunity for pearl clutching.
Commentary of this genre reached a fever pitch earlier in the year when a new study found that the majority of American college students majoring in English Literature were simply unable to understand the opening few paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Let me be clear: that a young American, studying English at a decent college, is unable to divine that a man’s “whiskers” refers to his beard and not to his cat, as one student guessed, is indeed very funny. But I do not feel as certain as some that it is a symptom of relentless decline into an illiterate post-book future.
After all, classics like Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four have recently basked in the approval of Tiktok influencers and have seen their sales rise. And tech billionaire Patrick Collison tweets about reading classic novels and seems to have singlehandedly begun a craze of reading Middlemarch in Silicon Valley.
These are small comforts in the context of the evidence released last year that adult literacy skills have declined or stagnated in most OECD countries. But still, they offer hope. So do the large children’s sections I see in bookshops, packed full with stories I remember from childhood and many I don’t.
My baby daughter likes being read to, but perhaps only to the extent that the activity puts my face within clawing distance (it’s affectionate, we think). “Doesn’t he know, there’s no such thing as a Gruffalo?” I read, quickly moving the book back to avoid its page being ripped in two. Ducking to one side as a tiny, ruthless hand gropes for my glasses, I continue, determined to give my daughter the best chance of understanding Bleak House before she becomes an embarrassing datapoint in a literacy study.