Can No One Read Any More?

And a story about buying books on your grandfather’s dime

Going to Buy a Book by Rukmini Banerji, illustrated by Santosh Pujari

This story is about a boy and a girl getting some money from their grandfather and going to a bookshop to buy books. It’s a very simple story and almost charming. But it’s not entirely charming. Mainly because the fantasy of going to a bookshop with a kindly owner and reading and reading and reading — both before and after purchase — does not belong in the world we inhabit.

There may be kindly bookshop owners. There may be hours of uninterrupted time to read and read and read, but does this seem plausible?

People often tweet — and for all I know, they say this on other social media apps, too — that when they were a child, they could read and read and read. And now they’re twenty, or thirty, or thirty-five, and they don’t have the ability any more. It’s generally someone else’s fault. The fault of writers. Books for adults are too grim, too realistic. No romance or losing yourself in that.

Or the evil phone has destroyed our capacity to maintain focus and attention. It’s the phone manufacturers’ fault. The fault of the makers of apps, like the one people use to complain. Or it’s the fault of modernity, or adulthood, or economic reality — for being too much of a downer, for pulling us in too many directions. It’s someone else’s fault I don’t read as much as I used to; I’m mad as hell and won’t take it any more.

Leave aside whether something like this can be anyone’s fault. We can get back to it. Instead, I’d like for a moment to discuss the idea of the mammoth childhood reading session. Did it exist? Was it routine? Does the memory of it matter?

I recently saw another post where someone said that the brain that’s barely keeping up with work and paying taxes cannot be the same brain that polished off easy-reader books by the half-dozen per week at school.

That’s possible.

But isn’t it more possible that someone like that is exaggerating their former delights and pleasures, exaggerating the extent to which they could get lost in a story or a narrative — free from whatever horrible pressure of real life is, we presume, insisting that they work for a living or pay their taxes in the here and now?

One of my schools, many years ago, tried to keep track of the children’s reading. I forget whether it was called a reading diary or a reading digest, but it was something of that kind. I have conversations with secondary teachers now and they tell me that the kids have no attention; that they’re distracted by the product of LLMs and vertical video slop (just as we, in our day, were destroyed forever by TV and by the phones that were just coming in and taking over every waking moment of our lives).

But then I think back to the kind of reading that was tracked at one of my schools and I remember how trivial it seemed then and seems now. If I recall right, in the reading diary (or digest), you had to show you’d read at least four pages of the designated book per night for homework. Now, I’m sure some people would quail at having to do that aged eight or nine or ten. But it’s hardly K2, is it? If this was the baseline, how many children really could polish off a few books a week comfortably and with no effort, in mammoth sessions of vanishing wholly and entirely into whatever it was they happened to be reading?

It’s certainly possible that the people who today bemoan the brokenness of their brains were once truly gifted and prodigious. They got through books like other people got through lunch money. Possibly. But it can’t be true for everyone.

Someone has to be overstating things. All nostalgia, especially scholastic and reading nostalgia, is still poison.

We can now return, as promised, to the idea that all of this is someone else’s fault.

Is it Mark Zuckerberg’s fault, or Jack Dorsey’s fault, or the taxman’s fault, or the fault of the boss, that we can’t get through something big like Bleak House every week? Are we so tired, so exhausted (the reflex adjectives of the past decade), because someone else contrived to make us so?

No. I think we’re not.

First, I think we’re nostalgic about how much energy and attention we actually had in the past. So we’ve not been robbed of all that much in reality.

Sadly, that time we’ve had stolen from us is being spent, by and large, on things we’ve decided to do. We’ve decided, as a species, that algorithmic slop scratches itches that Life and Fate mostly doesn’t.

We have more options, now. And we have other things we’d sincerely like to do. At least some of the former gifted readers of my own age have at least one child they’re probably busy bringing up. Would you rather look after your child or read Infinite Jest?

For many, when posed like that, the question is not hard to answer. Of course, some who don’t have anything meaningful to do also can’t make themselves read. And for them, of course, we must express a deep, abiding sadness — something approaching pity.