Do you remember the first time? Picking them out, not knowing what to expect, but compelled by an attraction you couldn’t quite define; fumbling awkwardly, not entirely sure how to get into it but finding your way; discovering a pleasure you’d never yet known, and were desperate to find again.
I am, of course, discussing reading for pleasure – a habit that all of us, one hopes, have long since gotten into. There must have been a point at which Young Billy went from his parents trying to force him to read books about trains and tractors to him doing so of his own volition. Or perhaps the transition is smooth, unthinking. One day you’re picking through Biff and Chip because Mrs Brown told you to, the next you’re running with Fantastic Mr Fox because you spotted a Quentin Blake squiggle in the school library and couldn’t walk by without picking it up. Either way, like riding a bike, it is a skill and joy that, once cracked, cannot be forgotten.
Or can it? Just in time for the release of The Odyssey this month, a great panic has started to spread that our age of literacy is collapsing. Across the Atlantic, in The, erm, Atlantic, Rose Horowitch wrote a widely-shared piece on the end of reading. She contends that smartphones, social media, short videos and AI are bringing an end to deep reading, concentration and complex reasoning, undermining our ability to engage with and understand books. Welcome to the post-literary world.
In Britain, the story is not much happier. Research from the Reading Agency charity last year found that almost half of British adults do not read by choice. At the same time, the National Literacy Trust found that reading enjoyment among children had fallen to its lowest level in two decades. But even among those who are still page turning, the habit of deep reading is collapsing. Bestsellers are one-third shorter than a century ago; English literature students are unable to understand Bleak House; even supposed bibliophiles cannot escape the blue screen’s glow. Will the last person to leave please turn out the library light?
Horowitch’s arguments echo those made by Times journalist James Marriott in his widely-read (oh, the irony) essay ‘The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society’ last year. According to Marriott, smartphones have reversed one of the most important developments in modern history: mass reading, beginning in the 18th century. Just as the spread of literacy was the Enlightenment’s handmaiden – democratising knowledge, encouraging abstract thought, weakening traditional authority and enabling liberal democracy – post-literacy undermines the habits upon which modern society is formed. A civilisation unable to grapple with complex ideas, hooked on its smartphone soma, cannot sustain itself. The barbarians are not at the gate, but on TikTok. We have become the Sea People; a new post-literate dark age beckons.
So far, so apocalyptic. Being Spectator readers, one hopes you are resistant to the virus of post-literacy. We are proud to be the heirs to Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, cultivating that spirit of free discussion upon which the Enlightenment was built. But as Horowitch and Marriott highlight, the fear is that reading will become an elite preoccupation.
Just as the spread of literacy was the Enlightenment’s handmaiden, post-literacy undermines the habits upon which modern society is formed
But perhaps salvation is at hand. Just as our star columnists are being recruited to promote their wares on social media and drive people back to the written word, perhaps those from the ‘attention-deficit’ economy can use the very tools that are destroying reading to popularise it. Step forward Dua Lipa.
The budding pop princess and Albanian nationalist is a self-declared reading super-fan. Like Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey before her, she has launched a book club which now has more than half a million followers on Instagram; she discusses books on her podcast, Service95 Book Club, and last month opened a small library for ‘censored’ books in Portugal. The latter received much mockery on X; a library devoted to ‘banned’ books is rather irrelevant in an age in which one can find most texts rapidly on Amazon, AbeBooks or Google.
Nonetheless, I like the idea of a celebrity promoting reading. David Bowie was a voracious reader, even if it was his dabbles with Nazi occultism that produced his best music. Witherspoon’s book club has been so successful at boosting sales that its impact on an author’s career has been dubbed ‘the Reese Witherspoon effect’.
One can only hope Lipa reaches an equally wide audience. Reading is fundamental: for the joy it brings, for the culture it promotes, for the habits and norms of tolerance and intelligence it encourages. A society that ceases to value it is a society that ceases to have value. If we are to survive by the skin of our teeth once more, it may require celebrities like Lipa to lead the way. Can she save the post-literate West? Sadly, she might be our best hope.
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