About ten years ago, I realised I had largely forgotten how to write longhand. After decades of Amstrads, PCs, laptops, smartphones, writing more than a few sentences by hand had become genuinely difficult: the muscles had lost the memory, and my signature had decayed into an embarrassed squiggle. A few years later I was obliged to write out an entire cheque, and I found the task so strange and taxing I might as well have been asked to illuminate a medieval manuscript.
Now I suspect the same thing is happening to me with reading, especially the reading of books. This is an awkward confession from a man who has spent his whole adult life writing books. It is like a distiller announcing he has gone teetotal, or worse, that he has forgotten why anyone would drink whisky in the first place.
Partly, and obviously, it’s the smartphone, the ultimate distraction machine. I’ll read three paper pages of something worthwhile and then a small voice says: ‘Sod it, how’s that lab leak argument on X coming along? Should I buy that Tang Dynasty rice bowl on eBay?’ And is it really true that robots can now run faster than Usain Bolt? (It is.)
And thus, in an instant, I’m gone, scrolling through wild infinity, lost down three dozen rabbit-holes. When I surface, fifty minutes later, I’ve lost the thread of the book, along with the mood and the will. These days, reading anything serious means leaving the phone in another room, like a drinker hiding the Bombay Sapphire from himself.
In truth, I lost one form of reading even before the first iPhone. Fiction. Sometime around 2005 I joined that vast and tragic fraternity that vexes every publisher in London: men over 40 who read almost nothing but military history. We recognise one another across the saloon bar. We discuss the new Antony Beevor.
There are reasons for my early flight from fiction, and not all of them are shameful. Television drama got much better and now performs much of the function novels once did. Give me eight hours of Succession, The Leopard or Game of Thrones and I get the long-form narrative satisfaction with more sex, tension, music and pretty women.
There is also professional deformation. Alex Ferguson once said that after he became a club manager, he could never again watch football for pleasure: he was forever asking why this defence sat so deep, why that substitution came so late. I have the same trouble with novels. I have written too many of them, so when I read them, I always look for the machinery. Ah, I think, here comes the inciting incident; yes, that minor character in chapter two will prove crucial on page 320. It’s like watching a conjuror when you know which sleeve conceals the dove.
And, finally, there’s the greater appeal of the truth. In a letter to Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis said that when reading a novel he wanted to continually protest: ‘no, that didn’t happen; no, he wouldn’t think that; no, she wouldn’t say that’. Amis eventually abandoned the reading of serious novels; meanwhile his peers Philip Roth and V.S. Naipaul stopped reading fiction altogether. Because, as Naipaul said, ‘why bother with made-up worlds when the modern world is so utterly compelling?’ What novel can match the accelerating narrative of humanity?
Thus, I retreated into nonfiction, and for years this felt like an honourable settlement. History, biography, science: real things that actually occurred, with facts marshalled by clever people. I read happily, even virtuously.
But now something strange has happened to me: my desire for non-fiction books is also expiring. Thanks to AI. Last autumn, driving through Oregon, I asked Gemini for a ‘deep research’ history of the Willamette Valley, that grand and lovely dale of farmland south of Portland. It came back in minutes with thousands of eloquent words and led me down another rabbit hole – into the 19th-century epidemics that annihilated the indigenous peoples of Oregon. Their numbers fell by as much as 98 per cent, making these the worst plagues, per capita, in human history.
This was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to know, partly to furnish an article, but mostly because it was so fascinating. To make it extra compelling, the machine could keep going on this precise theme. Which tribes? Which diseases? What did eyewitnesses say? What happened to the poor survivors?
No conventional history book can do this. A book is the author’s chosen journey through a subject: ‘here is what I have decided you should know, in the order I have decided you should know it’. AI abolishes the obligatory itinerary. You choose the journey yourself, and you can change it at every junction.
And there’s another layer of robotic prowess. Thanks to AI, I can take anything generated by Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude, feed it through ElevenLabs, and then give it the magnificent voice of Laurence Olivier. Suddenly I possess a bespoke audiobook, on any subject imaginable, narrated by Sir Larry, produced for an audience of one. Namely me, barrelling down the interstate.
Which raises the rather horrible question: why would I buy a whole book, in future?
I know the counterarguments. A great book is not mere information but an author’s mind: a sensibility, a companion, a personal thesis sustained across 400 pages. Serendipity also matters: the chapter you didn’t know you needed until it delightfully surprises you. All true. Yet I notice that knowing all this has not sent me back to Waterstones. The habit is going, and habits, as any lapsed pianist will confess, do not survive on fond nostalgia.
So here I am: a lifelong professional writer who, through smartphones, social media, prestige television and artificial intelligence, appears to have schooled himself out of one of humanity’s noblest intellectual disciplines. The one, awkwardly, on which my entire life depends. And, honestly, I’m not sure what to think of this. In my darker moments I wonder if deep reading will go the way of longhand: a universal skill dwindling into a ceremonial craft, kept alive by lovable eccentrics. Like whittling, or old steam engines.
And there you have it: I’ve almost stopped reading. And if you have read to the end of this article without once checking your phone, congratulations. You are doing better than the man who wrote it.
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