If you’ve been teaching at the college level for a number of years, and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon discussed in this new Atlantic article (archived here). The phenomenon is that students just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span.
I noticed this years ago when teaching introductory evolution. I asked the students to read one book: On the Origin of Species by Darwin. Granted, it’s a large and sometimes tedious book, but it’s also the most important biology book ever written, and of course relevant to my topic.
The students hated it. They said it was too long and they didn’t cotton on to the Victorian prose. So, after that failure, I found a condensed version (it might have been this one, about half the length of the original). But that didn’t fly either. It turned out that the students just didn’t want to read any books, and I didn’t probe further to find out why. I simply gave up asking the students to read Darwin.
Now there aren’t many biology courses in which students have to read any books beyond the textbook (if even that), but when I was in college it was normal to read at least half a dozen books for a humanities course–sometimes one per week. As the article below says, however, they no longer even do that. They read fewer books or, more often, sections of books.
You can guess the most important reason!
Some excerpts:
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
Oy! But why have high schools stopped assigning books? This just pushes the problem back to earlier education.
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
14 lines—too much! But we all know the reason: DEVICES!
Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.
Those statistics are depressing.
So now students read excerpts instead of books, and there’s a price to pay for that (see below). Another problem is a growing disparity between students educated at fancy private high schools and “regular” high schools.
Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.
Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”
The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.
The article goes on like this, getting more and more depressing, and winding up with the consequences of not reading books:
The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”
Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.. . . I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.
If Horowitch is right in her conclusion—and I think the trend will continue because there is no end in sight of students glued to “devices”—people will lose their skills at relating to other people. I already see signs of this in young people texting instead of phoning. Actually talking to someone is a dying practice, and talking in real time surely leads to better understanding of and communication with other people. Texting is the ultimate condensed reading, even using abbreviations like “BRB” or “l8r”.
Perhaps I sound like an old curmudgeon, but blame it on Horowitch. I myself have gained infinitely from reading, though I won’t claim that it’s made me more empathic or understanding. All I can say is that it’s made my world richer, with nonfiction being educational and fiction plucking the strings of emotion. It’s also helped teach me to write, for how can you learn to write well without seeing how others have done it. I simply can’t imagine a world built entirely on texting and reading devices.
Right now I’m reading a fiction book so full of emotion and pain that I can’t do more than thirty pages a night. It’s a masterpiece at depicting the human condition. If you’re up for 700 pages, try this one: (clink cover for Amazon link).
And now, I suppose, we should extol reading by telling each other what books we’re reading, or which ones we’ve especially liked.
Ooo, I have to admit, there is something and it has a lot to do with the screen.
I read Factotum (Bukowski) straight through in two days a couple years ago. But that is a rarity.
I can only read sections of other books in one sitting, usually non fiction – which I regard as essentially reference, because I frequently re-read them.
What explains it?
Is it fiction v. nonfiction?
Is it [ … ] hang on, I got a notification BRB!!1!1!
[ any animated GIF ]
I prefer nonfiction too.
A person who does not read has no advantage over a person who cannot read.
Well, yes they do; they can read street signs, ads, and so on. I know because I used to tutor illiterate adults who could not even read street signs, and thus were constantly lose (it is a bit better these days with smartphones).
I understood Colin to mean not just to read, but to read book. On that interpretation, his post is gnomic and perceptive.
I just read Justin Gregg’s “If Nietzsche Were A Narwhal,” about human and non-human intelligence. In fact, a friend and I used it as a sort of “book club” choice. Sorry to say, I wasn’t impressed with the book. Although it was a pleasant read and made some good points, it was neither perceptive nor penetrating enough for me to be able to recommend it.
I *hated* “A Little Life”, but recently enjoyed “Mania” and “Birnham Wood”.
However I, like everybody else who owns a device, find the concentration necessary for reading a book harder these days
Hated A Little Life p, as well. Currently loving The Singapore Grip, by J.G. Farrell (also loved his Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapoor). Am over halfway through Walter Isaacson’s The Wise Men (at 700+ pages, it’s bit of a slog and could use some editing.) i read a page or two of Proust’s 7-part masterpiece en français every night. And am partway through vol 8 of Mick Herron’s wonderful Slow Horses series (Bad Actors). Yes, I am more distracted than I used to be,and remember one quarter at Stanford having to read 40! books in 10 weeks, half of them in French🙀though I did NOT have to walk 5 miles uphill to school in the snow🤓
Anyone interested in great fiction (or in Darwin, FitzRoy, and the voyage of HMS Beagle) should consider the truly magnificent This Thing of Darkness, published nearly two decades ago and, quite possibly, the most under-appreciated work of fiction of the current century. It is, without question, a literary masterpiece, while the circumstances of its composition and of the untimely death of the brilliant young writer (Harry Thompson) remain fascinating and unbearably sad.
Also Janet Browne’s magisterial two-volume biography of Darwin. It’s fantastic.
Thanks, will check it out!
Apparently I already have it on kindle😵💫😵💫
I’m reading a 700-pager as well at the moment: Vanity Fair. Thackeray’s characterization is cruder than Dickens, and he’s more cynical, but he has a more bird’s-eye view of social structure. Like Balzac he depicts a society in which grasping for money and patronage, while doing as little as possible to earn it, is all-consuming. The writing is humorous, but the overall mood quite depressing.
The general trend you describe is depressing but, sadly, not remotely funny.
I read Vanity Fair not too long ago. It was…sort of OK. Much less interesting than I was led to believe it would be. Far too long, and I didn’t find Becky Sharp to be any of the usual “edgy” adjectives applied to her. Nowadays she’d just be a jerk. You’re right about the author depicting “a society in which grasping for money and patronage, while doing as little as possible to earn it, is all-consuming” but then question becomes, why should anyone want to read about that?
My recommendation for a Victorian novel: Bleak House
Yes to all that, which I guess is why after reading Old Goriot I never had the appetite for any more Balzac. I suppose a central female character being unapologetically a jerk was something of a breakthrough at the time, even if it no longer seems so. Bleak House is wonderful of course, Dickens at his finest.
I’m currently reading “Ex-Wife” by Ursula Parrott. This “scandalous” novel caused quite a stir, apparently, when it was first published in 1929.
I recently read “Radio Girls” by Sarah-Jane Stratford. The setting is the BBC during its early years.
Other novels I’ve read this year: “Good Behaviour” by Molly Keane, “Offshore” by
Penelope Fitzgerald, and “Angels on Toast” by Dawn Powell.
As for nonfiction, I recently read Patricia Churchland’s “Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition.”
I have a serious question that will sound harsh: Why don’t professors assign the books anyway and fail those students who are unable or unwilling to read them?
College is supposed to be for getting an education. If these “students” aren’t willing to put in the work, they’re not ready for college.
If you fail most of your students, they don’t get the blame, you do, and you will soon be out of a job. You need positive student evaluations more than they need the grade.
So we have two problems.
I think the problem is if the standard of required reading is not changed, then college will become unrealistically challenging for the majority of students, which may result in some backlogs…
University of Chicago philosophy professor Brian Leiter, at his blog there was a discussion of this article from The Atlantic:
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2024/10/do-your-undergraduates-have-trouble-reading-whole-books.html#comments
Comment #27 from this discussion:
“While I think that student capacity for reading has declined, I suspect a large part is also on universities. Adjuncts, assistant profs, and others have to worry about their [teaching] evaluations [from students] and thus are more likely to decrease reading to appease students, thus producing a continuous race to the bottom. At the same time, administrators and pedagogy experts are constantly encouraging us, in various ways, to lower expectations for our students.” (see also comment #33)
Comment #31:
“after reading The Atlantic article today I polled my 80 students in a freshman Critical Thinking class at a top university and about a third of them said they weren’t required to read a single book (defined as cover to cover, more than 100 pages) in their entire high school career.”
Comment #43:
I’ve been a public high school teacher and administrator in the US for 15 years, and the combination of the pandemic closures, smart phones, and (worst of all) the decision to treat having any real academic standards as inherently racist have created a uniquely bad situation.
It is possible and in fact easy to graduate from a public high school in many major districts in the US, with a very solid GPA, while lacking the numeracy and literacy one would ordinarily expect of a 4th grader.
I cannot emphasize enough how bad it is.
Students are aware of their power as well. They couldn’t read a book if they tried, but they don’t see this as bad or unusual. In fact it is problematic of you to even ask this of them, so there is a sort of indignant hostility towards the very notion of being asked to read a book. You are inflicting violence and trauma by asking, fascist.
Thankfully the madness has been on a downswing for at least a year, but I’m not sure what can be restored. One issue is that the k-12 education profession is rather full of dummies, and the profession has almost zero incentive to educate children.
You’re kidding, right? These days students tell the professors how and what to teach.
+mucho!
That’s exactly what I do. I assign 2-3 books a semester related to the course topic that are written for the general public’s consumption (e.g., The Beak of the Finch, The Sixth Extinction, Sand County Almanac, I Contain Multitudes, Why Evolution is True). A weekly quiz is given over the required chapter(s) and if a student fails so be it.
I’ve done anonymous polling of my students and they collectively hate the activity. My response is that one cannot be educated if that person doesn’t read and since I’m being paid to educate my students will read and often.
So far no complaints have been filed with the university administration. I really wish there had been, that would show that I’m doing something right as an educator.
I just finished two books; The Genetic Book of the Dead; A Darwinian Reverie by Richard Dawkins and The Safe Keep by Yael Van Der Wouden.
I recommend both, the first for, well…. read today’s Hilli; it has excerpts from a Free Press review and comments by Dr. PCC(e). The second I recommend (it was a Booker finalist this year) because it is an odd, taut, post war (WWII) story of the kind of tense relationships that can happen between traumatized people, even with love.
“Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy . . .”
This has long been a conceit of some literature professors, one that is particularly amusing to many who deal with literature professors day-to-day.
Maybe it’s a conceit of some literature professors, but I wouldn’t rule that out universally.
My own experience is the same. I’d also add that students no longer tend to go down the pub after lectures and blether to each other over a few pints. I can only speak for myself but regurgitating ideas over beer often led me to truly understanding more than a few difficult concepts.
The ONLY way this is going to change is by professors ENFORCING reading, and having their grades reflective of whether or not they read.
And then their teaching evaluations and enrolments will go down and an administrator higher up will use that as an excuse to close down the course and get rid of them.
While I suppose it’s still the case that university annual evaluations ask you list the books you’re written (or simply edited!), but not papers you’ve written.
Published papers (especially journal articles, especially articles in high-ranking journals) are used for evaluating faculty performance, but since much of the university’s income comes from student fees, they are treated more like customers these days, so a professor who doesn’t cater to students will soon be disadvantaged, no matter how productive they are in publishing.
This seems to me to be the real problem (besides, of course, phones, wokeness, and crummy high schools). To a certain degree, college has come to be about “running a business” rather than “providing an education.” This has enabled the existence of a number of the other problems that have already been mentioned, such as the necessity of getting good student evaluations, which have nothing to do with getting an education, and everything to do with keeping the customer satisified.
The phenomena that our host mentions are all too rife on this side of the Atlantic, including the strange reluctance of younger people to call someone, or to answer the phone if someone calls them.
Part of the reading problem must surely be that kids aren’t encouraged enough to read for pleasure, and this starts not just at primary school (in the UK, age 4-11) but in the home. A fifth of UK children have no books of their own at home. Too many parents don’t read to their children. I am a primary school governor, and I know the efforts our school goes to to get pupils to read, but sometimes it’s an uphill task. No wonder that, by the time they reach secondary or tertiary education level, many kids have little experience or indeed interest in sustained reading, or any understanding of the pleasure that can be gained by doing so.
I’m going through a phase of re-reading books on my shelf that I haven’t looked at for years. I have just finished three of James Shapiro’s great books about Shakespeare: ‘1599’, ‘1606’ and ‘Contested Will’. I haven’t re-read ‘Ulysses’ for about three years, so that’ll be coming up soon.
+1
Important to note though, a sound home library of tangible books might necessary, but not sufficient – likewise, parent involvement might be necessary, but insufficient…
I think when those conditions are met, it still can be found to not work great all the time – follow through, and development are important, and—
Oh gee, that became a long comment!
When I was young I read books my parents had in the house.
I read it at least 5yrs ago, but The Vital Question, Nick Lane (2015) still ranks very high. On insights and aspects of abiotic origins, the primordial soup, particularly with regard to inorganic chemistry.
Any Bio or Chem major who would balk at reading the nearly 300pgs ought not to be one of those majors.
I love that book! It, like many of my copies of science trade books (Dawkins, Coyne, etc), is filled with inked annotations. That is a sin, I know, but I yam what I yam.
I am currently reading The Evolution of Beauty by Prum.
Have a look at the review of Prums book in Evoution about one or two years ago. I found the book pretty bad, and also vetted the critique for the authors.
I wasn’t sure what to say about it here, out some caution since I’ve not heard other opinions. But I can assuredly agree. What is a “sense of beauty”? Why did he ignore the invertebrates which often also do courtship displays? Inverts account for most of the animal species that do these sorts of things, with brains smaller than the head of a pin.
I had an English lit prof who thought it was a sin to *not* “ink up” a book. Before my home library was destroyed by termites, I kept a clean, pampered copy of my most prized titles and one with notes in the margins.
Any mention of …
[clears throat for best German name ever ] :
Günter Wächtershäuser?
If you liked that, you will love his later book, ‘Transformer’. And his earlier ‘Life Ascending’. I agree that anyone interested in current science should read them all
I also found “The Vital Question” to be excellent, but a few years later was unable to parse “Transformer”. I do not know if it were my seemingly ever-decreasing mental abilities as I age or just not enough bio-chem background or ??? As for now, I spend my time mostly, well almost totally, with nonfiction. Recently read Musk and Fauci bios for easy reading and am currently working through Michael Oren’s “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East from 1776 to the Present” and Antonius’ “The Arab Awakening”.
I see this trend firsthand. My kids think YouTube videos contain all truth. They are post-literature. Older folks think truth is in books. Younger folks don’t. There is an ancient Chinese proverb to effect “A book holds a house of gold”. Sadly, the next generation is post-literate.
Even the best YouTube channels can be light-to-nil on literature.
Numberphile and associated channels, Veritasium, and certain others are usually very good though – allow rapid follow-up in primary lit, which is generally feasible.
It seems like “post” could also be spelled “il”.
Night Soldiers by Alan Furst took about two weeks to read over 500 pages. Narrative fiction set between 1938-1945 in South Eastern Europe, (guess where), about resistance movements caught between the Nazis and Communism. This spy thriller reads like historical fiction. Be prepared to do some research.
For a nonfictional account of WWII resistance, Norwegian resistance ace Gunnar Sønsteby’s Report from #24 is excellent. The Norwegian Resistance was very active. Operatives were aided by being able to escape to Sweden, whose neutrality the Nazis for some unknown reason respected. In tribute to his accomplishments. he rode shotgun for Crown Prince Olov and his family (in a ’38 Buick) on the Royal Family’s triumphant return to Oslo in 1945, seen here @ 9:28.
Otherwise, I read many excellent accounts of WWII espionage in books that I checked out from the U of Pittsburgh’s library some 20yrs ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a record of the titles, but one account that I remember was a male/female pair of operatives who parachuted to safety (at least I think they both did). They subsequently married and she made her wedding dress out of the parachute.
Sweden exported iron ore for German tanks. Neutrality worked for both sides.
Yep, I know. It was remain neutral and allow the ore shipments, or get invaded as Norway was, in order to secure the port for those ore shipments from Kiruna. But the Nazis could easily have flouted the agreement and pursued the Norwegians into Sweden. Given all else about Nazis, why they didn’t seems surprising.
Thanks for the article!
Reading at high school level was noticeably detrimented by the pandemic; it’s even worse at primary level, and teachers are still trying to bridge the gap…
I finished reading RF Kuang’s Yellowface today; however, at any given time, I am reading about twenty books (obviously focusing on some more than others)
I read less complete books than in the pre-digital age because I spend more time reading articles and blogs online (including this one). I spend maybe an hour total on social media in a day, partly because that’s how a maintain old relationships.
I must admit to not being surprised that young people are reading less. I didn’t realize it extended to whole books, tho. When I was in college (1958-62), we easily read a half-dozen books per semester. It’s very depressing.
I wonder also how young people’s math abilities are going, with calculators at hand all the time.
Your article mentioned The Iliad. I just read it for the 4th time. Wonderful. I also finally manged to finish Orwell’s 1984, on my 4th attempt — perhaps the most boring and depressing book I have ever forced myself to finish.
I finished 1984 on my third attempt. It has an interesting premise. I think part of the challenge for me was one doesn’t see how certain details in the earlier stages of the book converge to form important themes of the narrative later on
I have been skeptical about some of the complaints about kids these days, but this is not one of them. Reading, and the skill of sustained concentration, has decreased in young people.
But I wonder about us adults, too. Suppose we were to ask adults, 40-60, about how many books they have read over the past year, what would we find? If we were to compare those results to previous years, I would bet that we would see a significant decline in book reading in adults as well. Now I know that some adults are voracious readers, but I am referring to a trend.
“the skill of sustained concentration”
+1
But not that I can blame anyone – I think that is a substantial topic!
I would believe that as well. I know of friends who used to be voracious readers and now spend time on YouTube, social media and online blogs and new sites rather than reading books.
It seems like a lot of us at this site are still bookworms though!
We lend textbooks to our students at the beginning of their education (technichians for biology labs).
At the end of their education (after 2 or 3 years) we take them back.
10 years ago there where a few oddballs who did not open the plastic wrapping of their books. Nowadays the students who unwrap the books are the exception.
Good night and good luck from Germany,
Michael
I have always enjoyed reading but I have never taken a course in literary criticism or similar; and while I have no regrets about that, I do occasionally wonder whether I would get even more enjoyment from reading if I did take such a course. Would I?
On a different note, when the telegraph was invented people were able to tap out messages and send them instantly to friends many miles away. No doubt they thought it was even better when they could pick up a telephone and talk to a friend on the other side of the country. A century or so later and we are back to tapping out short messages.
I’ve enjoyed reading since I first started puzzling out the relation between characters on a page and speaking, aged about 5. I remember the pride after I’d made my way through an entire book that didn’t have pictures in it.
In high school we were usually assigned at least one play by Shakespeare and one novel per year. I normally enjoyed reading them at the beginning but nothing turned me off them more than the analysis we had to do.
In university I took a course on Old English, divided between the language structure in the first half and literary analysis in the second. Needless to say I enjoyed the first half much more and was bored out of my skull in the second.
Of course it may have to do with the way the analysis was done. I’ve enjoyed reading essays of literary analysis, especially by writers like George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens.
How can anybody not read? It’s my favorite pastime.
I loved “A Little Life”, but I think it’s the saddest, or definitely in the top 5 saddest books I’ve ever read. I cried my eyes out throughout. To make matters worse, I read it right after Rebecca Makkai’s “The great believers” which is also a beautiful but depressing read.
I’m currently in a non-fiction period: I really enjoyed Andrea Wulf’s “The invention of nature” and (fashionably late) Alfred Lansing’s “Endurance” – it’s the most incredible survival story. By the way, the ship wreck was found only in 2022! And also the Drake passage is named after Sir Francis Drake but he actually did not navigate the passage. He sailed through the straits of Magellan in his circumnavigation in 1577-1580 aboard the (in)famous Golden Hind. I’ll appreciate any book recommendations to feed my obsession with Pirate / Maritime / adventure tales.
This is one of my favorite adventure tales, The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World
It is about three men on the Scott Terra Nova Expedition in Antarctica, who head out in the Antarctic winter of 1910 to find Emperor Penguin eggs, hoping to find reptilian fetus features that would show that birds descended from reptiles. It is a ripping yarn, and I lectured on it in Antarctica. It was dark, of course, and they encounter horrible obstacles. Did they get their eggs? You will have to read it to find out. Cherry-Garrard was a superb writer.
Thank you! Added to my list.
Of course it’s gonna be dark – unless they parted with Scott pretty early (which I guess they have, having set out in 1910), I already know their fates.
Oops, I just read the Wikipedia entry and since it’s a memoir Cherry-Garrard obviously survived.
I read the ‘Worst Journey in the World’ around my final year of high school, and it was riveting — all that misery and endurance to retrieve some eggs in the name of embryology.
The interesting aspect now is who wrote such a book. I see on Wiki that he was a humanities graduate, but sought no career as a creative fiction writer. Presumably his cultural upper middle class social background, in that particular era, meant he read enough long books to be able to structure and narrate persuasively such an equivalent work. Nowadays far more likely that ‘explorers’ and sportspeople utilise ghostwriters and lots of help by the editors to bash something into some plausibility of a tome. I go onto the space.com and equivalent websites, and am often entertained by reading the bios of people who churn out science journalism. Almost all have university diplomas or actual degrees in creative writing, journalism, science journalism, ‘narrative nonfiction’ etc. Some even have science degrees, though it seems this is slightly less frequent than writing credentials.
Wrt maritime adventure tales, nothing beats the old Patrick O’Brien novels. Don’t start in the middle: read “Master and Commander” first, then go to the end. The arc of the books is really about aging and friendship more than adventure, but lots of the latter too.
Thanks! I’ll check them out.
“How can anybody not read?”
Exactly, I don’t get it. I remember in Grade 9 when we were required to write reports for *five* books or plays throughout the year, a student going up to the teacher after class and saying “I don’t like reading”. It baffled me – I had three books in my backpack that I was reading simultaneously.
The sensitive period for a child to learn to read and write is 2-5 years of age. If a child misses this, and “learns” to read later on, or never, they will experience strong anxiety over a requirement to read a book. It is a visceral repulsion.
In the proper setting, the child is guided into “decoding” and “writing” and hopefully has been exposed to an environment of aural experiences, at home and elsewhere. They have an active aural vocabulary. When the sensitive moment arrives, Maria Montessori describes (and I have witnessed many times) an “explosion into reading and writing.” You can’t stop it, once it starts. The young child is thrilled to learn the trick. They are overjoyed to do it, they bubble with the fun of it. Sometimes one child will organically teach the trick to another who is in the sensitive period in five minutes. They become readers/writers for life … unless damaged or stifled another way — a rich literate household and school are needed to keep up the joy.
The reason Montessori education encompasses the three years from 3-6 is to capture the sensitive period.
I will withhold my opinions about why this has been suppressed by the public education establishment. I have them, believe me. It is a horrific tragedy to deliberately inhibit it as public policy.
I would agree but you don’t even need a “rich literate household”, just a home where people read. I come from a working class / lower middle class background, where we often barely had enough money to get by, but my parents and grandparents were always reading. My father read science fiction and war fiction, my mother read celebrity biographies, my grandfather (a truck dispatcher from Yorkshire who had never finished high school) read Western novels. To this day my brother and sister and I are big readers.
I should also add that public libraries are crucial. When we were kids my parents would take us once a week to the local library to drop off / pick up books. That was also where a lot of (*free*) activities were happening – one year they showed an episode of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” for free every week. There were reading clubs for kids and book clubs for adults.
Hah! I see that a lot of folks have commented on this. Why am I not surprised? Reading is such a joy and, just as importantly, it offers a way of communicating across generations and geographies. It’s an amazing human capability—probably a unique human superpower.
I subscribe to the Atlantic, so was immediately discouraged when I saw the title of this essay. I’ve been out of academia since 1996, so I didn’t have to attempt to teach students who were unable or unwilling to read a book. In one of my graduate seminars, the class (of about six graduate students) read Darwin’s Origin end to end, discussing every chapter. In my 12 years teaching, I read it with the class at least six times (teaching that particular class every two years), and every time I read it I learned more! Either I read something in the book that I didn’t notice before, or I read something in the book that I now thought about differently because of what I’d learned or experienced in the interim. Some books are like that. They can be read over and over, each time offering new insights. It’s truly sad that many students may never experience the joy of reading and the life changing knowledge that can come from it.
DEEPWATER HORIZON A Systems Analysis of the Macondo Disaster. BP’s technical and management screw-up that killed eleven and poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. Napalm An American Biography. Born in a Harvard research laboratory in 1942.
Today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is perhaps relevant – https://www.smbc-comics.com/#comic
Also relevant is the same strip, from two days ago.
Aaargh, messed up the URL. Thanks for the correction, you linked to the one I meant to link to.
It wwould seem the film Idiocracy is a documentary, not a work of fiction.
Since you asked: South Africa – The first man, the last nation by R W Johnson. It’s the 30,000 year history of South Africa up to 2004. Johnson was born in SA in 1943, but left for the UK, as I understand so that he was free to speak out against apartheid. I found it scrupulously objective, setting down a chronology, and explaining but rarely judging. The only criticism is that it is too short. The conclusion? “The tragedy of South Africa is that it has always been ruled – and still is – by elites which seek their own group self-interest rather than the country as a whole”.
Next up: Edmund Burke by Jesse Norman. He had a few things to say about 1776, the French Revolution, and the East India Company. I’m looking forward to it.
Just finished the 6 volume WW2 series by Winston Churchill. I was surprised by the quality of the writing and his insights. It took three months to get through them all. While I was reading that I read Unsong by Scott Alexander, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, Antifragile by Taleb, and re-read Exodus by Uris. I also surfed through a Zane Grey book, but can’t remember which one, and also a book on product lifecycle management. I’ve started on more Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, and The Man From The Future (by Bhattacharya), along with starting to re-read The Man Who Would Be King. I’ve got The White Pill by Michael Malice ready to go next.
I will often read two or sometimes three books at the same time as I do find that sometimes I can lose interest in the same book day after day. I read primarily on Kindle, so in a way I’m still attached to a screen. I find it especially useful for traveling as I can carry a library wherever I go. On the other hand, I enjoy having a physical book in my hands that I can mark up, such as I did with Beginning of Infinity.
My wife and I have always given books as gifts to our grandkids, and even though they now range in ages from 6-12, all of them will sit down in the evening and read. There’s hope for some of the young generation yet, I hope.
I’m on the waitlist at the library for The White Pill. I’m looking forward to it.
There is an enormous amount of Kipling. Some is awful, but I read a lot of his prose and poetry because there are some great things, including Kim. Kingsley Amis said “Danny Deever” is the most harrowing poem in our language, and I just read Marghanita Laski describing it as his best poem. My reading plans include rereading the autobiographical memoirs of Molly Hughes. And I’m reading Holly Lawford-Smith’s essays in Sex Matters. Her piece on the historical significance of setting up public toilets for women really makes you think, when you realize that women couldn’t go anywhere outside their home for more than a couple of hours when there was no place they could pee.
I am not the avid reader I used to be. The last book I read is Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter. I liked the first half, maybe two thirds of it, but I’d like it more if the rest was missing; to me, the last part was a waste of my time, and spoiled the good impression from the previous parts as well.
And here is an issue I have with teaching of literature and literary criticism. Throughout the millenia, most authors, even talented ones, have written their books with brutal disregard for the reader’s time and taste, almost as if they were writing notes in their personal diaries. Then their masterpieces, or books dubbed such, were enshrined in the literature curriculum. Generations of teachers have pushed them down the students’ throats and then, instead of an honest discussion about what (to the readers’ opinion) the author got right and what not, students were forced to compile arguments why the boring book is a masterpiece. Even without today’s screen temptations, such a system could work only as long as students were kept completely powerless.
Another issue: at least in my country, literature and literature criticism courses do not accommodate any creative writing by the students themselves. This relegates them to an inferior status, and nobody likes that. Perhaps, if some attention was shown to the students’ writings, they would be more willing to reciprocate.
In my Grade 12 English class, we read a few of the classics plus others of our own choosing from a list of “100 Great Books” that the teacher provided. For our final project we had to choose one book and write another chapter to it. It could be before the first chapter, somewhere in the middle, or after the last chapter. The only criteria was that we needed to keep it within the theme and style of the original, and had to be at least 1000 words. Most of us chose to tack on to the end. Since we were informed of this at the beginning of the class and repeatedly throughout, we read each book with more interest than we otherwise would have had.
Not only did we have to show that we understood the story, but also that we heard the voice of the author. We also had to demonstrate our own writing skill. It was one of the most enjoyable classes I’ve ever taken.
What a creative teaching tool.
When I was an assistant professor teaching undergraduates, I noticed many (most?) had tv vocabularies, knew how to pronounce a limited set of basic words. My own vocabulary borne by my reading nearly every book in a small library during grade school, gave me a large vocabulary but little knowledge of pronunciation. I discovered I was teaching young people who didn’t read books.
Ironic (though I suppose not surprising) that the Iliad gets special mention in the article, as I started reading it recently for the first time. The version I have is the Alexander Pope translation, and I’d like to pride myself on being able to understand older English reasonably well but certain passages have definitely tested me. I think I’m getting the hang of it now at least. I’ll be finishing up my current contract in December and moving to another country after so at this rate frankly just hoping I can finish by the end of the year. I’m generally a slow reader even in good times. Nonetheless, I appreciate the drama Homer instills in just about everything and Pope’s created some really quotable lines from it.
I am not surprised by the trend discussed here and think it’s unfortunate but I also think professors tend to forget that students aren’t taking only their class. Whatever you assign for a week isn’t the only thing the students have to read or work on that week. Reading something like “Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next” I have to assume students were expected to read all of Crime and Punishment in a week? I’ve only read excerpts of Dostoevsky but that seems absurd. Surely there’s a middle ground between that and reading no books.
IMHO if you haven’t read Crime and Punishment, you haven’t lost anything.
I thought it was good.
Of course I like books about crime. I grew up with books on classic murders: Lizzie Borden, the Julia Wallace case and so on.
My parents were lawyers and had quite a collection.
I disagree!
I disagree. C&P and The Brothers Karamazov are my all-time favorites of ‘classic’ literature. I read virtually all of Dostoyevsky after reading C&P for a HS English class. We also had to read the entire Iliad, Odyssey, and a heckuva lot of Shakespeare.
One of my closest friends is a professor of English and history. She has been painfully aware of students’ lack of reading books for many years. Actually, she told me that when she grades students’ papers, she can easily distinguish native English speakers from non-native. Non-native speakers write BETTER than USAnian native speakers.
Reminding me of the classic from My Fair Lady.
I recently read the Rabbit novels by John Updike. The last two books, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, felt a lot more timely than I expected. They’re also Rabbit’s story at its very best. Brutal, human, and humorous.
I loved the Rabbit series. I adored many of Updike’s novels. He was the author who brought me back to reading for pleasure after college when I’d grown exhausted from reading what I *had* to read.
I read Updike’s Rabbit novels when I was about 9. I was an extremely literal-minded kid, and I kept waiting for the rabbit to show up.
I’ve been averaging about 47 books per year for the last 20 years or so, while in my high school and college years it was more like 25 per year, including assigned reading, but mostly for pleasure.
I see I haven’t rated anything five stars so far this year, but a couple of my favorite four star reads were:
– _My Effin’ Life_ (Geddy Lee) – yes, you probably have to be a Rush fan for this, but it really is well done; he makes an effort to emphasize his Jewish heritage and upbringing (his parents actually met in a concentration camp!).
– _Viral_ (Chan and Ridley) – I realize this is controversial, but I think they present a plausible case for the lab leak hypothesis, while acknowledging that there’s evidence pointing the other way as well.
Regarding _Origin_, I gave it four stars when I read it in 2011, though I probably rounded up. On the other hand, only three for _The Descent of Man_ in 2018. Talk about tedious – this was an exhaustive and wordy info dump of literally every case he was aware of that illustrated the points he wanted to make. Worth reading, but I think more for historical than scientific value.
No books that I’m currently reading are as relevant to our cultural situation today as are some of the stories told by Stanislav Lem. In his *Star Diaries* (of short stories, a great introduction to Lem) the protagonist Ijon Tichy makes two memorable voyages: the eleventh and twenty-first voyages. In the eleventh, he is sent to a planet populated by robots, but from where other agents sent there have never returned. I won’t spoil it, but believe me it is spookily prescient of the current state of affairs w.r.t. woke culture/science. It clearly shows where we will end up, when people stop telling the truth. Similarly, the twenty-first voyage sees Tichy travel to a world where the inhabitants have a culture of extreme body modification: some people choose to have extra legs, or to replace their legs with e.g. a wheel. It is transhumanism as foreseen by this brilliant Polish author. Finally, in his “hard-science-fiction” novel *The Invincible*, Lem tells of a mission to a planet where a prior mission had failed for mysterious reasons. They will discover a feature of the planet’s “ecosystem” that is attracted to thought (i.e. brain waves), and then this feature works to extinguish that thought. Aside the fact that this story was a brilliant critique of censorship (Lem wrote these stories in Communist Poland, and his stories had to pass a censor’s review), which nonetheless got past the censors (!), it is again spookily suggestive of what is happening now in academia and elsewhere, and posits that the ultimate outcome of censorship is the destruction of society.
I remember also his voyage to a planet where the local dictatorship, after flooding the entire surface with a too-enthusiastic irrigation program, forced the human-like inhabitants to pretend that they were aquatic. And the poor ones were not even able to swim!
I wonder what is happening in philosophy classes. Philosophy is all about book length arguments to assert and support a premise.
I just read a pretty good book ‘The Japanese’ by Christopher Harding, and for a bit of SciFi fun, the Murderbot series by Martha Wells.
I find myself trying to catch up. Frederick Crewes died, and so I’m 2/3 of the way through the utterly brilliant (essential?) Freud book. I already read his two Pooh books, but didn’t recognize his name. Now Robert Coover has died, and I have his Huck Out West book and the 1100+ page Brunist sequel! I’m reading some fiction series books all the time on iPad and Kindle, while busily downloading stuff from Internet Archive to suit my current interest in the Metis. Just read a wonderful obscure one: Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 (1980). But I’m up on Michael Connelly, after a wallow in non-fiction books about Cahokia, inspired by the interesting fiction Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (2024). And just reread Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and am working on another of my many Iliad translations, while wallowing in Pope’s Iliad (torturous rhyming couplets I first read a tiny part of in Freshman English in high school in South Dakota in the early ’60s).
I’m currently reading Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia. After that I want to read new Nobel Laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Percival Everett’s Erasure.
I’m also planning to read the first book in JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, The Cuckoo’s Calling. I’ve read the latest three and found them ridiculously entertaining (especially Troubled Blood.) Figure it’s time I go back and read the early ones.
Another college professor, Alan Jacobs, deemed “A Little Life” to be “a novel I wish I had never read”. You might be amused at his ” three-strike system to help me decide whether to read contemporary fiction”: https://blog.ayjay.org/rational-choices/
I also read “A Little Life”. Bottom line: not my cup of tea. But (at the time) I made the observation that the most common line of dialog in the book was “I’m sorry”, and variations thereon. I claimed that one paragraph (page 673) has eight occurrences of “I’m sorry”. People have a lot to be sorry for in the book.
The blog you linked to has me intrigued. As I’ve said here many times, one of my favorite things about reading WEIT is all the collateral knowledge I find along the way. Thank you
I agree: it’s the devices.
sent from my Android phone
😉
The answer, surely, to students who won’t read a book (even “Literature” students) is that they will not pass the course. Parenting 101. Perhaps the most useful, in the long term, of all my GCE O-levels, taken age 16, was English Literature. We had to study three texts for the Oxford examination board, Romeo and Juliet, Far From the Madding Crowd, and The Goshawk (by T H White). The exam was 2.5 hours of essays, and we spent two years preparing. For two years before that, we studied previous exam texts such as Macbeth, Elephant Bill and The Black Narcissus. You were expected to include as many quotes as possible in the essays, and you were not allowed to take the books into the exam. The result is that I can still spout quotations from them, even now, and that when I read a book, I tend to think hard about it. I can’t live without books, and am now half way through my project of re-reading all of Dickens. I’ve been delayed by a biography of Queen Victoria and a collection of essays on WW2 (No End Save Victory, editor Robert Cowley). I took nine such “Ordinary” levels, and that was at the local comprehensive, not at any sort of special school. I guess things have changed.
” But we all know the reason: DEVICES!” “Texting is the ultimate condensed reading, even using abbreviations like “BRB” or “l8r”. ”
The DEVICES undoubtedly provide the germ of a new literary form: novels consisting entirely of textings and short cellphone messages. Such fiction is probably already published, unknown to me because I am far behind the times.
Superb books I’ve read this year include:
The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer
The Lessons of History, by Will and Ariel Durant
An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, by Konstantin Kisin
The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
Swamp Story, by Dave Barry
All seven Thursday Next novels, by Jasper Fforde
I am Pilgrim, by Terry Hayes
The first three books in the Stormlight Archive, by Brandon Sanderson
Waiting for the Galactic Bus, by Parke Godwin (if you’ve read Heinlein’s “Job” and like that sort of religious parody, you’ll love this one too; they are very much two species in the same genus).
Students never LIKED reading books, but always HAD TO. Now it seems whatever the students WANT is more important than the result: a well-rounded individual.
Myself, I am now reading Bolesław Prus’ “Faraon” which was both on my high school reading list, and made into a 1968 Polish movie, now available on Blue Ray in Europe.