I came across an article in The Atlantic recently that has stayed with me.
Written by Rose Horowitch, its title in the magazine was deliberately provocative: “The Age of Reading Is Over.”
My first reaction was that surely this was an exaggeration. People still buy books. Bookstores still exist. Libraries are still open. I write books, and many of you reading this newsletter are readers yourselves.
Then I looked at the numbers. Fewer than half of American adults reported reading a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38%read a novel or short story. The percentage of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day has fallen from 28% in 2004 to just 16% in 2023. And then there is the statistic that stopped me: Only 2% of American adults reported reading to a child on any given day.
Two percent.
This isn't simply about whether the publishing industry will survive or whether novelists like me will continue to have an audience. It is about something much larger.
We Have Been Here Before—In a Different Way
There is a temptation to think that human progress moves in only one direction.
History tells us otherwise. The ancient world accumulated extraordinary stores of knowledge. The great Library of Alexandria became a symbol of that achievement. Scholars gathered manuscripts, studied mathematics and astronomy, edited literature and attempted to preserve what human beings had learned. The library eventually disappeared, although not in one dramatic fire as popular legend sometimes suggests. And the centuries that followed the decline of the ancient Mediterranean world were enormously complicated. Political institutions collapsed. Trade networks fractured. Cities declined. Education changed.
It would be far too simple to say that people stopped reading and the Dark Ages began. But there is a lesson worth remembering: Knowledge survives only when one generation cares enough to preserve it—and the next generation possesses the ability and desire to receive it.
Today we face a strange reversal of the ancient problem. Our libraries are not burning. The books are still there. Indeed, virtually the entire accumulated written inheritance of civilization is available to us in a way that would have astonished anyone who lived before our time. The danger is that fewer of us may be willing—or eventually able—to sit still long enough to read it.
Reading Changes Us
For most of human history, the ability to read was possessed by relatively few people. The spread of literacy changed civilization. Books allowed knowledge to travel across centuries. A person could encounter the thoughts of someone who had died a thousand years earlier. Ideas could be examined rather than merely heard and forgotten. Arguments could be considered, challenged and reconsidered.
Reading also asks something unusual of the human mind. It asks us to slow down and be still. It asks us to concentrate. It asks us to follow an argument over pages rather than seconds. A novel asks us to enter another person's world and remain there long enough to understand people whose experiences, beliefs and choices may be very different from our own. Those habits matter far beyond books. They help develop patience, imagination, empathy, vocabulary, memory and the ability to follow complicated ideas.
And those are precisely the habits our modern world seems increasingly determined to interrupt. We scroll. We swipe. We watch thirty-second videos. Our phones buzz. Another headline appears. Another notification demands attention. Information has never been more plentiful. Attention has never seemed more scarce.
What Happens to a Country That Doesn't Read?
That question troubles me. A self-governing nation requires citizens capable of considering complicated questions. Not every problem can be explained in a headline. Not every disagreement can be reduced to a meme. Not every person with whom we disagree is a villain. Democracy requires us to weigh evidence, recognize nuance, understand history, distinguish argument from emotion and occasionally entertain the uncomfortable possibility that we might be wrong.
Reading does not guarantee any of those qualities. But sustained reading exercises many of the mental muscles they require. And there are signs those muscles are weakening. Reading scores among American students have declined. According to the statistics cited by The Atlantic, only 35% of high-school seniors demonstrated proficiency in reading skills such as analyzing complex themes and evaluating an author's argument on a 2024 national assessment. Meanwhile, schools themselves are assigning fewer complete books. Horowitch reports that middle- and high-school teachers surveyed recently assigned between zero and four books a year.
Think about that for a moment. We may be raising children surrounded by more words than any generation in human history while giving them less experience with sustained reading. Those are not the same thing.
But This Story Isn't Finished
There is another side to the statistics. Print books are still selling. New independent bookstores are opening. Book clubs flourish. Audiobooks have introduced people to stories they might otherwise never encounter. And readers—the people who still love books—appear to love them passionately. That gives me hope.
Because reversing this trend does not require an act of Congress or some enormous national program. It can begin in our own lives.
- Read a book. Find something you actually want to read and give it twenty minutes that you might otherwise give to your phone.
- Read to a child. If you have children or grandchildren in your life, give them books. Sit beside them and read. Do the voices. Let them interrupt. Let them ask for the same story for the fiftieth time. Those moments are doing more than teaching a child how to recognize words. They are teaching that child that books matter.
- Give books as gifts. For birthdays. For Christmas. For no particular reason at all. Write something inside the cover so that years from now the recipient remembers who gave it to them.
- Talk about what you're reading. Recommend books to friends. Ask someone what they're reading. Start a book club—or simply trade books across the back fence.
- Join or start a book club.To make starting you own book club a bit easier, I have written this guide to help you along. Click here to download your free copy.
- And let children see us read. This one may be the most important. We cannot spend every evening looking at our phones and then wonder why children prefer screens to books. If we want them to believe reading is worthwhile, they need to see that we believe it ourselves.
Twenty Minutes
Perhaps that is where we start. Twenty minutes tonight. Put the phone somewhere else. Turn off the television. Pick up a book. And read.
If there is a child nearby, invite that child to join you. Because civilizations don't lose their stories only when libraries burn. They can lose them when people simply stop opening the books.
I spend much of my life writing stories about people who lived before us. One of the great privileges of doing so is discovering that the past is never truly gone. People left behind letters, diaries, newspapers, memoirs, histories and stories. They recorded what they saw, what they feared, whom they loved and what they believed. They left us their words. Our responsibility is remarkably simple.
Keep reading to them. And then make certain there is another generation willing to read ours.