After class, one of my new first-year students approached me as I was packing up at the podium. Bright and eager, she told me she was excited to be in my class and loves reading. I said that’s great.
She asked me, “Do you like to read?”
“Depends on what I’m reading,” I said. I explained that I had been in grad school for the last seven years, so a lot of my reading was for academic and research purposes. I asked her what she liked to read.
“Oh, pretty much everything. I read 12 books this summer.”
“Wow, that’s a lot. Anything good?”
She talked about a teen horror series, and a series about hero cats that fight villain cats. I nodded but admitted I had not heard of those books. She asked me how many books I read over the summer.
I did some quick math. “I read about 50 different books, but some I read multiple times.”
“Wow!” she said. “That’s awesome! So you read like every day?”
“Definitely.” We waved goodbye.
I am not sure she ever put it together that at least 48 of my 50 books were bedtime reads to my four-year-old daughter.
Obviously, my response of 50 was sort of a joke, but it raises a serious question. What counts as reading, and who gets to decide?
You have no doubt encountered the hand-wringing claim people are reading less and we are in a literacy crisis. Test scores are down. Our endless phone scroll and always-on television apps displaced the attention we used to have for one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments, The Written Word.
We are apparently now living in a postliterate age. A recent think piece in The Atlantic (“The End of Reading is Here”) uses historical, statistical, emotional, intellectual, and rhetorical analysis to confirm it. The author serves as both harbinger and mortician by tangling our dwindling attention spans, political climate, digital dependence, journalistic shifts, and artificial intelligence into a Gordian knot with no solution. Reading is over, it seems.
The change in her reading habits resonates with me: “The habit slipped. The change was subtle. I became busier […] And the books would always be there. I could pick them up later.”
Of course, we don’t.
I can see it in my own life. I used to read more deeply and for longer periods of time. There have been more movies and YouTube clips in my life than novels or nonfiction. Sadness gets closer to the feeling than guilt. Reading as I used to feels more missing than unattended.
But what if postliterate isn’t the end of reading? The prefix “post-” does not mean an earlier period has been wiped out but rather that its assumptions are open to questioning.
Turns out the end of reading has been arriving for a very long time. Socrates believed reading could lead to superficial wisdom and poor memory. Plato thought it was a good idea to write that down, and then told it to Aristotle, who decided to write his Poetics as the foundational text about why reading matters. We aren’t reading anymore, thankfully, but our deficits in memory and wisdom have survived this 2500-year-old reading crisis.
My students report considerable time and effort in high school spent on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s partyboy disasterpiece The Great Gatsby. The social distance between East Egg old money and the West Egg nouveau riche are about as interesting to them as the multiple-choice and short-answer quizzes that inevitably follow.
Let us not blame Fitzgerald. He didn’t print discussion questions in the back of the book. School did that. We schoolified The Great Gatsby and in so doing turned a sometimes-dull book into a frequently hated one.
We can slice this knot down the middle by toning down our end-is-nigh rhetoric, by giving up the impulse to shame and blame, and by admitting that we are making reading harder than it should be. To read that Atlantic article, I had to scroll past an audio option beginning with a 30-second advertisement about colon cancer screening. Yes, the one about putting your own poop in a box and then putting that box in the mail.
I hope that we are postliterate. If literate means that we see reading as a sociomoral imperative, or cultural practice needing protection, or test-based evidence of our children’s academic capacities, I am over it. Can we back up and look at the supposed literacy crisis from a different angle? Let’s start the discussion not about the decline, but what reading offers us and how it makes us feel.
Reading gave the new student an opening to connect with her odd-looking but approachable professor. For the first six years of my daughter’s life, reading has given my wife, my daughter, and me irreplaceable time together. Reading is time to ourselves we get to spend with others.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this counts.
