If we lose reading, we lose…

Posted on by Live & Learn

…These are darkening days for those of us who love books. But we needn’t drift apathetically into a horror story. The English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote of beauty that it is “vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter.” Well, that’s true of reading. It is vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter. We are on our phones.

Like characters in a scary story, we need to see that we are drifting toward disaster and save ourselves, before it’s too late. Each of us has the power to show that reading does matter. We can do it by reading—and being seen reading—with dedication, bravado and a bit of countercultural aggression. Be the person on the train who pulls out a paperback rather than a phone. Be the parent in the pediatrician’s waiting room who reads a story rather than letting your child zone out on a tablet. Be the spouse who chooses a novel after dinner over the television. Be the teacher who transfixes the class with a live reading rather than a canned video. Revive the old social norms by setting them yourself…

Poetry and literature are art forms that can lift a person from blinkered individual existence to sublime and broadened understanding. Books form a great reverberating conversation across the centuries, joining the minds of men and women long dead with those alive today. If we lose reading, we lose the connection, and we consign future generations to a kind of witless groping around in cultural obscurity. It is vital, though, to recognize where we are now. English majors are struggling to read Dickens. If we let this slide, in a decade we’ll be lucky if graduate students can parse “Fun with Dick and Jane.”

— Meghan Cox Gurdon, from “Put Down the Phone and Pull Out a Book, Revel in words and writing. Let the world see you doing it.” (wsj.com, July 22, 2025)

26 thoughts on “If we lose reading, we lose…”

      1. I guess it’s the texting that is worse than anything else. It’s definitely convenient, but people, especially young people who haven’t learned to write good English yet, take shortcuts with writing so that after a while they don’t know or care how to write correctly. I know I sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but I love reading and writing, and it hurts to see the language destroyed.

        2. I completely agree as well Anneli. I have two nieces, age 18 and 21, who struggle to communicate by any other means than text. When they were little, they were voracious readers, but that all seems to have gone by the wayside. I haven’t seen either of them with a book in hand for over a decade. As someone who has at least two books going at any given time, it breaks my heart. Broad generalization here, but This generation’s communication skills are, IMHO, severely hampered.

  2. I was all jazzed up after your hump day post…. Now this. Downer. Even if it’s true. I know I have shared this on this platform before, but the engagement I used to garner when introducing a new novel to the class is now non existent. Takes me 2-3 weeks sometimes now, before a class will “buy in” that reading can be fun. Hope it turns, but I can’t see it.

      1. 😑 Oy, overuse / strain can happen. I do it ALL on my phone, and its lower case font size (“Largest”) is only about a third of a tiny red ant’s size! (Um, roughly!)

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