Tag: read

If we lose reading, we lose…

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…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)

Truth…

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Let’s talk for a minute about the etiquette of gifting books. The etiquette is that you probably shouldn’t do it. First of all, there is a 99% chance that you’re going to gift a book that someone won’t like. You’re gifting it because you like it, but you don’t know what the other person likes, so it will probably sit on a shelf somewhere. Second of all, it’s like gifting someone a vacuum cleaner. Great, but now I have to spend ten hours cleaning the house.

— Jared Dillian, from “Nobody Reads” in “We’re Going to Get Those Bastards” (May 16, 2025) (via The Layman’s Blog)

Can’t Read. Won’t Read.

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…Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books…

…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…

…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…

…(he) 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…his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet…

…Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. 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…”

…Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea…

…300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula…

…High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text…

…A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.

…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…

—  Rose Horowitch, from “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” (The Atlantic, October 1, 2024)

Photo: Dayan Rodio

It was magic…

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The sweetest thing I read this week was a note from Cecilia Hogan, a reader in Tacoma, Wash. While waiting to pick up a book at her local library, she saw a 5-year-old boy applying for his first library card.

“The boy swam in excitement,” Ms. Hogan tells me, “bobbing from foot to foot, gurgling over each development the librarian devised. ‘Can you sign the back of the card?’ she asked. The boy nearly exploded. ‘You don’t have to write your whole name. How about just the first letter? A ‘Z,’ right?’ The boy took the pen from her and, after carefully executing a ‘Z,’ he added an ‘N’ and an ‘A.’ The more letters, the better, right?” 

Then it was time to put the card on a lanyard — his own lanyard. “The boy was ecstatic!” Ms. Hogan adds. “It was magic as old as libraries and still possible in the world we occupy today.”

Amid all the shameless assaults on librarians– like this real-life horror story – that little boy’s delight reminds us what’s at stake and why it’s worth defending everyone’s freedom to read. […]

Sunday marks the start of Library Card Sign-up Month, a national effort to connect children with libraries and books. The annual drive started in 1987 after then Secretary of Education William Bennett said, “Let’s have a campaign. . . . Every child should obtain a library card and use it.”

If there are young people in your life, consider how you can help them get a library card and begin a transformative engagement with the world of books. 

— Ron Charles, from “The Book Club” (Washington Post, August 30, 2024)

Photo: Ivo Rainha, Porto, Porto, Portugal

My Bookshelf, Myself.

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People have been arguing that print is dead, or about to be dead… It is not dead in this house. We write in books. We dogear pages and underline passages and draw little stars in the margins. To read a book after my husband has read it is to have a window into his curious and wide-ranging mind.

I’m aware that a novel is not a thing. A poem is not a thing. Whether a story or a poem or an essay or an argument comes in through your ears or your eyes or your fingertips doesn’t change the alchemy that happens in reading: the melding of writer and reader, one human heart in communion with another, and with all the others, past, present, and future, who have read the same book. That magic is unrelated to the delivery system of a text. It happens whenever and however a person reads.

Nevertheless.

I will always prefer a book I can hold in my hand, the kind that smells of paper and glue, the kind whose unfolding I control, no button or touchscreen involved, by flipping backward and forward with pages ruffling between my fingers. The physicality of it pleases me. I listen to audiobooks on solo road trips, but I always switch back to the physical book as soon as I unpack. Reading a book on paper feels slower — calmer, stiller — than encountering any digital text.

For me, a book made of paper will always be a beautiful object that warms a room even as it expands (or entertains, or challenges, or informs, or comforts) a mind, and a bookcase will always represent time itself. I walk past one of our bookcases, and I can tell you exactly why a particular book is still there, never culled as space grew limited, even if there is no chance I’ll ever read it again.

When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.

— Margaret Renkl, from “In Praise of Overstuffed Bookshelves” (NY Times, August 26, 2024)