Reading time: 7.26

1,769 words

Hey Reader,

When I was a child I often went missing. Not missing missing — except for that one time my parents gathered the entire neighbourhood to look for me and were about to call the police before my brother found me underneath the dining room table behind the tablecloth reading a stack of books.

And that’s where I often was.

In a cupboard or under a table or hidden in a nook, reading.

I wasn’t very good at interacting with other children; their games generally bored me, I didn’t know how to join in, and if I wasn’t climbing trees or exploring the Black Track, I was hiding with a book.

The stories they held captivated me then teleported me to different times and places: the Magic Faraway Tree and the Enchanted Wood; the islands the Famous Five explored; the riverbanks of the Wind in the Willows. I’d be completely absorbed, learning all about frogs and toads and fairies and how children talk to each other and what I was supposed to do when I was invited to a birthday party.

When I got older, I travelled to different places that I’d never seen, with people I hadn’t had the chance to meet. I lived in a very white, working class place so books were the only way I had, really, of discovering people who didn’t look like me and finding out all about them.

And now I’m an adult, I get to choose where and when I travel, and who will be my guide.

I can travel through time and space whenever I like — open a wormhole to a different place and just arrive there, as if by magic.

And so can you! Simply by reading a book.

But will you?

Because it seems like nobody reads anymore.

The post-literate era

According to an article in The Atlantic, we are in a “post-literate” era: “A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.”

I am both surprised and not surprised.

I’m surprised because reading — in whatever form — is such a source of pleasure and delight to me that I cannot imagine choosing to be assaulted by a 30-second reel blast of sound and light and anxiety over and over and over again, rather than immerse myself in a story that will make me think and feel and experience something I’ve never experienced before.

And I’m not surprised because of all the above.

Everything about the modern world is desperately trying to push reading into a hole and bury it. The algorithms serve us what we think we want before we even know it ourselves, then they keep us there with more and more. They flood our feeds and our brains with cheap nasty dopamine that leaves us jonesing for more. They know us better than the people who are closest to us. They’re designed to have us move on after 45 seconds, onto the next thing that captures our fleeting attention, so we don’t have time to consider what we’re consuming. And there’s definitely no time to sit with it and think critically about it.

Which, let’s be honest, is hard and uncomfortable work at times.

Humans thrive in discomfort

We’ve been sold a lie that the world should be neither hard nor uncomfortable. We’ve been sold a lie that we are all entitled to a frictionless existence in which nothing pushes us and nobody makes us feel bad. But that’s only half a life, and nothing grows in that space. Everything shrinks and contracts and we’re seeing it right now, unfolding in real time, as people withdraw into their silos, making each other the enemy. Which is very handy for the group of people who actually are enemy.

We’re all busy, too. Working at least one job, sometimes more, with every penny going on housing, food, utilities, with little left over for pleasure. No leisure time. No time to be idle. Because idle people THINK.

The devil makes work for idle hands? Nah. Idleness is a virtue, not a sin, despite what we’ve been sold.

But back to this frictionless existence, and back to why I believe — no, I KNOW — reading is an act of resistance and a book is a radical thing.

In pursuit of friction

When it’s possible to sit down on the sofa, TV in front of us and phone in hand, and scroll endlessly and have Netflix deliver the next episode in the series we’re currently bingeing without us having to do anything to find it, why would we reach for a book?

We have to get up, find the book, turn on a reading light, maybe find our reading glasses if we’re over 40, then concentrate. There’s friction. It’s work.

And it’s magic.

Books transport us and change us without us even noticing.

Books force us to be creative even in the act of reading, because they make us think.

Books are radical because they’re slow in a world that venerates fast.

As Elizabeth Day says in her article:

There’s no snobbery in this, either. Everyone is entitled to literacy and everyone is entitled to be able to read (and, yes, ebooks and audiobooks count).

A return to the Dark Ages

What I’m worried about is the slide to the dark ages that is already happening. It started when the Library at Alexandria burned — not through calamity, but likely through neglect. Because it was too much hard work to maintain the scrolls, it was easier to let them rot and then burn. And that has resurfaced now with the banning of books in schools and libraries in the UK as well as in the USA, because it’s too much work to engage with them (plus, of course, the political agendas that want an illiterate, compliant, and ignorant population). It’s evident in the attention spans that mean people are watching TV shows and movies with their phones in their hands, so Netflix and other studios are instructing filmmakers to constantly remind the viewer what’s going on because they’re not paying attention.

Which explains why, if you’re like me and have your phone nowhere near you when you’re watching something, modern TV is SO frustrating. The storytelling has changed and now we’re spoon-fed ideas we should be able to grasp by — ya know — watching. I hate this pandering to the lowest common denominator. By making it easy to watch TV without paying attention, are we encouraging people to KEEP not paying attention?

Modern internet and even modern TV is designed to demand nothing. Don’t like what you’re watching? No need to “give it a chance” or put some effort into understanding it — just swipe away, tap something else, move on. There’s no resistance at all.

Books (and movies, long-form articles, and podcast series) are resistance — in the real world and metaphorically.

Not anti-tech; pro-curious

Reading is resistance against the slide into dull thoughtlessness and the tacit acceptance of a future that is coming for us no matter what.

I’m not anti-technology — far from it. I’m anti-technology-used-like-this. I’m anti-technology-as-a-tool-for-billionaires-to-get-richer-at-everyone-else’s-expense. I’m anti-technology-that-is-anti-intellectual.

I’m pro-curious.

There’s a deeper thread here: I am going to work hard to continue reading books, to continue reading long-form articles that challenge me, because I don’t want to lose what I’ve spent a lifetime building. I do not want to become what I am beginning to see: a person who is incapable of critical thought, whose creativity has atrophied, whose enthusiasm for joy has waned. And worst of all, I think, a person who has given up the fight.

We cannot give up the fight.

Reading is an act of resistance and empowerment.

Take the power back

Let me tell you a story, of a young physiotherapist who started working with my sister-in-law. She carried around a notebook, and in that notebook she’d write down words she’d never heard before and their meanings. There were unusual words and medical words, for sure… but there were also words you would expect a 20-something to know. Birds, like magpies and buzzards, that she’d never heard of. After some conversation, it transpired that she had never read a book. I was boggled as to how she’d made it through school and physio training without reading a textbook at least, but she had taken only what she needed and most training was apparently online.

She decided — on her own — that she was going to try to read a book and I cannot tell you how much I LOVE that. But the book she picked was quite a heavy memoir and she didn’t get very far. It made her feel kind of stupid.

So we suggested Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas which is incredibly readable, quite silly romantasy, and lots of fun. As far as I know, she’s now a reader of all sorts and her world has expanded and she knows more and understands the world more.

That’s what I’m talking about when I talk about resistance and empowerment: the widening of worlds and deep learning in a way that we don’t get from digital media.

Go to your local library and join up, and take out a book. Put it in your bag and read it on the bus, on the train, while you’re standing in a queue, in a café. Whenever you’d reach for your phone, instead reach for a book (or an audiobook).

Gift books to children and adults. Join a book club. Create a book club.

Make the effort.

I will not succumb to helplessness in the face of technology designed to make us feel helpless.

TTFN,

Vicky 🫡

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