The Death of Reading Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Reading is good. Reading more would be better. But literate societies can be susceptible to illiberalism.
THERE IS IRONY IN THE FACT that last month’s controversy over the “end of reading,” heralded in an Atlantic essay of that name by Rose Horowitch, was succeeded by a far bigger controversy over a film retelling one of humanity’s oldest works of literature—which spurred a surge in print sales of the work itself. Christopher Nolan may or may not have helped give reading a boost with his film The Odyssey, but the debate over the “end of reading” is worth revisiting now that the dust has settled.
Horowitch is far from alone in sounding the alarm over reading in crisis. In a recent piece in the Conversation, Austin Sarat, a political science professor at Amherst College (and an occasional contributor to The Bulwark), writes that complaints about “students’ reading habits, or rather nonreading habits” have become common among faculty. Sarat concludes: “Reading—not just any kind of reading, but reading long, complex, challenging books—is quickly vanishing from the American scene.”
What’s more, we are warned that not only the fate of literature but the fate of liberalism is at stake: Liberal democracy cannot thrive without a literate citizenry capable of processing complex information. Horowitch quotes Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the liberal world by definition is literate.” Horowitch adds: “The inverse appears to be true as well.” In other words, a postliterate world is turning postliberal—or make that simply illiberal.
Should we be worried? About illiberalism, of course. About postliteracy? That, to quote the description of Odysseus that apparently inspired Nolan, is complicated. Yes, Americans read less than they did forty years ago—not surprising, considering how many other forms of entertainment and information are competing for our time and attention. But does this spell decline or diversification? And is it really related to liberal democracy’s prospects?
MY OWN THOUGHTS on these questions are informed by my decades as a reader and a writer, and by my childhood in a culture that was at once both book-centric and part of a totalitarian system.1
But my thoughts are also informed by previous iterations of this debate. The reading (or non-reading) panic has been with us for the duration of my life in the United States, where I came from the Soviet Union as a teenager in 1980. The following year, a book titled Why Johnny Still Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch, a blistering critique of American reading education, became an instant bestseller—though not as big as its predecessor, Why Johnny Can’t Read, published in 1955. In the early 1980s, I remember buying paperback books that featured public-service ads with the stark warning that one in five Americans can’t read. (I was shocked until I figured out that “can’t read” did not refer to actual illiteracy but to lack of sufficient reading and writing skills to function in everyday life.) Illiterate America, by activist educator Jonathan Kozol, came out in 1985. As a student at Rutgers University in 1987, I wrote a review for the Detroit News of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which asserted that “our students have lost the practice of and the taste for reading” and portrayed a generation addled by rock music and television. (I thought Bloom was overgeneralizing.) There was also E.D. Hirsch’s 1987 bestseller Cultural Literacy, the premise of which was that young Americans need to remedy their lack of familiarity with the basics of history, culture, and art. In 1990, literary critic Alvin Kernan published The Death of Literature, which took note of a survey showing that nearly 60 percent of Americans had not read a single full book in the preceding year while most of the rest had only read one. Books, Kernan thought, had been done in by television and computers. The following year, a piece by Daniel Singal in—yes—the Atlantic warned that even smart and high-achieving students were often unprepared, poorly read (“one can’t assume that college students know anything anymore”), and generally familiar with political candidates only from commercials. On a familiar note, Singal warned that this situation was a potential danger to democracy.2
Horowitch acknowledges that warnings about the death of reading and of literacy itself aren’t new: McLuhan foretold the coming postliteracy in 1962, and his friend Neil Postman amplified the alarm in 1985 in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Maybe, Horowitch suggests, they weren’t wrong but “merely early”: Maybe it just took that long for the full transition from text to visual media to take place. Maybe doomsday is now.
Plenty of data confirm that Americans—children and adults—are reading less. The percentage of 13-year-olds who read for fun every or almost every day, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), fell only slightly from 1984 to 2012 (from 35 percent to 27 percent); but it plunged to 17 percent in 2020 and 14 percent in 2025. The share of those who never or hardly ever read for pleasure hovered around 10 to 12 percent in the 1980s and 1990s, then jumped to 24 percent in 2008 and 29 percent in 2020 and 2025. The post-2012 decline in daily or almost daily reading for fun has also been tracked for 9-year-olds (from 53 percent to 37 percent). As for adults, the American Time Use Survey has found that the share of those who report any reading for personal interest dropped from 26 percent in 2003 to 16 percent in 2023.
Blame smartphones? Social media? Video games? All of the above? Probably. But before we get depressed, a few caveats are in order. We have no idea what kind of reading these surveys capture (they do not specify books, either print or digital) or what kind of reading has declined. You could be reading Jane Austen or a celebrity gossip magazine; the survey would count them as the same. Is it possible that at least some of the drop in reading reflects a shift to other media among consumers of lighter fare? People who would have been reading celebrity gossip columns twenty-five years ago, for instance, are now more likely to scratch that itch with TikTok or Instagram. People who once read the sports pages may now be listening to podcasts, and so on.
A fascinating factoid from the time-use survey actually does suggest that it was the more casual, less serious readers who drifted away between 2003 and 2023: Even as the share of people who reported reading for personal interest dropped by 10 percentage points, mean reading time among those who do read went up over the same period—from about 80 minutes to nearly 100 minutes on a given day. That’s not necessarily because serious readers started reading more. Most likely, the change reflects the fact that many people who might once have spent five or ten minutes a day reading are no longer reading at all and are consuming other media instead.
Many commentators see a particularly dire sign in the fact that fewer children are reading today: given that reading declines with age, this seems to presage an ever-shrinking minority of adult readers. But we do not know if the pattern will still hold for today’s children and adolescents.
One pessimistic nugget in Horowitch’s essay also leads to data that paint a more nuanced picture: “Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text,” up from less than 20 percent in 2017. Those numbers, from the Survey of Adult Skills conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), refer to adults with literacy scores at Level 1 or below—ones who can, at best, understand short texts and find simple pieces of explicit information. But the OECD data for the United States also show little decline in the share of high-competency readers, scoring at Level 3 and above. The share of adult Americans reading at Level 3, considered to be the minimum required for functioning in modern society, dropped from 35 to 31 percent between 2017 and 2023. Level 4 and 5 readers, who can, among other things, compare different texts and evaluate the persuasiveness of arguments, remained constant at 13 percent of the adult population. The drop in reading skills was primarily among those scoring at Level 2—which is marginally better than Level 1, but is still considered below high school education goals. According to one document, it’s enough to “locate information in text, make simple inferences, and integrate easily identifiable information.”
NAEP assessments show a similar trend for high school seniors. The share of those with “below basic” reading skills rose from 20 to 25 percent in the 1990s, and then to 32 percent in 2024; but the biggest drop has been in the share of twelfth graders with “basic” skills, while the share categorized as “proficient” has decreased only slightly and the percentage with “advanced” reading skills has remained steady.3
Or, to put it more concisely: The poorly literate are getting poorer while the rest are mostly staying as they are. Is this bad? Yes, I think so. But is it a death knell for reading, or even for reading difficult books? Probably not.
WHEN MY FAMILY CAME HERE from the Soviet Union in 1980, one of the first things we heard from quite a few Soviet émigrés was, “Americans don’t read.” (“Except cookbooks,” said one woman, who stopped talking to my parents after my mother asked in a rather acid tone whether bookstores and publishers in America existed solely for Soviet émigrés.) As off-putting as this snobbery was, it had a certain sliver of truth in that Russia, at the time, was a “book culture” in a sense that America was not. For a college-educated person to show a lack of familiarity with the classics, including then-controversial modern classics like Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, was a very definite faux pas. At the school I attended (admittedly, a specialized school that mostly drew students from a more educated background than average), nearly everyone read on his or her own time, and the reading fare often included both Russian and foreign classics; I don’t think there was a single person who hadn’t read Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo by 14 or 15. Partly, the reading reflected the paucity of other entertainment: While Soviet television was not pure propaganda, as some might imagine, and it did offer some good programming, there just wasn’t very much of it. Besides, in a censoriously prudish culture, books offered glimpses of sex: Everything from Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami to Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls to occasionally published translations of twentieth-century American or European mystery novels was devoured in search of titillating tidbits.
But Soviet/Russian book culture was also, in a very real sense, performative. Bookshelves full of classics—including multivolume complete collections of everyone from Anton Chekhov to the sixteenth/seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Lope de Vega—were a status symbol; so were books from the two-hundred-volume “Library of World Literature” collection, a Soviet equivalent of Everyman’s Library. It’s a fair bet that many of those books were never opened; I heard stories of people borrowing books from friends and finding uncut pages inside. Some people hunted books without the slightest knowledge of either books or authors: My father once approached a long line outside a bookstore and asked a woman what was on sale. “Some guy named Garpo,” she replied. The book turned out to be a volume of Edgar Poe in Russian translation.
For many people in the Soviet era, reading was an outlet for dissent: People took great risks to circulate banned books, in samizdat typescript and in smuggled-in foreign editions. (Sometimes, a book was borrowed for a single day and read in an all-night marathon.) And yet, as Russia’s post-Soviet experience shows, literacy did not produce liberalism. In the first years of reform and opening up—perestroika and glasnost—people avidly read once-forbidden books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Vladimir Voinovich. A little over a decade later, the Russian book market was inundated with trash promoting Stalin apologism or historical revisionism with a Russian nationalist and anti-Western slant. On several trips to Russia in the 1990s, I found that my former classmates—who had almost certainly read more books than the average American of similar age and social status—were dismayingly credulous toward conspiracy theories and con artists such as psychic healers on television. We haven’t kept in touch, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they are now equally credulous toward the Kremlin’s war propaganda.
Does that mean reading is useless? No, of course not. But the literacy/liberalism connection is much too simplistic. The Soviets, and other Communist regimes, aggressively promoted literacy and reading in their early years to use books and newspapers as propaganda tools. The Nazi regime in Germany sprang from a highly literate society with a great appreciation of art and culture; if radio played a major role in the Third Reich, so did newspapers (and the book Mein Kampf, which had sold 12 million copies by the time the regime collapsed). Audiovisual media may be more suited to stirring up mindless anger and paranoia, but there is no shortage of examples of print media doing the same—from pamphlets and newspapers during the French Revolution to books like None Dare Call It Conspiracy in the United States in the 1970s. All things being equal, I’d rather see people get their information from books than podcasts—all things being equal, I agree that information from books is likely to be processed more thoughtfully—but obviously, it all depends on the podcast and the book.
DOES THAT MEAN EVERYTHING IS FINE as far as Americans’ cultural literacy and reading habits? I wouldn’t say that. I think there was something to be said for the middlebrow culture of the 1950s in which classics—literary, artistic, or musical—had a cachet of prestige and television networks felt a patrician and paternalistic obligation to bring them to the masses. On the other hand, I also realize that replicating that ancien régime is impossible in a media environment of infinite variety—and that even that golden age wasn’t all gold: Mike Wallace complained on his CBS interview show that only 39 percent of Americans, according to a Gallup poll, had read one or more books in 1955.
Besides the distractions of the digital age, the culture of reading has undoubtedly taken other hits—some of them political. George Orwell’s 1946 essay assailing the dominance of left-wing orthodoxies in the literary world of his time was titled “The Prevention of Literature”; paraphrasing it, one can certainly say that the modern left has engaged in what one might call ‘the prevention of reading,’ not only on the college level but in many high schools and many progressive cultural spaces. It’s hard to sustain love for books when authors and their works are “problematized” for inane reasons, identities are elevated above everything else, and classics become something to be “interrogated” rather than understood and appreciated. But today’s right with its scorn for the humanities and its suspicion of anything perceived as unpatriotic, “elitist,” or unmanly—like an overly “female” focus on feelings—is no less hostile to reading, literacy, or culture. (True, some red states such as Texas have genuflected toward “great books” with school reading lists that feature classics, but these initiatives still keep literature political: Those lists have a distinct rightward slant.)
Academics’ first-person accounts of students who don’t read assigned books and seem unable to finish a twenty-page text, let alone a book, certainly shouldn’t be ignored—even if one such account, by Tyler Jagt in the Chronicle of Higher Education in June, opens with the acknowledgment that “every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read.” Jagt writes that “the lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote.” Yet his own article seems short on data, other than some recent drops in NAEP reading scores—primarily, it seems likely, among the non-college-bound. And there are also competing or complicating reports from college professors and even high school teachers who say they still assign long and complex texts and that plenty of students still love to read.
The flurry of “reading in crisis” essays may have its positive side even if the alarm is overblown—if only because it gets people to talk about reading and ways to support it. But the concern shouldn’t turn to defeatism.4 We can note encouraging signs, such as the resurgence of book clubs among “Generation Z.” Maybe the trend of TikTok videos making fun of “performative reading,” such as showing off a big book while actually holding it upside down, reflects respect and not contempt for actual reading. Maybe even the Odyssey firestorm reflects an underlying sense that our literary heritage matters.
We can also talk about solutions, from improving reading programs in schools to putting pressure on institutions to help build a more reading-friendly culture. (Jeff Bezos, whose fortune started with books, should have gotten a lot more backlash for killing the Washington Post Book Review.) But one thing we shouldn’t do, I think, is link the fate of books to the fate of liberal democracy. Right now, restoring sanity and humanity to our politics should be our top priority. But one of the blessings of a saner and more humane political environment is that it will free up many of us to focus on more essential things that matter—including literature and art.
I’m the sort of person who worries about the decline of books. I am a lifelong bookworm raised in a book-loving, even book-revering home. I believe that books enrich lives; serious reading may not make you a better person, but I think it does make you a more thoughtful, insightful and well-rounded one. I also have a personal stake in book appreciation, as a writer who has published two nonfiction books, has recently finished her first novel, and has plans for more nonfiction books and translations of beloved classics. Obviously, I don’t want to write into a void.
More recently, the Atlantic also published Nicholas Carr’s 2008 lament “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in which he complained that “the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle” for him and his friends because of the attention-span-eroding internet.
A look at the numbers year by year shows that comparisons should be treated with caution, since some of the shifts are likely to be flukes. For instance, the share of students with “below basic” reading skills was 20 percent in the NAEP’s 1992 sample, but 25 percent in the 1994 sample and 23 in the 1998 sample. The share labeled “proficient” was 36 percent in 1992 and 32 percent in 1994. A comparison of 1992 and 2019, when 31 percent of seniors were classified as proficient in reading, seems to show a 5-point drop—but taking 1994 as the baseline reduces that drop to just one point.
Also not helpful: snobbish dismissal of books that don’t qualify as literary fiction but are smart and well-written. Horowitch, for instance, takes a swipe at Suzanne Collins’s latest bestseller in the “Hunger Games” series—Sunrise on the Reaping, which, for what it’s worth, is rich in quotes from classics.
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