I have shared in class with my students the article by Gaby Hinsliff’s “I Fear Books Are Going the Way of Vinyl Records – A Rarefied Pursuit for Hobbyists” published in The Guardian a couple of months ago. This article begins as the typical piece on summer reading to take then a turn towards the also classic essay bemoaning that people don’t read books anymore.
The key circumstance is an observation by the poolside: a person keeps scrolling on their smartphone rather than read the paperback that lies abandoned (perhaps that’s the author herself?). Hinsliff’s main thesis is that we humans need narratives but we’re beginning to prefer the short fixes provided by Instagram Stories or similar rather than the long read that a book provides. For her, this is like stopping your hunger pangs with junk food snacks when, she claims, hunger can only be satisfied with a proper meal. Please, note, than when Hinsliff refers to book reading she actually means fiction, that is to say, novels. Please, also note that by summertime reading she means just what you can cram in a two-week break, which is not much. Her article also includes a barrage of citations from diverse statistics claiming that the adults who read for pleasure are abandoning that pursuit and so are children. Booktubers and booktokers, and their circles, appear to be an anomaly in an otherwise declining panorama.
Perhaps I was wrong to expect that this article would arise debate, for it is not really a piece with a for-and-against argumentation but a warning that book reading is in danger. As an avid book reader and productive book author myself, I must worry but matters look obviously different for the younger generation, for whom the book is not as essential. I must say that I am enjoying enormously the second part of my classes, in which students interact telling each other about the books they are reading, a different set of four for each of them. The sight of young people discussing books and moving all over the classroom to meet other students is, frankly, refreshing and rewarding. Mine is not, clearly, a class of students who don’t read, but this does not mean they are interested in books as my generation was. Or were we?? Recently, my former poetry teacher, Prof. Josep Maria Jaumà, who retired eighteen years ago, came to deliver the MA programme’s inaugural lecture. This was a heartwarming summary of his experiences as a translator of modern poetry from English: Yeats, Larkin, Graves, Frost and so on. Now he is translating into verse a selection of The Canterbury Tales. Over lunch we had the classic ‘students-don’t-read’ conversation and he told me that this was the case too in the time when he was my teacher. Few students read then and now, he claims.
I think I am beginning to understand the problem. Those of us who became Literature teachers were the small minority of constant readers in the classroom. To be honest, I lack a clear idea of whether my peers read much or not, though my impression is that they disguised better their non-reading habits, if they had them. If you get a small group of people with the same passion, it seems that everyone must necessarily enjoy it, too, though this might not be the case at all. It is not normal, if you think about it, to be surrounded professionally by so many persons with doctoral degrees in Literature. In fact, we, the Literature staff, are a statistical anomaly, since we all read many books per year. We have assumed that our statistical anomaly extends to all the students that come to us for a degree, and, clearly, this cannot be the case, though it should be. We, professional teachers of Literature and constant readers, live in a bubble that might burst at any time.
The article by Hinsliff was received, I think, with a shrug of the shoulders, perhaps because I insisted too much that books are the way to learning, which for me is part of what the Victorians called self-improvement. What my students claimed, and in particular one of them, is that learning comes from other sources than books and, anyway, not all books provide knowledge. That is absolutely right, of course. I never meant that only books provide us with knowledge and, clearly, avoiding awful books is more useful than reading them. My concern is that whatever these other sources of learning are they may lack the depth that a sustained argumentation or narrative can provide in hundreds of pages. Extended audiovisual products (fiction and non-fiction films and series) come close to being as fulfilling, or the shorter texts you may find online (short fiction, essays, articles), but as a boomer I have a deep distrust of what social media can offer.
So, suppose for the sake of argumentation, that Hinsliff’s warning materialises and that reading books becomes a pursuit as rare as it was centuries ago, with, I should think, the exception of the Bible in Protestant countries (which explains their much higher degree of literacy than in the Catholic countries). Perhaps I should rephrase the supposition since Hinsliff refers in particular to reading for pleasure, taking it for granted that books will still be necessary for educational and professional training purposes (will they?). What if, as one of the students suggested, parents stop reading to their children or never take them to a bookshop or a library? Can reading for pleasure be lost in just one generation? How can the enthusiasm of booktubers and booktokers halt this trend? Many questions, I know.
I have been investing most of my professional energies in the last years on writing and editing academic books, and perhaps I am projecting onto Hinsliff’s article the frustration of the writer who knows that her audience is diminishing. Prof. Fredric Jameson passed away ten days ago, at the age of 90, and I believe that something else died with him, not just because he was a major intellectual, but because he communicated though books. Both things go together: intellectuals publish book-length essays as novelists publish novels. Perhaps those of us who as students admired authors like Jameson and wanted to produce books, not as immensely influential, but at least satisfactory, are now seeing the rug pulled under our feet. Do I ever wonder why I write books? Yes I do, all the time. This is why, fearing that I have no audience, I write books I would like to read. I assume it is the same for novelists.
I would like to finish with an idea I have already presented here but that might get traction, and that Hinsliff also mentions: diverse studies suggest that reading might work to prevent Alzheimer, and so reading a book would be the equivalent of a dozen hours at the gym toning your muscles. Again, I’m facing the same snag in my argumentation: reading does not necessarily mean reading books; though I doubt that reading tweets does much to stimulate the brain, perhaps reading short stories or magazine articles does.
I’m not done yet, it seems. I told my class that I feel like a Jurassic dinosaur though unlike the poor beasts I see the asteroid coming my way. Coincidentally, my niece asked me yesterday for my copy of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the novel which best captures the fear that books may one day disappear. In the dystopian society Bradbury imagined books are forbidden and firemen have been given the task of locating the hidden caches some book lovers still keep and light a fire with the doomed volumes. The solution Bradbury offers is a return to orality, with readers learning by heart the contents of their beloved books and transmitting them in this way. This is a very pretty idea, which François Truffaut illustrated beautifully in his film adaptation, but I doubt that human memory can hold so much text; this is why we invented writing eventually after using verse for epic poetry.
So, signing off from Jurassic park, long live books and those who love them!