For you,on your towel at a beach,in your chair by the pool,that book you are reading is just a new year’s resolution. You will read more this year. You will read the book you got for Christmas. You will reada book.
But beyond your personal good intentions,much has been said in the past year about how the future of reading anything longer than an online post – the brain’s very ability to read a book - is on the line.
Summer reading.Simon Letch
The data is not insignificant. A Gallup poll found that than at any time since the beginning of the poll in 1990. Two decades ago,before smartphones began their brain-filleting work,the National Endowment for the Arts found that a million Americans dropped out of reading literature every year. The decline was consistent across all ages,sex and ethnic demographics.
Surely kids are the answer? While the market for children’s books - and all books - grew during the first year of the pandemic,a gap opened between those being bought and those being read,and a bigger gap still for those being read for pleasure,according to the British government’s. The number of children who ‘never read’ for pleasure rose from 13 to 20 per cent in the last decade.
Pulp fiction? Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.Fairfax
This apocalyptic fear has been reflected in the Australian moment,where booksellers report an accelerating trend from ‘literary’ to ‘commercial’ adult fiction. COVID–19 appears to have converted swathes of literary fiction readers into readers who want something less like exercise,more like escape. ‘Dark’ and ‘difficult’ are reportedly on the nose. When your brain feels like it has been sliced and diced by work and by life itself,a book is a vehicle to carry you softly into sleep,and the preferred transport is a book that feels like other books you have read before.
If the research is correct,the junk novel is just a gateway drug to giving up reading altogether. When Dan Brown’sThe Da Vinci Code was selling millions,I wonder how many were turned off ever reading a book again by Mr Brown’s prose. Talk about hard work. Sometimes ‘ease’ is an illusion,and an ‘entertaining’ book really can feel like it goes on forever.
It’s not the first time reading has died,and every week brings a new version of the end of the world. When I was a kid,television gave us square eyes. Now,our phones turning our brains into the consistency of couscous. Having to one-up the quaint fears of previous generations,we enlist the science of neuroplasticity to reinforce our anxieties. The brain itself is being remodelled! In his book Stolen Focus:why you can’t pay attention,Johann Hari popularised widespread research about how the stop-start,multi-tasking,concentration-shredding influence of digital devices and modern work are changing the brain itself.
Or,as Nicholas Carr put it ten years earlier,Google is making us stupid. (Though beware the sweeping generalisation:if the hummingbird brain produced by 21st-century digitisation is killing our ability to concentrate,then the best readers in the world would have been the single-task process-working masses of the 20th.)
During the past year,the new to a persuasive appeal from writers and readers to support literature. But,as the wise Miles Franklin-winning author Amanda Lohrey has pointed out,more good writing means little if there are no readers. Imagine the future of music if listeners were hit by an epidemic of deafness (hang on,I think that’s happening too). The pressing challenge,Lohrey argues,is to restore reading,starting in schools and emanating into communities. A strong national culture is a strong reading culture.
Taken in by the latest apocalypse,I sometimes wonder if we have come to a book-reading precipice,if it can fall out of use as suddenly as the fall of the Soviet Union – an empire that evaporated in the space of a few weeks. As a writer,this is a nightmare of course,but the reckoning comes more painfully as a reader.
I guess I read something like 80 books a year,and have done so for at least 45 years,so let’s say that amounts conservatively to 3000-odd books,or roughly 30,000 hours. According to the 10,000-hour rule,in the time I have given to reading books I could have become a genius in three different disciplines. I could have been a surgeon,while also a professional golfer,and a concert pianist to boot. Instead,I gave that life to poring over ancient manuscripts like a medieval monk.
The sadness would not be for poor old me,but for everyone else and the pleasures they will have missed out on. Forget about one wasted life;what about the many lives they missed out on living? Whatever is happening to our brains,it remains a human need to imagine different lives,to travel to a world beyond our own. Imagination drives all that time we spend on those infernal devices. But you don’t get to fully inhabit that other world for a few seconds on Instagram. You’re just window-shopping. Only the time spent inside a book,the expansion of your dreaming,can gift you the miracle of travel that you are seeking.
Here’s some hope. Johann Hari was clearly answering a question that many were asking. What is really happening to my concentration? His book sold more than 50,000 copies in Australia. When people wanted to know why they couldn’t concentrate on reading,they looked for the answers in a book.
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