book reading is a dying phenomenon of life nowadays essay

Lakhmir Singh

Essay on “Book reading is a dying phenomenon of life nowadays.” Throw light on the factors responsible for it and give suggestions for its improvement

Essay – book reading is a dying phenomenon of life nowadays.

Book reading is a dying phenomenon of life nowadays Essay: Books: considered as the best friend of man is seemingly at the death bed. While intellect is on rise with days, the medium to record those and sharing of thoughts has changed in this 21 st Century. Words are increasing, dictionaries are becoming bulkier, but the writings are not necessarily found in the written medium that has been there since ages. While the first printed book was done in China in the 9 th Century called Diamond Sutra containing sacred Buddhist texts, the first mass produced book was the Gutenberg’s Bible. The Bible is till now the most printed book in the world. With so many prints happening each year, why are we saying that book reading is reducing day by day?

Books, and by that I mean physical hard copies have a different feel altogether in terms of deep, sustained engagement with an idea or story. Reading books is both a skill and a habit. New readers feel more lethargic towards reading, but if they manage to continue with the practice, reading becomes a habit. The person feels more and more intrigued and habituated to books and feels like reading about new things and explore more. But according to current trends as seen in the United States of America, book reading has reduced by about 17% than the levels seen in the 1990s. The reason is mostly attributed to the rise of various forms of media. Though traditional news media through television and radio was popular at that time, people mostly from upper and upper middle classes were able to afford the best of those. Even then, these medium offered quite less than what people got from magazines and books, and these also became sorts of memoirs and collections for those who could afford the books on their own. Libraries were seen running on full fledge with people issuing books from all genre, and even came for magazines having information regarding jobs and opportunities.

Keeping aside the books issued for school curriculum, India has also seen reduction of book readers. With the advent of 2000s and beyond, computers and mobiles became more common in households, and so did social media with time. This has become a bane for books and their survival in this competitive world. In the world of TikTok and Instagram reels, a thirty second to one minute video is more of an attention grabber than a book of hundred pages which might take a day or two for a newbie to complete reading. Facebook and blog websites became excellent sites to share anecdotes and important life lessons. Magazines became digital with added footages of favourite stars. E-books are more common than hard copies since they take no extra storage in one’s home.

So the debate continues: is book reading indeed dying or has people changed medium of information gathering? And the answer is that gathering information online is not equivalent to the way a person holds a book in his hands, goes in his own world undistracted from the happenings of the present. He does not feel like scrolling through social media every two minutes. He has more concentration and patience. He processes the information given in the book in his hands without extra external feeding of ideologies. He can have his own thoughts, may be different from the other readers. Also, he is not in the continuous cycle of justifying his thoughts and getting shame on social media. Thus, traditional way of book reading becomes imperative even in this world of information overload.

Book reading as a practice has momentarily revived during the CoViD-19 Pandemic that shook the world. People were idle in their homes and after a few days and months of binge watching videos, turned towards books. Self-help books topped the selling lists. With the world opening up again, we as a society need to promote traditional ways of reading for our betterment. Promoting book clubs, introducing weekly discussions in schools where students share their thoughts on a selected book become excellent ways to revive the process. New learners should take it slow by starting off with short stories and eventually making way to genres they are most interested about.

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The Art of Optimism

Stop Saying Books Are Dead. They’re More Alive Than Ever

David Steinberger and Lisa Lucas speak onstage during the 68th National Book Awards at Cipriani Wall Street on November 15, 2017 in New York City.

“The book is dead,” is a refrain I hear constantly. I’ll run into people on the subway, in a taxi, in an airport, or wherever I might be and when I tell them what I do, they ask me “do people even still read anymore?” This simple question implies the very work I do at the National Book Foundation may not be worthwhile—or even possible. It’s generally a casual statement, a throwaway remark, a comment repeated so often that it’s taken as fact. The book is obviously dead, or at least dying, right?

False. When people tell me that fighting for books is fighting a futile battle, that’s the moment my optimism kicks in. That’s the moment I power up my very deepest belief in literature. A person who wants to challenge or lament the death of reading with me is a person looking for a fight and, I think , a person who wants to be convinced otherwise. This gives me hope. I’m here for this fight.

Not long ago, I came across an article with the headline “Reading is a rapidly depleting form of entertainment,” which cited recent findings from Pew Research Center that 24% of Americans didn’t read a book in 2017. Now, what I saw was that 76% of Americans did read a book. The reality is that if 76% of any population is participating in a single activity then you are surrounded by people doing that very thing. The article said that books are dying; the research said—to me, at least—that we are a nation of readers.

The glass is far more than half full. After more than a decade of decline, the number of independent bookstores is on the rise — despite the dominance of online retailers. The American Booksellers Association, which promotes independent bookstores, says its membership grew for the ninth year in a row in 2018. Sales of physical books have increased every year since 2013, and were up 1.3% in 2018 compared to the previous year.

See the 2019 Optimists issue , guest-edited by Ava DuVernay.

Of course, we know that everyone doesn’t read, and we didn’t need a poll to tell us. But we do need to better understand who reads and why and how to encourage them to read more and more joyfully. We need to figure out who has been left out of the conversation around books and welcome them into the fold with open arms. And so the job of people like me is to widen the audience and make sure that books remain steadfastly relevant to our culture. At the Foundation, we bring authors from around the nation to meet would-be readers on their home turf, distribute books to young people living in housing projects, and celebrate diverse, wide-ranging, excellent work on our largest stage at the National Book Awards.

My colleagues at publishers, libraries, bookstores and literary non-profits share these challenges. We all need to figure out how to make more seats at the table. Our job is to build readers. And while some might consider this work an uphill journey, we do this every day because the profound pleasures of a good book are for everyone, everywhere.

Storytelling is fundamental to human beings. It is how we explore and make sense of this world and understand one another. Because books absorb us and harness our imaginations, they are an essential medium for storytelling—as well as a satisfying one. The idea that these benefits and pleasures are for a limited subset of any given population is dangerous. Books are not exclusive.

Literature strengthens our imagination. If we all have the tools to try to imagine a better world, we’re already halfway there. Each day, there are more books being published that speak to every kind of person, from every kind of place. And I believe readers can be built—because I know we have an unlimited number of invitations to this party.

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Friday essay: a real life experiment illuminates the future of books and reading

book reading is a dying phenomenon of life nowadays essay

Lecturer, RMIT University

Independent artist / Lecturer (adjunct), RMIT University

Disclosure statement

Andy Simionato is founder and editor of Atomic Activity Books, and is a lecturer at the School of Design, RMIT University.

Karen ann Donnachie is founder and editor of Atomic Activity Books, an independent, experimental publishing concern.

RMIT University provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU.

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Books are always transforming. The book we hold today has arrived through a number of materials (clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, pixels) and forms (tablet, scroll, codex, kindle).

The book can be a tool for communication, reading, entertainment, or learning; an object and a status symbol.

The most recent shift, from print media to digital technology, began around the middle of the 20th century. It culminated in two of the most ambitious projects in the history of the book (at least if we believe the corporate hype): the mass-digitisation of books by Google and the mass-distribution of electronic books by Amazon .

The survival of bookshops and flourishing of libraries (in real life) defies predictions that the “ end of the book ” is near. But even the most militant bibliophile will acknowledge how digital technology has called the “idea” of the book into question, once again.

To explore the potential for human-machine collaboration in reading and writing, we built a machine that makes poetry from the pages of any printed book. Ultimately, this project attempts to imagine the future of the book itself.

A machine to read books

Our custom-coded reading-machine reads and interprets real book pages, to create a new “ illuminated ” book of poetry.

The reading-machine uses Computer Vision and Optical Character Recognition to identify the text on any open book placed under its dual cameras. It then uses Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing technology to “read” the text for meaning, in order to select a short poetic combination of words on the page which it saves by digitally erasing all other words on the page.

Armed with this generated verse, the reading-machine searches the internet for an image – often a doodle or meme, which someone has shared and which has been stored in Google Images – to illustrate the poem.

Once every page in the book has been read, interpreted, and illustrated, the system publishes the results using an online printing service. The resulting volume is then added to a growing archive we call The Library of Nonhuman Books .

From the moment our machine completes its reading until the delivery of the book, our automated-art-system proceeds algorithmically – from interpreting and illuminating the poems, to pagination, cover design and finally adding the endmatter. This is all done without human intervention. The algorithm can generate a seemingly infinite number of readings of any book.

The following poems were produced by the reading-machine from popular texts:

deep down men try there he’s large naked she’s even while facing anything.

from E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey

how parties popcorn jukebox bathrooms depressed shrug, yeah? all.

from Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction

Oh and her bedroom bathroom brushing sending it garter too face hell.

from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s

My algorithm, my muse

So what does all this have to do with the mass-digitisation of books?

Faced with growing resistance from authors and publishers concerned with Google’s management of copyright, the infoglomerate pivoted away from its primary goal of providing a free corpus of books (a kind of modern day Library of Alexandria ) and towards a more modest index system used for searching inside the books Google had scanned. Google would now serve only short “snippets” of words highlighted on the original page.

Behind the scenes, Google had identified a different use for the texts. Millions of scanned books could be used in a field called Natural Language Processing . NLP allows computers to communicate with people using everyday language rather than code. The books originally scanned for humans were made available to machines for learning, and later imitating, human language.

Algorithmic processes like NLP and Machine Learning hold the promise (or threat) of deferring much of our everyday reading to machines. History has shown that once machines know how to do something, we generally leave them to it . The extent to which we do this will depend on how much we value reading.

If we continue to defer our reading (and writing) to machines, we might make literature with our artificially intelligent counterparts. What will poetry become, with an algorithm as our muse?

We already have clues to this: from the almost obligatory use of emojis or Japanese Kaomoji (顔文字) as visual shorthand for the emotional intent of our digital communication, to the layered meanings of internet memes, to the auto-generation of “ fake news ” stories. These are the image-word hybrids we find in post-literate social media.

To hide a leaf

Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Spiritual Laws

Emerson’s challenge highlights the subjectivity we bring to reading. When we started working on the reading-machine we focused on discovering patterns of words within larger bodies of texts that have always been there, but have remained “hidden in plain sight”. Every attempt by the reading-machine generated new poems, all of them made from words that remained in their original positions on the pages of books.

The notion of a single book consisting of infinite readings is not new. We originally conceived our reading-machine as a way of making a mythical Book of Sand , described by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1975 parable.

Borges’ story is about the narrator’s encounter with an endless book which continuously recombines its words and images. Many have compared this impossible book to the internet of today. Our reading-machine, with the turn of each page of any physical book, calculates combinations of words on that page which, until that moment, have been seen, but not consciously perceived by the reader.

The title of our early version of the work was To Hide a Leaf. It was generated by chance when a prototype of the reading-machine was presented with a page from a book of Borges’ stories. The complete sentence from which the words were taken is:

Somewhere I recalled reading that the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest.

The latent verse our machine attempts to reveal in books also hides in plain sight, like a leaf in a forest; and the idea is also a play on a page being generally referred to as a “leaf of a book”.

Like the Book of Sand, perhaps all books can be seen as combinatorial machines . We believed we could write an algorithm that could unlock new meanings in existing books, using only the text within that book as the key.

Philosopher Boris Groys described the result of the mass-digitisation of the book as Words Without Grammar , suggesting clouds of disconnected words.

Our reading-machine, and the Library of Nonhuman Books it is generating, is an attempt to imagine the book to come after these clouds of “words without grammar”. We have found the results are sometimes comical, often nonsensical, occasionally infuriating and, every now and then, even poetic.

The reading-machine will be on display at the Melbourne Art Book Fair in March and will collect a Tokyo Type Directors Club Award in April. Nonhuman Books are available via Atomic Activity Books .

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Dying to Read: Reflections on the Ends of Literacy

2020, New Literary History

I choose my title “dying to read” for two reasons: first, to consider those lifeworlds—those ways of experiencing, sensing, and being—seemingly eclipsed by the rise of modern conceptions of literacy; and second, to consider the relation between the novel and death itself—that is, death as a sort of literary limit, the horizon of the possible testimonial, and the experiential limit of what can be narrated. It is with this in mind that I address an alternate plotline for the history of the novel. At the boundary between literacy and illiteracy is the condition of the possibility of the novel itself. If we understand reading to be implicated in social transformations such as schooling, libraries, and print culture, then how might we understand the passing of forms eclipsed by a new literary regime? The essay here provides a reading of Taha Hussein's "Call of the Curlew" to consider narrational limits and unnovelizable lives. At the limits of novelization is a never-ending story of a persistent past with lingering forms of life and language that continue to haunt the supposedly modern present. It is this story that is of interest to me here, one that is refracted through the move from illiteracy to literacy—an inquiry into what we might call the horizon of the literary.

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Daniel Fraser

This article examines the interruption of the phenomenological experience of reading caused by an encounter with a particularly striking sentence or passage. More specifically, the text interprets the passage of language from text to reader as a moment of quotation whereby language is inscribed within the register of biological life. Drawing on the work of Blanchot and Benjamin the article suggests that this capture of a textual fragment, its transfer into the reader’s memory, simultaneously challenges and reaffirms the violence of conceptuality Hegel identified at the heart of language.

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Cathy Caruth

Three times I rushed, and my heart urged me to hold her, and three times she flew from my hands like a shadow or even a dream.—Homer, The Odyssey 11.206–08.To speak of the future of literary criticism is always to speak of the future of literature, which is a mode of language and an institution whose very being essentially touches on the possibility and fragility of its own future. “The fragility of literature,” as Richard Klein suggests, “its susceptibility to being lost,” is at the heart of all literary writing, which emerges from the absence of a “real referent” and thus sustains itself through its reference to other texts, to the archive of literary writing that is made up of figures and other literary articulations that allow us to read. Klein reminds us, citing Jacques Derrida, that literary texts may always disappear: not only because they may be forgotten but also because they are susceptible to the erasure of the archive, to apocalyptic destruction, and to the collective lo...

Massimo Leone

Roland Barthes’s famous essay on the “Death of the Author” inaugurated an intense reflection on the progressive dwindling of the importance of the traditional biographic idea of ‘author’ in the activity of receiving and interpreting a text, especially a literary one. In the new epistemic era favored by the emergence and affirmation of structuralism, the meaning of a text was, indeed, no longer seen as stemming from an individual agency, but from the social dimensions of language and culture. As digital communication is progressively supplanting every form of non-digital meaning transmission, though, present-day semiospheres are confronted with a different scenario: on the one hand, ‘empirical' authors are actually becoming more and more prominent, meaning that audiences are starving for non-digital and ‘auratic’ experiences of encounter with meaning, minding more meeting with authors, for instance, than reading their novels; on the other hand, given the easiness of meaning production with digital technology, the same cultures are going through a progressive ‘agony of the reader’: individuals are so intent in creating new particles of meaning, with impatient and daily frenzy, that they never become patient readers of other people’s meaning creations, especially if these challenge the instantaneousness that characterizes the contemporary digital communication. The shortness of present-day meaning creation and its lack of audience is bound to change the entire semiosphere. The essay aims at foreseeing some of these changes, pinpointing one the main features of Narcissism in the digital era.

Margit Sutrop, The Death of the Literary Work, Philosophy and Literature, Volume 18, Number 1, April 1994, pp. 38-49

Margit Sutrop

Curiously, there has been a lot of discussion about the death of the author but the death of the literary work has hardly been resisted. It has been taken for granted that literary work closes itself on a signifed, that the work is closed, finished object which hides its meaning. In this article I show that there are good reasons to doubt this claim. In the first part of the article I argue that the literary work has lost its content because the notion of the text has has such an important extension. Many reader-oriented critics are convinced that every text has its meaning only in reading. As the meaning is produced, assembled and constituted in the reading process, it is always subjective, individual, plural. The literary work becomes the victim of the text and will be sidelined. In the second part of the article I will compare the phenomenological literary theory of the Polish aesthetician Roman Ingarden and the reader-response theory (reception aesthetics) of the German literary theorist Wolfgang Iser. I will focus on how Iser will make an important extension of the notion of the text - in the spirit of Barthes- at the same time giving the notion of the literary work a totally new content.

Gregg Lambert

College English

Gayatri C. Spivak

Journal of Romanian Literary Studies

Dana Badulescu

This article looks into the evolution of books and paradigms of reading in the last approximately three hundred years. The proviso is that print compelled the people to read, and therefore to be modern. Since a large number of books entered the world, the extensive model of reading took precedence over the intensive model. Referencing a variety of ideas on books and reading, I argue that there is a bodily interaction between readers and books, and also between the act of reading and the printed text. Moreover, books have a body of their own, which has been designed to be a match for the human body. Probing into possible answers to the question ”Why do we read?”, I also tackled the resistance of some texts, which may either frustrate their readers, or give them a sense of what Bloom calls the ”reader’s sublime.” The difficulty of reading puts the reader not just in the text, but in its very centre, while the text itself becomes the reader’s drama. In the 21st century, in the context of what many consider to be a ”decine of literacy” and the large use of electronic reading devices, books and reading have entered a new stage. The printed book and reading traditional books have not lost their grip, while the e-book and e-reading need further testing.

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Why We Don’t Read, Revisited

By Caleb Crain

Image may contain Transportation Vehicle Terminal Train Train Station Human Person Subway Clothing and Apparel

A little more than a decade ago, I wrote an article for The New Yorker about American reading habits, which a number of studies then indicated might be in decline. I was worried about what a shift to “secondary orality”—a sociological term for a post-literate culture—might do to America’s politics. “In a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with,” I wrote. I suspected that people might become less inclined to do fact checking on their own; “forced to choose between conflicting stories,” they would “fall back on hunches.”

I’ll go out on a limb and say that I don’t think that I got this part wrong. But I’ve often wondered whether I was right about the underlying trend, too. Were Americans in fact reading less back then? And are they reading even less today? Whenever I happen across a news article on the topic, I wonder if I’m about to find out whether I was Cassandra or Chicken Little.

In assessing reports about reading habits, I keep in mind a couple of lessons from the research that I did a decade ago. First, although American adults seem to get a kick out of worrying about whether American children are reading enough, this is an enormous waste of time in the world in which we happen to live. Children who have any hope of getting into or remaining in the middle class are under great social and economic pressure to excel at academics, and, of all Americans, they are perhaps the least likely to change their reading habits of their own volition. Even the amount of pleasure reading they do seems likely to reflect the social pressure they’re under—not where America in general is headed.

Second, in studies of reading habits, the gold standard is asking participants to report hour by hour how they spent a particular day. It’s pretty much useless to ask how many books somebody read last year, because almost nobody remembers, and many exaggerate, to seem smarter. At the time I wrote my article, the best American data came from a time-use study begun by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2003, statistics that were then still only a few years old, and inconclusive.

In January, however, a Times article about American sleep habits alerted me to the fact that the Department of Labor’s American Time Use Survey is alive, well, and all grownup now. It now has fourteen years of data, series upon series of which is easily accessible through its home page , and also through a Labor Department data portal . Another look at American reading habits seemed timely.

I’ll cut to the chase: between 2003 and 2016, the amount of time that the average American devoted to reading for personal interest on a daily basis dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours. It would seem that reading in America has declined even further in the past decade. But statistics can be tricky, so let’s kick the tires a little.

One hazard of statistics is the contribution of “compositional effects.” Suppose a survey finds that the average American today eats a third fewer French fries than he did a decade ago. Oddly, this wouldn’t necessarily mean that any Americans have changed their French-fry-eating habits. It might be, instead, that the “composition” of the American population has changed. Maybe there are fewer men and more women in America than there used to be, and maybe men tend to eat more French fries. In that case, the average French-fry consumption would drop even if the typical man and the typical woman continued eating a number of French fries no different from the number they had eaten from time immemorial.

It’s possible that a compositional effect explains the decline of reading in America. Maybe, for example, as more women have entered the workforce, their full-time employment has left them with less leisure to read. It’s easy to check such a hypothesis by parsing the data from the American Time Use Survey according to gender . Women read more than men, it turns out, but time spent reading has declined steadily for both genders. If you break down the data according to employment status , meanwhile, you see that the unemployed do read more, but they, part-timers, and full-timers all read steadily less as the decade went forward. The same applies when you break down the data by race and ethnicity or by age ; you see differences in the amount of reading, but a decline is taking place in almost every subgroup.

A less explored cause might be the recession. America’s middle class is shrinking, and the proportion of Americans in the labor force is lower than it has been since the nineteen-seventies. Maybe people read less when they have less money? From a breakdown of reading by income quartile , it turns out that the rich read more—but they read less and less every year. Americans in the lowest income quartile did manage to read more in 2016 than they did in 2003—a rare trend—but that’s probably a dead-cat bounce; the 2003 number was so low that it was as likely to improve as not. All these factors are probably making some contribution to a compositional effect. But nothing, to my eye, looks substantial enough to explain away the over-all trend: Americans are reading less.

To make sense of the data from the American Time Use Survey, it helps to know how they’re collected. A pamphlet explaining the survey is mailed to each subject ahead of the day to be observed. The day after, a survey-taker telephones to ask how the subject spent her time. A subject who doesn’t report any reading may not be a non-reader in any absolute sense. All we know for sure is that she didn’t happen to do any reading on the day under scrutiny.

As a statistic, therefore, the number of average hours spent reading is perhaps less telling than two other statistics: the percentage of the population that did some reading, and the average time that these readers spent on their reading.

This image may contain Plot Text and Page

Here there’s a little bit of good news: the average American reader spent 1.39 hours reading in 2003, rising to 1.48 hours in 2016. That’s the very gradually rising blue line in the graph above. In other words, the average reading time of all Americans declined not because readers read less but because fewer people were reading at all, a proportion falling from 26.3 per cent of the population in 2003 to 19.5 per cent in 2016. You could call this a compositional effect, but it’s a rather tautological one: reading is in decline because the population is now composed of fewer readers. And the assessment would be a little unfair: we don’t know that the survey’s non-readers are in fact never-readers. All we know is that, when Americans sit down to read, they still typically read for about an hour and a half, but fewer are doing so, or are doing so less often.

It’s beyond my statistical powers (though probably not beyond an expert’s) to figure out whether a decline in an individual’s reading tends to be correlated with a rise in any other activity measured by the American Time Use Survey. I can only offer suggestive comparisons. The activity that the survey calls “socializing and communicating” seems to be shifting in more or less the same way that reading is: those who take part spend about as much time on it as they ever did, but the over-all average of hours per day spent on it is declining because fewer people are taking part.

Perhaps whatever is eating away at reading is also eating away at socializing. More and more people are taking part in “ game playing ” and “ computer use for leisure, excluding games ,” even as the time that devotees spend on the activities holds steady. It’s possible, too, that the numbers may be reflecting a shift in the way that people read news and essays. As best as I can tell from the survey’s coding instructions , reading an e-book and listening to an audiobook both count as “reading.” With computer activity, which would seem to include the use of smartphones, the survey-taker is supposed to “code the activity the respondent did as the primary activity,” which presumably means that reading a newspaper or magazine online would also be classified as “reading.” But “browsing on the internet” is listed in the survey’s official lexicon as an example of “computer use for leisure, excluding games.” So there’s a chance that people who used to read the newspaper in print and be counted as “reading” are now doing so online and being counted as Web surfers.

But, at last, we come to the rival to reading known as television, and find a footprint worthy of a Sasquatch.

Television, rather than the Internet, likely remains the primary force distracting Americans from books. The proportion of the American population that watches TV must have hit a ceiling some time ago; in the years studied by the American Time Use Survey, it’s very stable, at a plateau of about eighty per cent—roughly four times greater than the proportion of Americans who read. But America’s average TV time is still rising, because TV watchers are, incredibly, watching more and more of it, the quantity rising from 3.28 hours in 2003 to 3.45 hours in 2016.

When I was researching my article ten years ago, the sturdiest and most convincing data about reading habits that I found came from a Dutch time-use study, which went back decades. It showed with remorseless detail how television had dethroned reading in the Netherlands between 1955 and 1995. (The data aren’t directly comparable, because the Dutch recorded not hours per day but hours per week, limiting their observations to evenings and weekends.)

These are remarkable curves. I think it’s fair to imagine the trends captured by the American Time Use Survey as an extension rightward, into the twenty-first century, of the lines in the Dutch graph. More than half a century after television’s début, its share of American leisure time is still growing—and reading’s share is still falling. The Dutch researchers Wim Knulst and Gerbert Kraaykamp observed that each generation seems more susceptible to television’s wiles than the generation before it. That observation is confirmed by the American Time Use Survey, which shows that older Americans are more likely to have sat down with a book the day before the survey-taker called.

In the end, the data from the American Time Use Survey paint a fairly grim picture of America’s reading habits. They don’t completely relieve me of my fear of being Chicken Little; it’s possible that the migration of news from print to the digital realm has disguised some reading as mere computer leisure. I suspect, though, that the fraction of such computer use devoted to essays and news is too small to provide much mitigation. The long march to secondary orality seems well under way. The nation, after all, is now led by a man who doesn’t read .

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By Katy Waldman

By Graciela Mochkofsky

Why Reading Is a Lost Art

Thoughtful Reading

Reading as a lost art may sound strange. After all, you’re reading this article, and nearly every adult you know can wield the reading wrench from their skills tool kit.

In reality, thoughtful reading is becoming a lost art. Even if we’re reading more, it’s primarily on screens. We scroll through social media and scan online text, barely processing one thought before a hyperlink jerks us to the next. Artful reading is dying. Many people believe it’s drawing a final breath on its deathbed.

But recovery is possible! When we recognize our manifold losses and why they matter, we can implement ways to recover artful reading.

Is Reading Lost?

Most people believe reading is worthwhile and they should read more. But nearly a quarter of adults cannot name one author or haven’t read a single book in the previous year. Retirees read more than other age groups in America, but even they don’t average as much as an hour per day. Compare that to the average of five to six hours spent daily on digital media. Many people believe technology has detrimental effects on reading.

Recovering the Lost Art of Reading

Leland ryken , glenda faye mathes.

In today’s technology-driven culture, reading has become a lost art. Recovering the Lost Art of Reading explores the importance of reading generally and of studying the Bible as literature, while giving practical suggestions on how to read well.

In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains , Nicholas Carr supports his claim that Internet use causes negative brain changes. Online reading impedes analytical thought and fractures focus.

In Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” 1 he grieves his own loss: “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” His mind now expects to receive information as the Internet “distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” He writes, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Michael Harris goes even farther to confess, “I have forgotten how to read.” 2 Unable to complete one chapter in a book, he found other people shared his problem. “This doesn’t mean we’re reading less” in our “text-gorged society,” he writes. “What’s at stake is not whether we read. It’s how we read.” He states: “In a very real way, to lose old styles of reading is to lose a part of ourselves.”

What Are We Losing?

Failures to read or read well cause us to lose life’s balance and multiple means of sharpening minds and shaping character. We may even lose crucial aspects of our spiritual lives.

A primary casualty is the loss of meaningful leisure. Finite humans need rhythms of work and rest, both of which God ordained for our good. Reading refreshes more deeply than leisure activities that fail to engage the mind and imagination.

A related loss is self-transcendence. Immersing ourselves in the reading experience lifts our minds above self-centered thoughts and concerns to focus on other people, or large themes, or God.

If we neglect reading, we lose contact with the wisdom and enrichment from the past. The voice of the past speaks with a stabilizing influence into the tyranny of the secular and politically-correct present. A weighty consideration for Christians is that their sacred book and salvation’s redemptive acts are rooted in the past.

Another loss is our failure to connect with essential human experience. A disconnection with biblical and bedrock aspects of humanity thwarts our understanding of enduring values, norms for living, and self-identity concepts. Rejecting connections with the past and essential human experience prevents our participation in civilization’s ongoing conversation.

These disconnections contribute to our loss of an enlarged vision. C. S. Lewis writes that “we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own.” 3 Dismissing literature’s vast sweep of viewpoints and experiences limits our outlook and stunts our spirits.

Not reading also results in the loss of a primary means of edification. Some literature affirms the Christian faith, while a larger body embodies truth congruent with it. Even literature contradicting Christianity can edify the believer who sees through its despairing unbelief to our joyful hope in Christ. Failing to read prevents new avenues of edification.

The decline of reading has impoverished our culture and individual lives. In the process, we lose our capacity to discern the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Why Should We Care?

These losses are important for everyone, but particularly Christians. As children of The Book, we should passionately seek the true, the good, and the beautiful in every book.

If we—like Michael Harris—have forgotten how to read, we’ve lost more than delight in literary treasures. We’ve lost the ability to read the Bible consistently and attentively. What then happens to the way we live and to our relationship with God? We lose part of ourselves in ways infinitely worse than Harris imagines.

Philip Yancey conveys the extent of this risk in the title of his article, “The death of reading is threatening the soul.” 4 He views a commitment to reading as a continuing battle, advocating protection against temptation and an environment that nourishes reading and meditation.

Artfully reading the Good Book and other good books is a treasure we dare not lose.

Christians are called to quiet our souls and commune with God through an open Bible. What keeps us from meditating on God regularly, receptively, and thoughtfully? Artfully reading the Good Book and other good books is a treasure we dare not lose.

Is Reading an Art?

We begin to consider reading as an art when we think about what we read and how we read. Informational reading and online skimming require only simple decoding. Imaginative literature involves complex thinking. But artful reading involves more than this basic differentiation.

Receptively and thoughtfully reading a novel or a memoir or a poem makes us an active participant in its art. An imaginative current flows between the written words and the mind’s eye. An author creates a work of literature. A reader receives and responds to it, empowering participation in its art.

In The Mind of the Maker , Dorothy Sayers identifies a book’s threefold aspect. The book as Thought (the idea in the writer’s mind), as Written (the image of the idea), and as Read (its power on the responsive mind). We participate in literature’s artistic experience by pondering the author’s idea, receiving the energy in the words, and responding to the work’s power. Such participation propels reading into the realm of art.

We discover the power of creativity with the context of a biblical aesthetic, which can be defined as a perspective steeped in scriptural knowledge and informed by artistic awareness. A foundational concept in developing a biblical aesthetic is looking for the true, the good, and the beautiful.

This triad, usually credited to ancient Greek philosophy, is actually rooted in God and his word. Philippians 4:8 urges readers to think about whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, and excellent—a list encompassing the true, the good, and the beautiful.

The Bible teaches that God is truth and his word is truth. Because truth is integral to God’s character, Christians must search for it and walk in it. Christians prize all that is true, wherever we find it and whatever its secondary source.

As God values what is true, he equally values what is good. God is good and the origin of goodness. The Bible is our ultimate sourcebook for morality. But literature influences readers with moral (or immoral) prompts. When Christians accurately assess these prompts, we share God’s love for the good.

In addition to the true and the good, a biblical aesthetic includes the beautiful. The Bible teems with depictions of God’s beauty, details for beautiful worship items, and the beauties of creation. Beauty in our world reflects God’s beauty and his love for it. We glorify God when we delight in his good gift of beauty.

Reading is an art that we cannot afford to lose. And recovery is within our reach.

How Can We Recover Reading?

When we acknowledge the problem and its importance, we begin to recover reading by nurturing positive perspectives. Rather than view ourselves as unliterary people, we can think of ourselves as readers. Instead of stressing about not having time to read, we can exercise our freedom to choose reading’s pleasure and refreshment.

An obvious step toward recovery is to read. The more we read, the better readers we become. We learn to read carefully, immersing ourselves in the story before us. Attentive reading increases awareness of the work’s artistry, which generates joy.

Many people enjoy repeatedly reading favorites, but community with other readers through book clubs or discussion groups can introduce us to new genres and authors. Part of discovering a good book includes asking how it is true, good, and beautiful. Such evaluation helps artful reading surpass mere enlightened humanism to move into the realm of the spiritual life.

The Spiritual Component

Although the Bible is God’s authoritative and inspired word, he can work through human words to bring spiritual renewal or even conversion. Christians frequently notice ways literature resonates with our faith or nurtures our spiritual lives. This makes perfect sense because the Bible conveys its truth predominately through literary form. Obviously, spiritual growth can flow through literature. The Bible proves it.

Artful reading enriches our corporate and personal lives in countless ways. It often brings the reader closer to God. We lose it at our very great peril.

The Atlantic , July/August 2008, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
The Globe and Mail , February 9, 2018), theglobeandmail.com/opinion/i-have-forgotten-how-toread/article37921379/
An Experiment in Criticism , chapter 3
The Washington Post , July 21, 2017, washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/07/21/the-death-of-reading-is-threatening-the-soul/

Glenda Faye Mathes is the coauthor with Leland Ryken of Recovering the Lost Art of Reading: A Quest for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful .

Glenda Faye Mathes (BLS, University of Iowa) is a professional writer with a passion for literary excellence. She has authored over a thousand articles and several nonfiction books as well as the Matthew in the Middle fiction series. Glenda has been the featured speaker at women's conferences and at seminars for prison inmates.

8 Bible Reading Habits to Establish as a Young Person

David Murray

How can we establish healthy Bible-reading habits so that we are connected to God, have a God-centered worldview, grow in confident faith, and enjoy spiritual peace and confidence?

How to Help Your Kids Establish Bible Reading Habits

Ask yourself, What do I want most for my kids? If we're Christian parents, we want our kids to know Jesus, we want them to be saved. Sometimes just writing that down really helps to reorder our lives.

3 Losses of an Illiterate Culture

Glenda Faye Mathes , Leland Ryken

The decline of reading has impoverished our culture and individual lives. We have lost mental sharpness, verbal skills, and ability to think and imagine.

Help! My Kids Don’t Like to Read

Glenda Faye Mathes

What are some major obstacles that prevent children from enjoying reading? Here are some practical suggestions for helping to instill a love of books.

Related Resources

A Complete Handbook of Literary Forms in the Bible

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The novel is dead (this time it's for real)

I f you happen to be a writer, one of the great benisons of having children is that your personal culture-mine is equipped with its own canaries. As you tunnel on relentlessly into the future, these little harbingers either choke on the noxious gases released by the extraction of decadence, or they thrive in the clean air of what we might call progress. A few months ago, one of my canaries, who's in his mid-teens and harbours a laudable ambition to be the world's greatest ever rock musician, was messing about on his electric guitar. Breaking off from a particularly jagged and angry riff, he launched into an equally jagged diatribe, the gist of which was already familiar to me: everything in popular music had been done before, and usually those who'd done it first had done it best. Besides, the instant availability of almost everything that had ever been done stifled his creativity, and made him feel it was all hopeless.

A miner, if he has any sense, treats his canary well, so I began gently remonstrating with him. Yes, I said, it's true that the web and the internet have created a permanent Now, eliminating our sense of musical eras; it's also the case that the queered demographics of our longer-living, lower-birthing population means that the middle-aged squat on top of the pyramid of endeavour, crushing the young with our nostalgic tastes. What's more, the decimation of the revenue streams once generated by analogues of recorded music have put paid to many a musician's income. But my canary had to appreciate this: if you took the long view, the advent of the 78rpm shellac disc had also been a disaster for musicians who in the teens and 20s of the last century made their daily bread by live performance. I repeated one of my favourite anecdotes: when the first wax cylinder recording of Feodor Chaliapin singing "The Song of the Volga Boatmen " was played, its listeners, despite a lowness of fidelity that would seem laughable to us (imagine a man holding forth from a giant bowl of snapping, crackling and popping Rice Krispies), were nonetheless convinced the portly Russian must be in the room, and searched behind drapes and underneath chaise longues for him.

So recorded sound blew away the nimbus of authenticity surrounding live performers – but it did worse things. My canaries have often heard me tell how back in the 1970s heyday of the pop charts, all you needed was a writing credit on some loathsome chirpy-chirpy-cheep-cheeping ditty in order to spend the rest of your born days lying by a guitar-shaped pool in the Hollywood Hills hoovering up cocaine. Surely if there's one thing we have to be grateful for it's that the web has put paid to such an egregious financial multiplier being applied to raw talentlessness. Put paid to it, and also returned musicians to the domain of live performance and, arguably, reinvigorated musicianship in the process. Anyway, I was saying all of this to my canary when I was suddenly overtaken by a great wave of noxiousness only I could smell. I faltered, I fell silent, then I said: sod you and your creative anxieties, what about me? How do you think it feels to have dedicated your entire adult life to an art form only to see the bloody thing dying before your eyes?

My canary is a perceptive songbird – he immediately ceased his own cheeping, except to chirrup: I see what you mean. The literary novel as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes. Let me refine my terms: I do not mean narrative prose fiction tout court is dying – the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are clearly in rude good health. And nor do I mean that serious novels will either cease to be written or read. But what is already no longer the case is the situation that obtained when I was a young man. In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour. The capability words have when arranged sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of either the commonsensical world, or any number of invented ones; and the capability of the extended prose form itself, which, unlike any other art form, is able to enact self-analysis, to describe other aesthetic modes and even mimic them. All this led to a general acknowledgment: the novel was the true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk .

This is not to say that everyone walked the streets with their head buried in Ulysses or To the Lighthouse , or that popular culture in all its forms didn't hold sway over the psyches and imaginations of the great majority. Nor do I mean to suggest that in our culture perennial John Bull-headed philistinism wasn't alive and snorting: "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." However, what didn't obtain is the current dispensation, wherein those who reject the high arts feel not merely entitled to their opinion, but wholly justified in it. It goes further: the hallmark of our contemporary culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations, accompanied by a sense of grievance that conflates it with political elitism. Indeed, it's arguable that tilting at this papery windmill of artistic superiority actively prevents a great many people from confronting the very real economic inequality and political disenfranchisement they're subject to, exactly as being compelled to chant the mantra "choice" drowns out the harsh background Muzak telling them they have none.

Just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Simply because you've remarked a number of times on the concealed fox gnawing its way into your vitals, it doesn't mean it hasn't at this moment swallowed your gall bladder. Ours is an age in which omnipresent threats of imminent extinction are also part of the background noise – nuclear annihilation, terrorism, climate change. So we can be blinkered when it comes to tectonic cultural shifts. The omnipresent and deadly threat to the novel has been imminent now for a long time – getting on, I would say, for a century – and so it's become part of culture. During that century, more books of all kinds have been printed and read by far than in the entire preceding half millennium since the invention of movable-type printing. If this was death it had a weird, pullulating way of expressing itself. The saying is that there are no second acts in American lives; the novel, I think, has led a very American sort of life: swaggering, confident, brash even – and ever aware of its world-conquering manifest destiny. But unlike Ernest Hemingway or F Scott Fitzgerald, the novel has also had a second life. The form should have been laid to rest at about the time of Finnegans Wake , but in fact it has continued to stalk the corridors of our minds for a further three-quarters of a century. Many fine novels have been written during this period, but I would contend that these were, taking the long view, zombie novels, instances of an undead art form that yet wouldn't lie down.

Literary critics – themselves a dying breed, a cause for considerable schadenfreude on the part of novelists – make all sorts of mistakes, but some of the most egregious ones result from an inability to think outside of the papery prison within which they conduct their lives' work. They consider the codex. They are – in Marshall McLuhan's memorable phrase – the possessors of Gutenberg minds.

There is now an almost ceaseless murmuring about the future of narrative prose. Most of it is at once Panglossian and melioristic: yes, experts assert, there's no disputing the impact of digitised text on the whole culture of the codex; fewer paper books are being sold, newspapers fold, bookshops continue to close, libraries as well. But … but, well, there's still no substitute for the experience of close reading as we've come to understand and appreciate it – the capacity to imagine entire worlds from parsing a few lines of text; the ability to achieve deep and meditative levels of absorption in others' psyches. This circling of the wagons comes with a number of public-spirited campaigns: children are given free books; book bags are distributed with slogans on them urging readers to put books in them; books are hymned for their physical attributes – their heft, their appearance, their smell – as if they were the bodily correlates of all those Gutenberg minds, which, of course, they are.

The seeming realists among the Gutenbergers say such things as: well, clearly, books are going to become a minority technology, but the beau livre will survive. The populist Gutenbergers prate on about how digital texts linked to social media will allow readers to take part in a public conversation. What none of the Gutenbergers are able to countenance, because it is quite literally – for once the intensifier is justified – out of their minds, is that the advent of digital media is not simply destructive of the codex, but of the Gutenberg mind itself. There is one question alone that you must ask yourself in order to establish whether the serious novel will still retain cultural primacy and centrality in another 20 years. This is the question: if you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.

We don't know when the form of reading that supported the rise of the novel form began, but there were certain obvious and important way-stations. We think of Augustine of Hippo coming upon Bishop Ambrose in his study and being amazed to see the prelate reading silently while moving his lips. We can cite the introduction of word spaces in seventh-century Ireland, and punctuation throughout medieval Europe – then comes standardised spelling with the arrival of printing, and finally the education reforms of the early 1900s, which meant the British Expeditionary Force of 1914 was probably the first universally literate army to take to the field. Just one of the ironies that danced macabre attendance on this most awful of conflicts was that the conditions necessary for the toppling of solitary and silent reading as the most powerful and important medium were already waiting in the wings while Sassoon, Graves and Rosenberg dipped their pens in their dugouts.

In Understanding Media , Marshall McLuhan writes about what he terms the "unified electrical field". This manifestation of technology allows people to "hold" and "release" information at a distance; it provides for the instantaneous two‑way transmission of data; and it radically transforms the relationship between producers and consumers – or, if you prefer, writers and readers. If you read McLuhan without knowing he was writing in the late 1950s, you could be forgiven for assuming he was describing the interrelated phenomena of the web and the internet that are currently revolutionising human communications. When he characterises "the global village" as an omni-located community where vast distances pose no barrier to the sharing of intimate trivia, it is hard not to believe he himself regularly tweeted. In fact, McLuhan saw the electric light and the telegraph as the founding technologies of the "unified electrical field", and, rather than being uncommonly prescient, he believed all the media necessary for its constitution – broadcast radio, film, television, the telephone – were securely in place by the time of, say, the publication of Finnegans Wake .

McLuhan, having enjoyed his regulation 15 minutes of fame in the unified electrical field of the 1960s has fallen out of fashion; his rigorous insistence that the content of any given medium is an irrelevance when it comes to understanding its psychological impact is unpopular with the very people who first took him up: cultural workers. No one likes to be told their play/novel/poem/film/TV programme/concept double-album is wholly analysable in terms of its means of transmission. Understanding Media tells us little about what media necessarily will arise, only what impact on the collective psyche they must have. In the late 20th century, a culture typified by a consumerist ethic was convinced that it – that we – could have it all. This "having it all" was even ascribed its own cultural era: the postmodern. We weren't overtaken by new technologies, we simply took what we wanted from them and collaged these fragments together, using the styles and modes of the past as a framework of ironic distancing: hence the primacy of the message was reasserted over its medium.

The main objection to this is, I think, at once profoundly commonsensical and curiously subtle. The literary critic Robert Adams observed that if postmodernism was to be regarded as a genuine cultural era, then it made modernism itself a strangely abbreviated one. After all, if we consider that all other western cultural eras – classicism, medieval, the Renaissance – seem to average about half a millennium a piece, it hardly matters whether you date modernism's onset to Rousseau, Sturm und Drang or Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , it clearly still has a long way to go. By the same token, if – as many seem keen to assert – postmodernism has already run its course, then what should we say has replaced it, post-postmodernism, perhaps? It would seem better all round to accept the truth, which is that we are still solidly within the modernist era, and that the crisis registered in the novel form in the early 1900s by the inception of new and more powerful media technologies continues apace. The use of montage for transition; the telescoping of fictional characters into their streams of consciousness; the abandonment of the omniscient narrator; the inability to suspend disbelief in the artificialities of plot – these were always latent in the problematic of the novel form, but in the early 20th century, under pressure from other, juvenescent, narrative forms, the novel began to founder. The polymorphous multilingual perversities of the later Joyce, and the extreme existential asperities of his fellow exile, Beckett, are both registered as authentic responses to the taedium vitae of the form, and so accorded tremendous, guarded respect – if not affection.

After Joyce, we continue to read; we read a great deal – after all, that's what you do when you're wheeled out into the sun porch of a care home: you read. You may find it difficult to concentrate, given the vagaries of your own ageing Gutenberg mind, while your reading material itself may also have a senescent feel, what with its greying stock and bleeding type – the equivalent, in codex form, of old copies of the Reader's Digest left lying around in dentists' waiting rooms. Yet read you do, closing your ears obstinately to the nattering of radio and television, squinting so as to shut out the bluey light from the screens that surround you, turning your head in order to block out the agitation of your neighbours' fingers as they tweezer info panels into being. I've often thought that western European socialism survived as a credible ideological alternative up until 1989 purely because of the Soviet counterexample: those on the left were able to point east and say, I may not altogether know how socialism can be achieved, but I do know it's not like this. So it was with the novel: we may not have known altogether how to make it novel again, but we knew it couldn't go the way of Hollywood. Now film, too, is losing its narrative hegemony, and so the novel – the cultural Greece to its world-girdling Rome – is also in ineluctable decline.

I repeat: just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. When I finished my first work of fiction in 1990 and went looking for a publisher, I was offered an advance of £1,700 for a paperback original edition. I was affronted, not so much by the money (although pro rata it meant I was being paid considerably less than I would have working in McDonald's), but by not receiving the sanctification of hard covers. The agent I consulted told me to accept without demur: it was, he said, nigh-on impossible for new writers to get published – let alone paid. At that time the reconfiguration of the medium was being felt through the ending of the Net Book Agreement, the one-time price cartel that shored up publishers' profits by outlawing retailer discounting. In retrospect, the ending of the agreement was simply a localised example of a much wider phenomenon: the concertinaing of the textual distribution network into a short, wide pipe. It would be amusing to read the meliorism of the Panglosses if it weren't also so irritating; writing a few months ago in the New Statesman, Nicholas Clee , a former editor of the Bookseller, no less, surveyed all of the changes wrought by digital media – changes that funnel together into the tumultuous wordstream of Jeff Bezos's Amazon – before ending his excursus where he began, with the best of all possible facts implying we were in the best of all possible worlds: "I like," Clee wrote, "buying books on Amazon."

Groucho Marx once said to a man with six children taking part in his TV show: "I like my cigar, but I know when to take it out." By the same token: I also like buying books on Amazon, but I'm under no illusion that this means either the physical codex, or the novel – a form of content specifically adapted to it – will survive as a result of my preferences. Because I'm also very partial to sourcing digital texts from Project Gutenberg, then wordsearching them for a quotation I want to use. I like my typewriter as well, a Groma Kolibri manufactured in the German Democratic Republic in the early 1960s, but I'm under no illusion that it's anything but old technology. I switched to writing the first drafts of my fictions on a manual typewriter about a decade ago because of the inception of broadband internet. Even before this, the impulse to check email, buy something you didn't need, or goggle at images of the unattainable was there – but at least there was the annoying tocsin of dial-up connection to awake you to your time-wasting. With broadband it became seamless: one second you were struggling over a sentence, the next you were buying oven gloves. Worse, if, as a writer, you reached an impasse where you couldn't imagine what something looked or sounded like, the web was there to provide instant literalism: the work of the imagination, which needs must be fanciful, was at a few keystrokes reduced to factualism. All the opinions and conceptions of the new media amount to nothing set beside the way they're actually used.

While I may have registered the effect of digital media on my sense perception, I by no means feel immune from them; on the contrary, I've come to realise that the kind of psyche implicit in the production and consumption of serious novels (which are what, after all, serious artists produce), depends on a medium that has inbuilt privacy: we must all be Ambroses. In a recent and rather less optimistic article in the New Yorker on the Amazon phenomenon , George Packer acknowledges the impact on the publishing industry of digital text: the decline in physical sales; and the removal of what might be termed the "gatekeepers", the editors and critics who sifted the great ocean of literary content for works of value. He foresees a more polarised world emerging: with big bestsellers commanding still more sales, while down below the digital ocean seethes with instantly accessible and almost free texts. Packer observes that this development parallels others in the neoliberal economy, which sees market choice as the only human desideratum. The US court's ruling against the big five publishers in the English-speaking world and in favour of Amazon was predicated on this: their desperate attempt to resist Amazon's imposition of punitive discounting constituted a price cartel. But, really, this was only the latest skirmish in a long war; the battles of the 1990s, when both here and in the US chain bookstores began to gobble up the independents, were part of the same conflict: one between the medium and the message, and as I think I've already made clear, in the long run it's always the medium that wins.

I've no doubt that a revenue stream for digitised factual text will be established: information in this form is simply too useful for it not to be assigned monetary value. It is novels that will be the victims of the loss of effective copyright (a system of licensing and revenue collection that depended both on the objective form of the text, and defined national legal jurisdictions); novels and the people who write them. Fortunately, institutions are already in existence to look after us. The creative writing programmes burgeoning throughout our universities are exactly this; another way of looking at them is that they're a self-perpetuating and self-financing literary set-aside scheme purpose built to accommodate writers who can no longer make a living from their work. In these care homes, erstwhile novelists induct still more and younger writers into their own reflexive career paths, so that in time they too can become novelists who cannot make a living from their work and so become teachers of creative writing.

In case you think I'm exaggerating, I have just supervised a doctoral thesis in creative writing: this consists in the submission of a novel written by the candidate, together with a 35,000-word dissertation on the themes explored by that novel. My student, although having published several other genre works, and despite a number of ringing endorsements from his eminent creative-writing teachers, has been unable to find a publisher for this, his first serious novel. The novel isn't bad – although nor is it Turgenev. The dissertation is interesting – although it isn't a piece of original scholarship. Neither of them will, in all likelihood, ever be read again after he has been examined. The student wished to bring the date of his viva forward – why? Well, so he could use his qualification to apply for a post teaching – you guessed it – creative writing. Not that he's a neophyte: he already teaches creative writing, he just wants to be paid more highly for the midwifery of stillborn novels.

If you'll forgive a metaphoric ouroboros: it shouldn't surprise us that this is the convulsive form taken by the literary novel during its senescence; some of the same factors implicated in its extinction are also responsible for the rise of the creative writing programme; specifically a wider culture whose political economy prizes exchange value over use value, and which valorises group consciousness at the expense of the individual mind. Whenever tyro novelists ask me for career advice I always say the same thing to them: think hard about whether you wish to spend anything up to 20 or 30 years of your adult life in solitary confinement; if you don't like the sound of that silence, abandon the idea right away. But nowadays many people who sign up for creative-writing programmes have only the dimmest understanding of what's actually involved in the writing life; the programme offers them comity and sympathetic readers for their fledgling efforts – it acts, it essence, as a therapy group for the creatively misunderstood. What these people are aware of – although again, usually only hazily – is that some writers have indeed had it all; if by this is meant that they are able to create as they see fit, and make a living from what they produce. In a society where almost everyone is subject to the appropriation of their time, and a vast majority of that time is spent undertaking work that has little human or spiritual value, the ideal form of the writing life appears gilded with a sort of wonderment. The savage irony is that even as these aspirants sign up for the promise of such a golden career, so the possibility of their actually pursuing it steadily diminishes; a still more savage irony is that the very form their instruction takes militates against the culture of the texts they desire to produce. WB Yeats attributed to his father the remark that "Poetry is the social act of the solitary man"; with the creative-writing programmes and the Facebook links embedded in digitised texts encouraging readers to "share" their insights, writing and reading have become the solitary acts of social beings. And we all know how social beings tend to regard solitary acts – as perversities, if not outright perversions.

As I said at the outset: I believe the serious novel will continue to be written and read, but it will be an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse. The current resistance of a lot of the literate public to difficulty in the form is only a subconscious response to having a moribund message pushed at them. As a practising novelist, do I feel depressed about this? No, not particularly, except on those occasions when I breathe in too deeply and choke on my own decadence. I've no intention of writing fictions in the form of tweets or text messages – nor do I see my future in computer-games design. My apprenticeship as a novelist has lasted a long time now, and I still cherish hopes of eventually qualifying. Besides, as the possessor of a Gutenberg mind, it is quite impossible for me to foretell what the new dominant narrative art form will be – if, that is, there is to be one at all.

What I can do is observe my canary: he doesn't read much in the way of what I'd call serious novels, but there's no doubting that he's alive, breathing deep of a rich and varied culture, and shows every sign of being a very intelligent and thoughtful songbird. On that basis, I think it's safe for us both to go on mining.

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Module 10: Health, Aging, and the Elderly

Reading: death and dying, death and dying.

A young man in a green T-shirt and white shorts is shown sitting in the grass in front of a gravestone.

A young man sits at the grave of his great-grandmother. (Photo courtesy of Sara Goldsmith/flickr)

For most of human history, the standard of living was significantly lower than it is now. Humans struggled to survive with few amenities and very limited medical technology. The risk of death due to disease or accident was high in any life stage, and life expectancy was low. As people began to live longer, death became associated with old age.

For many teenagers and young adults, losing a grandparent or another older relative can be the first loss of a loved one they experience. It may be their first encounter with grief , a psychological, emotional, and social response to the feelings of loss that accompanies death or a similar event.

People tend to perceive death, their own and that of others, based on the values of their culture. While some may look upon death as the natural conclusion to a long, fruitful life, others may find the prospect of dying frightening to contemplate. People tend to have strong resistance to the idea of their own death, and strong emotional reactions of loss to the death of loved ones. Viewing death as a loss, as opposed to a natural or tranquil transition, is often considered normal in the United States.

What may be surprising is how few studies were conducted on death and dying prior to the 1960s. Death and dying were fields that had received little attention until a psychologist named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross began observing people who were in the process of dying. As Kübler-Ross witnessed people’s transition toward death, she found some common threads in their experiences. She observed that the process had five distinct stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She published her findings in a 1969 book called On Death and Dying . The book remains a classic on the topic today.

Kübler-Ross found that a person’s first reaction to the prospect of dying is denial : this is characterized by the person’s not wanting to believe he or she is dying, with common thoughts such as “I feel fine” or “This is not really happening to me.” The second stage is anger , when loss of life is seen as unfair and unjust. A person then resorts to the third stage, bargaining : trying to negotiate with a higher power to postpone the inevitable by reforming or changing the way he or she lives. The fourth stage, psychological depression , allows for resignation as the situation begins to seem hopeless. In the final stage, a person adjusts to the idea of death and reaches acceptance . At this point, the person can face death honestly, by regarding it as a natural and inevitable part of life and can make the most of their remaining time.

The work of Kübler-Ross was eye-opening when it was introduced. It broke new ground and opened the doors for sociologists, social workers, health practitioners, and therapists to study death and help those who were facing death. Kübler-Ross’s work is generally considered a major contribution to thanatology : the systematic study of death and dying.

Of special interest to thanatologists is the concept of “dying with dignity.” Modern medicine includes advanced medical technology that may prolong life without a parallel improvement to the quality of life one may have. In some cases, people may not want to continue living when they are in constant pain and no longer enjoying life. Should patients have the right to choose to die with dignity? Dr. Jack Kevorkian was a staunch advocate for physician-assisted suicide : the voluntary or physician-assisted use of lethal medication provided by a medical doctor to end one’s life. This right to have a doctor help a patient die with dignity is controversial. In the United States, Oregon was the first state to pass a law allowing physician-assisted suicides. In 1997, Oregon instituted the Death with Dignity Act, which required the presence of two physicians for a legal assisted suicide. This law was successfully challenged by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2001, but the appeals process ultimately upheld the Oregon law. Subsequently, both Montana and Washington have passed similar laws.

The controversy surrounding death with dignity laws is emblematic of the way our society tries to separate itself from death. Health institutions have built facilities to comfortably house those who are terminally ill. This is seen as a compassionate act, helping relieve the surviving family members of the burden of caring for the dying relative. But studies almost universally show that people prefer to die in their own homes (Lloyd, White, and Sutton 2011). Is it our social responsibility to care for elderly relatives up until their death? How do we balance the responsibility for caring for an elderly relative with our other responsibilities and obligations? As our society grows older, and as new medical technology can prolong life even further, the answers to these questions will develop and change.

The changing concept of hospice is an indicator of our society’s changing view of death. Hospice is a type of healthcare that treats terminally ill people when “cure-oriented treatments” are no longer an option (Hospice Foundation of America 2012b). Hospice doctors, nurses, and therapists receive special training in the care of the dying. The focus is not on getting better or curing the illness, but on passing out of this life in comfort and peace. Hospice centers exist as a place where people can go to die in comfort, and increasingly, hospice services encourage at-home care so that someone has the comfort of dying in a familiar environment, surrounded by family (Hospice Foundation of America 2012a). While many of us would probably prefer to avoid thinking of the end of our lives, it may be possible to take comfort in the idea that when we do approach death in a hospice setting, it is in a familiar, relatively controlled place.

Think It Over

Test Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. Think of someone or something you have lost. You might consider the loss of a relationship, possession, or aspect of your self-identity. For example, perhaps you dissolved a childhood friendship, sold your car, or got a bad haircut. For even a small loss, did you experience all five stages of grief? If so, how did the expression of each stage manifest? Did the process happen slowly or rapidly? Did the stages occur out of order? Did you reach acceptance? Try to recall the experience and analyze your own response to loss. Does your experience facilitate your empathizing with the elderly?

1. Thanatology is the study of _____.

life expectancy
biological aging
death and dying
Ignatz Nascher
Erik Erikson
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Carol Gilligan

Self-Check: The Process of Aging

You’ll have more success on the Self-Check, if you’ve completed the three Readings in this section.

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May 27, 2013

The immense benefits of reading as an essential life skill has long been known and

indeed for a long time it has been a favourite pastime for many people. Unfortunately, with the rapid growth of electronic technology the reading habit, particular among the young is declining at an alarming rate and the decline in language skills, especially writing skills, is being reflected at all levels of society. Gone are the days when the libraries and bookstores were almost always filled to capacity and one would feel embarrassed when someone mentions a book which you have not read. In those days it was dreadful when you missed out on reading a book, especially when it was a classic. Today it is in the reverse, when you speak of great books you are looked upon as being odd and even crazy in some instances. It is well known that if children do not master reading in elementary school, they will almost certainly encounter difficulties throughout their schooling. And when they leave school and enter the working world lacking the skills they need to find a job, develop financial independence, and take their places as citizens, parents and workers they encounter serious difficulties.. In early life, a key benefit of strong reading skills is that your child will read. Skilled readers end up reading many millions more words than struggling readers, an incredible advantage in knowledge, vocabulary, high stakes test and understanding of life, which carries through college and into life. From reading, the brain also benefits from a good workout. And reading is more neurobiologically demanding than watching TV or listening to the radio. A sentence is shorthand for a lot of information that must be inferred by the brain. In general, your intelligence is called into action, as is greater concentration. “We are forced to construct, to produce narrative, to imagine,” says Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language — when you watch a film or listen to a tape — you don’t press pause.” A literate mind is a more complex one. “There’s a richness that reading gives you,” Wolf says, “an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.” In Anne E. Cunningham’s paper, What Reading Does for the Mind (pdf version), she found that reading, in general, makes you smarter, and it keeps you sharp as you age. Reading about the diversity of life and exposing yourself to new ideas and more information helps to develop the creative side of the brain as it imbibes innovation into your thinking process, perhaps the best reading benefit of all. Against this backdrop, the First Lady’s call during her recent visit to Essequibo to make reading a significant part of their lives, as opposed to doing so only when studying is required, is timely and most welcome. But to arrest the decline in the reading habit it would take much more than an appeal from the First Lady. Instead, it would need the collective effort of society including that of parents, teachers, community leaders as well as the re-orienting of children and students which in today’s context of rapid growth of electronic technology certainly will be a herculean task. Nevertheless, “the longest journey begins with the first step.”

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Reading: A Dying Habit In The digital Age?

“ A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one .”(George R. R. Martin) We’re all Reading something or the other at all times. Some people read the newspaper first thing when they wake up in the morning. Others may only read articles that interest them. Different individuals read for different purposes; it could be to acquire knowledge or simply for leisure purposes .

In what manner has the practice of Reading books evolved over time?

Reading is one of the cheapest yet most adequate ways of obtaining information. To get an update on the latest world affairs, there are newspapers. When there’s something you’re not sure about and perhaps want to get a clearer idea of a particular topic, you research about it. Countless published studies or articles by experts may help you solve your problem without much effort!

Over time reading has taken up various forms. Book shops have seen a fall in sales because of the invention of e-books . People also prefer to get news updates through various news applications on their phones or laptops. The importance of Reading, however, is higher now than ever. They say knowledge is power and there is more knowledge out there waiting to be consumed.

Reading patterns of students in the present times

In today’s world , extensive reading is essential for all students studying in high schools, colleges or universities. Majority of the courses have lots of reading material which leaves the students with not much choice. Even though a majority of the students do not read for leisure purposes, they still read.

A study by Naveed Sehar about the ‘ Reading Habits among Undergraduate Students of NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, Pakistan ’ shows that, out of the 50 students the study was conducted on, 80% were those who read. Out of that 80%, 52.5% prefer to read printed books , while the remaining percentage would rather use e-books . Furthermore, out of the students who favoured paperback/printed books, 66.6% read for academic purposes or to attain information ; 19% read to improve their vocabulary and merely 14.2% students read for entertainment . This gives a rough idea of the reading trends among students in Pakistan. Although the data is not enough to be representative of the entire student body of Pakistan.

Receding reading habits in Pakistan

Reading opens up another dimension for an individual, creating new perspectives and opening up one’s mind to creative ideas . It helps you think out of the box and maybe paint pictures for you that you might not be able to envision otherwise. A self-help book would perchance help you evolve into a better version of yourself. Similarly, more or less, a history book would educate you to view the conflicts of the world in a more unusual light than you previously did.

According to a recent survey conducted in 2019 by Gallup and Gillani Foundation Pakistan, 3/4 th of the Pakistani population does not read. The survey conducted on 1178 men and women from all over Pakistan concluded that only 9% of Pakistanis are keen readers.

Book reading should be encouraged from a very young age in order to develop polished reading habits by the time a child is grown up. Traditional Urdu literature is also dying over time since not much importance is given to it. Many people blame the invention of devices such as phones and iPads for having caused the decline in reading books.

How to bring back the book reading culture?

A lot of issues that preclude our society from advancing arise from the absence of understanding and knowledge . The existence of extreme racial discrimination , sexism and abuse of power is majorly due to the lack of awareness . Awareness is created through educating individuals about certain areas of problem.

Multiple sources can be used to fix the acknowledged issues. Using social media, for instance, we could reinforce the seriousness of the concerns. Reading books should most definitely not be left as a tradition for the elder generations only. Schools need to reassess educational methods that lead to cramming.

We at Dastaan strive to bring back the book reading culture . We thoroughly appreciate the crisp turning of pages while reading a book or the smell of old books paired with new ideas. Our collection at Qissa undoubtedly has a book for each and every one of you. So get your cup of coffee and your reading glasses because it’s time to dive into a world of imagination!

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The Sunday Read: ‘What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living’

Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind..

By Phoebe Zerwick

Read by Samantha Desz

Produced by Jack D’Isidoro and Aaron Esposito

Narration produced by Anna Diamond and Emma Kehlbeck

Original music by Aaron Esposito

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Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout Kerr’s childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness. Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the buttons on Kerr’s shirt, fiddled with them and said something about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the woods. “I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a good place because we were going fishing,” Kerr told me.

Kerr now calls what he witnessed an end-of-life vision. His father wasn’t delusional, he believes. His mind was taking him to a time and place where he and his son could be together, in the wilds of northern Canada.

Kerr followed his father into medicine, and in the last 10 years he has hired a permanent research team that expanded studies on deathbed visions to include interviews with patients receiving hospice care at home and with their families, deepening researchers’ understanding of the variety and profundity of these visions.

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Essay
Book reading is a dying phenomenon of life nowadays Essay: Books: considered as the best friend of man is seemingly at the death bed. While intellect is on rise with days, the medium to record those and sharing of thoughts has changed in this 21 st Century. Words are increasing, dictionaries are becoming bulkier, but the writings are not ...
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But, I read with intention and make sure my time spent reading is worthwhile. I want to remember what I read, so I highlight, I take notes, I read across a variety of topics that interest me, and I will stick with boring books if I still believe in why I chose it. In the latter case, I once read an incredibly dry book on databases.
The Dying Art of Reading. A reader lives a thousand lives before…
To add to this: when we read, the thoughts and ideas that are conceived are unique, you might be able to hear a fascinating insight that you hadn't taken into consideration before. Libby: a resource for reading. Readers are not a dying breed; the way we read and the resources we source books from have simply been updated.
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And yet even though the digital can be found in all kinds of forms, locations, and practices of textuality today, most public debates about the future of reading reduce the status of reading in the digital age to the question of screen and e-book reading. 10 In these debates, e-book reading is often feared to usher readers into a state of utter ...
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I choose my title "dying to read" for two reasons: first, to consider those lifeworlds—those ways of experiencing, sensing, and being—seemingly eclipsed by the rise of modern conceptions of literacy; and second, to consider the relation between the novel and death itself—that is, death as a sort of literary limit, the horizon of the possible testimonial, and the experiential limit of ...
The Paris Review
A Life of Reading Is Never Lonely. Photo by Nadja Spiegelman. Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act. The writer becomes your ideal companion—interesting, worldly, compassionate, energetic—but only if you stick with him or her for a while, long enough to throw off the chill of isolation and to hear the intelligent voice ...
SOLVED: Write the essay on "Book Reading: A Dying Phenomenon of Life
In conclusion, book reading is a dying phenomenon in today's world, but it is not too late to revive it. By taking the necessary steps, we can create a reading-friendly environment and encourage people to read books. Reading books is not only a source of knowledge but also a way to escape from the stresses of daily life. Answer
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This makes it necessary to examine reading practices relating to the traditional printed book and to the new medium of e-books. Today, book readers are more than ever confronted with the conscious decision of whether to read in print or on a digital screen (Baron, 2021).The Pew Research Center reported that of the 75% of US adults who are saying they have read a book in the past 12 months, 32% ...
Youth Practices of Reading as a Form of Life and the Digital World
The proliferation of digital technologies is precipitating a transformation in the socio-cultural fabric of human existence. The present study is dedicated to investigating the coexistence of various reading practices among contemporary youth in the modern era. The advent of new forms of reading has resulted in a shift from conventional paper-based reading to electronic formats, which, in turn ...
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Literary fiction used to be central to the culture. No more: in the digital age, not only is the physical book in decline, but the very idea of 'difficult' reading is being challenged. The future ...
write the essay on "book reading a dying phenomenon of life Nowadays
write the essay on "book reading a dying phenomenon of life Nowadays" throw lift on the factors responsible for it and given suggestions for it improvement (350-400)words ... staying awake the whole night to finish a novel of thousand pages is what I mean by Reading. In today's world of social media and video games and all other kinds of ...
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Sep 12, 2023. 1. The practice of reading, once a valued pleasure, is gradually falling into obscurity in a time marked by technological breakthroughs and an ever-increasing demand for rapid ...
Reading: Death and Dying
Kübler-Ross's work is generally considered a major contribution to thanatology: the systematic study of death and dying. Of special interest to thanatologists is the concept of "dying with dignity." Modern medicine includes advanced medical technology that may prolong life without a parallel improvement to the quality of life one may have.
Is reading a 'dying habit'?
The fact that many countries celebrate a "reading month" should be an indicator that, yes, reading "is a dying habit," and which, therefore, needs to be encouraged among the young. The reading habit may have lost out to the strong competition from modern gadgets. It began with television and then came computers, mobile phones, and tablets.
Reading-a dying habit
Reading-a dying habit. May 27, 2013. The immense benefits of reading as an essential life skill has long been known and. indeed for a long time it has been a favourite pastime for many people. Unfortunately, with the rapid growth of electronic technology the reading habit, particular among the young is declining at an alarming rate and the ...
Reading: A Dying Habit In The digital Age?
A study by Naveed Sehar about the ' Reading Habits among Undergraduate Students of NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, Pakistan ' shows that, out of the 50 students the study was conducted on, 80% were those who read. Out of that 80%, 52.5% prefer to read printed books, while the remaining percentage would rather use e-books.
Reading: A Dying Habit
The fact that reading is a dying habit doesn't negate that kids of the future generation are becoming smarter day by day. They are more aware of the world's happenings, formulate opinions, and express them quite succinctly. They are street smart, and they don't need books for that. In this space and age of technology and connectivity ...
The Sunday Read: 'What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living'
Kerr now calls what he witnessed an end-of-life vision. His father wasn't delusional, he believes. His mind was taking him to a time and place where he and his son could be together, in the ...