What’s gained in reading
“We read to know we’re not alone.”
It feels good to say it… that lulling lilt of iambic tetrameter, the soothing internal rhyme. You can hear Anthony Hopkins speaking these words, you can hear “the music in his speech” as one critic had it, playing writer C. S. Lewis in the film Shadowlands. Lewis, though, did not pen those words, however reflective they are of a distillation of his sensibilities. No, they were written by playwright William Nicholson, in adapting his own bio-dramatic work from the stage to the screen and, incidentally, receiving an Oscar nod, but not the gong, for his efforts. Furthermore, in the film the words are not the insights of Lewis himself. In a little twist of irony, they are relayed to him by an old student he had tutored, who finds himself tutoring Lewis in turn with this expression of the psychology of reading that came originally from his humble schoolmaster father – and which Lewis subsequently adapts towards the inspiration of a new generation of Oxford students.
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At any rate, lovely words, lovely sentiment, whoever said it.
It feels good to believe it, too. It feels like why we read. We don’t, after all, read to be better people. Instead, we tend to find, alongside the occasional insight and less frequent epiphany, we tend to find ourselves in what we read. And that’s why we read… to find ourselves, in company.
Our sense of wonder is reaffirmed through another’s eyes. We inhabit the mind-state of others whose confessions to us make for a more intimate connection than with many friends. We have the comfort of company, just being by ourselves with a book.
Reading does bring insights into ourselves… I thought only I felt that way, I felt that no one else thought of things like that… It’s phenomenologically compelling, that alignment of our self-conception with a character’s – and with the authorial mind who created them, their thoughts, their feelings, what makes them real to us by, in a way, making ourselves more real, more psychologically vindicated to ourselves.
So reading makes us appreciate that, somewhere in the world – the real or some literary world – someone gets it, like we do… and so we feel, as we turn the pages, that they get us. That in turn makes us get them, understand better as well the bits of them that aren’t so much like us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop, feeling more understood, and so then understanding more ourselves, allowing us to feel even more understood, and so on… knowing we’re not alone. Our sense of wonder is reaffirmed through another’s eyes. We inhabit the mind-state of others whose confessions to us make for a more intimate connection than with many friends. We have the comfort of company, just being by ourselves with a book.
The sense of comfort in that familiar company matters at all stages in our reading lives, whether we’re coming back to Harry Potter or to Harry Bosch.
Paradise Lost – the reading drop-off
The psychology of how children read, and their revelations of feeling not alone, was a topic close to C. S. Lewis’ heart, as author of the Narnia series. From the figurative to the analytical, it’s also an essential focus for a publishing landscape experiencing declining readership overall, and demographically – with the trend of dropping out of the reading preference-pattern increasing with age.
A 2023 study by the UK’s National Literary Trust – comprising 71,351 children across ages five to eighteen, a formidable sample – found a steady drop in reading as an “appealing pastime” in a child’s or youth’s spare time. Over 75% of five-to-eight-year-olds believe that reading books is a fine way to fill one’s downtime hours, slipping to 68% of eight to elevens, then down precipitously to 40% for elevens to sixteens. Crossing to the USA, to pick up on numbers for adult reading decline – the NEA’s 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, evaluating adult reading habits, found that the number of American adults reading just one book in the preceding year had fallen below 50% for the first time, though its fall had been depressingly steady over decades.
What can be done to stem the tide, staunch the bleeding, stop the rot… of those who read as children being lost for good to reading?
From the mouths of babes! Younger readers, in an overwhelming demographic majority, are still choosing to read and read books. Then the rot sets steadily in. Eight to elevens see a small drop-off – those drop-offs, though, are less than likely to return to the reading fold. Then a huge loss of potential readers in the tweens to teens range, culminating in the dire book-reading rate of adults, in which having read a single book over the past year, all 365 days, would put you ahead of 51.5% of the US adult population.
Where does it come from, the innocent purity of pleasure of early childhood reading? And what can be done to preserve that appeal and its behavioral patterns, through the Middle Grade, Young Adult and actual adult age groups? What can be done to stem the tide, staunch the bleeding, stop the rot… of those who read as children being lost for good to reading?
Reading lives like our own
Initially, as children are read to, the knowing they are not alone is literal, in the shared sounding of words and tracing of pictures with a parent, a much-loved uncle, grandparent, friend of family, or even a devoted babysitter. Then, as they grow into reading by themselves, their appreciation of the appeal of reading is an essential aspect of their coming of age, the expansion of their imagination and their humanity, their apprehension of their inner and outer worlds. This significant rite of passage is, additionally, achieved through reading the rites of passage of characters in books. Through this they are immersed in the emergent experience of the company of a close friend so close as to seem almost a doppelganger – a double to the child’s idealized sense of themselves, a twin who is braver and so makes him feel what it is to be more audacious, a mirror who is more impetuous, more resourceful and so makes her feel the intoxicating freedoms of those feelings.
Bildungsroman is one of those great portmanteau words that German does so well. Etymologically education novel, more frequently refined to formation novel. Since coming of age is, arguably, the most fundamentally defining human experience, literally and symbolically, Bildungsroman has claims to being the most pervasive literary genre.
The Bildungsroman phenomenon of the twentieth century was, unquestionably, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (at least, before Harry Potter just snuck in in the late 1990s). What was remarkable about the book was that nothing else like it existed, nothing else like it that spoke to its young audience to make them know they weren’t alone. Holden Caulfield was by no means the first disenfranchised and alienated youth to appear in literature… but he was the first to speak directly to other disenfranchised and alienated youth in their own language. Catcher wasn’t written to reflect a demographic shift, instead it helped to facilitate one, by anticipating emergent trends subsequently elaborated by sociologists and psychologists.
The book’s incredible success caused a paradigm shift in the market conception of the publishing industry, paving the way for what would come to be known as the Young Adult – YA – reading demographic. Salinger had, consciously or not, fashioned the strands of his era’s youth zeitgeist into a novel that demanded the creation of, and attention to, a new commercial publishing category. This was a gift, a boon, the happiest of happy accidents for the publishing industry – the recognition of a distinct market for whom books could be written, and from whom sales could be made, that did not cannibalize other book purchasing by other demographics, and in time proved to have appeal to older audiences as well.
While there are always best-sellers, every year, coming and going and making scads of money… what Catcher did was different. It changed a generation’s sense of why they read. The publishing industry couldn’t get that lucky twice, surely…? Well, give it forty years or so, and maybe it could. The Harry Potter series became a phenomenon for different, and even more lucrative reasons. It threaded the ideal needle, between the established love of reading of younger readers, and the continuity continuum in keeping those readers as they matured abreast of their much-loved protagonists, through childhood, middle grade and YA.
Nonetheless we still have adolescent reading plummeting vertiginously from BC to AD… that is, from the BC stage of childhood (Before Cell phone) to the inevitable later AD period (After Disruption of social media) – with the further flow-on to drastically diminished adult reading.
Phone usurps book – the plague of (anti)social media
We read to know we’re not alone, we social to know we are alone… in the duplicitous confabulations of our lifestyles…
The phone did it. It seems so simple… too simple. But it is that simple. The cause of the reading drop-of is external to publishing and to the act of reading itself. And one cannot expect different from the culprits concerned. The social media companies have monetized the violation of children’s – everyone’s – minds and morals. They did what they did in full knowledge and with impunity, well-aware, indeed demanding of their addiction model, “dopamine-driven feedback loops” and so on, the exploitation of intermittent reinforcement that Behaviourist B. F. Skinner showed, over a half-century ago, lies at the root of addiction formation. It was deliberate, the devising of algorithms towards addictive stagnation of sense and identity and sense of identity – the illusion of community in the morass of alienating social dissociation. Everything that reading is not – anti-reading. We read to know we’re not alone, we social to know we are alone… in the duplicitous confabulations of our lifestyles, in the alternating between persecution complex and delusions of grandeur in our online one-upmanship (one-uppersonship?!?), in the toxically teased self-absorption that makes it damn near impossible to know we’re not alone, because the online app-lived life is so comprehensively lonely.
Yet in spite of the one-sidedness of the respective cost-benefit analysis, reading of books continues to diminish – and even “reading” on the screen, a poor enough substitute, is increasingly elbowed out by the online takeover of the written word by images and videos, so much quicker, easier, to digest and move on to the next diverting but unenlightening confection.
How, then, to bridge that gap, BC to AD, before cell to after disruptive social media? How to ensure a continuity of connection to the world, to ideas, to the world of ideas – from childhood’s intrinsic understanding of self-defining relationships with salutary characters, to youth’s abandonment of rich connections for the empty blandishments of their tech-imposed, insular and lonely self-conceit?
TikTok… BookTok… is-there-any-point-Tok…?
since more exposure to social media inevitably spawns even more exposure to social media, this content is more likely just to pull its distractable and distracted audience further down the rabbit hole…
What of harnessing social media to ameliorate some of the damage it has wrought? Enter BookTok, ostensibly “a corner of TikTok devoted to reading.” which is perhaps something of an overstatement since what it really is, is a corner of TikTok devoted to talking and imagery about reading… not quite the same thing. What’s interesting and suggestive about the generally supportive comments on the BookTok effect is how often the necessary brevity of these TikTok videos is advocated – “short,” “snapshot,” “under a minute,” “quicker and snappier all the time…”
If the BookTok exposure sweet-spot criterion is brevity, how is this grab, measured in seconds, supposed to convincingly incline someone to buy a book they actually intend to take dedicated, non-tech-interrupted time, to read? Also, since more exposure to social media inevitably spawns even more exposure to social media, this content is more likely just to pull its distractable and distracted audience further down the rabbit hole, rather than surfacing to go and buy and read the book.
Is there some element of a grass roots rectification? A back-to-analog approach highlighting awareness of reading strategies – reinvigoration of recommendation dissemination by teachers, librarians, bricks and mortar booksellers…? They are, after all, at the coalface during the significant points of the reading-drop-off-transition, in their stewardship of reading passion. Certainly, publishers do not fail to engage with them, but in the circ*mstances alter cases, longer pants need shorter braces world of constant changes in points of human contact, these individuals, in roles of real-life influence, cover all three of Malcolm Gladwell’s connectors, mavens and salespeople “agents of change.” That must earn them a place in any serious defensive strategy.
The dis-infantilization of good habits
There is a precedent. Analog resistance against digital encroachment is a strategy effectively used by the wine industry internationally, as we have covered in the second edition of our book The Psychology of Wine – truth and beauty by the glass. The emergence into adulthood of the millennial generation, with their “stay younger longer” mindset exploited by marketers of bland alcoholic sodas, saw a widespread infantilization of tastes, a generational failure to “grow into” wine – an inverse parallel, in a way, to the “growing out” of reading at comparable ages.
This was somewhat addressed by greater prominence of “on the ground” figures of taste authority… wine store clerks, wine reps and even wine makers in wine stores, sommeliers, a burgeoning movement of grass roots wine clubs and both official and unofficial wine tourism. These strands of influence were necessarily abutted by websites, online newsletters, digital personalities and the like. The important thing is it wasn’t left to fate. Mind you, oenological breakthroughs don’t make for a Catcher or Harry Potter effect, and it may be that publishing’s luck continues. It never pays to bet against creativity… at least, for as long as creativity’s still seen as the key.
Reading clearly entrenches itself in the habit patterns of children. Habit is a powerful, perhaps the most powerful, shaper of ongoing behavior. In William James’ deliquescent metaphor of habit, “Water, in flowing, hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes, when it flows again, the path traced by itself before.” Powerful words but up against parlous social forces. In the recent-to-current case of reading patterns, the habit of reading in childhood is disrupted by the infringing of other habits less noble and ennobling – more detrimental to a youth’s, a teen’s, a young adult’s, any kind of adult’s connection to the conviction of “knowing we’re not alone.” Can we hope that other more redemptive social forces – unknown unknowns – might emerge to redress this?
The challenge is clear, while the solution is piecemeal, ambiguous, less than certain… but no less imperative. The extension of the childhood stage of reading engagement… push-back against the stupefying effects of expanding social media addiction… the reinvigoration of child-like reading habits in adults (child-like, not childish, that’s reserved for the abandonment of books for apps)… Otherwise, to see reading wither and its beneficial legacies die – and along with that, the precious knowledge that, in the very best sense, we’re not alone.
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