It’s hard to write a case for reading. The challenge for writers who try it isn’t that reading is more abstruse than other subjects. And it certainly isn’t that arguments for reading can’t find receptive readers. The challenge of writing about reading is that the writing has to be especially good—it has the burden of demonstrating, in itself, the highest virtues of the written word. If it’s true, for instance, that “the intellectual world of print is orderly, logical and rational”—as James Marriott writes in The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society—an author telling readers so had better be attentive to the tightness of their own arguments. If it’s the case, as Marriott contends, that “conversation is simply much more forgiving of exaggeration and bullshit than print,” the print surrounding that claim should be as close to bullshit-free as might fairly be expected. And if writing really does force writers into reason and coherence, while “when we talk we are free to ramble, to make unsupported statements, to indulge in logical non sequiturs,” and “to jump from topic to topic as the mood takes us,” it’s incumbent upon a book making that distinction to approach its subject with discipline and sobriety.
The basic task of The New Dark Ages is made all the more difficult by the fact that Marriott, a journalist for The Times of London, is working on already well-trodden ground. “It seems that every few weeks, a new article or video on the literacy crisis goes viral,” the writer Jared Henderson recently observed. “Whether this is a video on YouTube, an article in The Atlantic, or a post on Substack, the message tends to be more or less the same. Americans are reading less; college students struggle to read whole or difficult texts; early childhood education is in decline.” And as we all know—or think we do—our phones are mostly to blame.
The New Dark Ages isn’t fully reducible to those claims—slim as it is, it does, rather ambitiously, try to tell readers the story of reading and give an account of why reading still matters in a world of technological upheaval. But the account is troubled. Readers without their wits about them—for writing is a trickier business than Marriott lets on—will leave the book misled not only about the present state of reading, but about the nature of the real threats our new technologies pose to it and about reading’s fundamental value.
Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, whom Marriott references often, is of course right that reading has been “our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought.” Sadly, though, as The New Dark Ages demonstrates, the books we read often fail to deliver either.
Nothing about mass literacy should be taken for granted. It is deeply strange, to begin with, that we have written language at all. “Spoken language comes naturally to us,” Marriott explains. “Reading and writing do not.” Every time we make use of the written word, we’re hacking visual processes we evolved to make sense of the physical world—to read faces, to assess our surroundings, to find and avoid becoming food. The practice of using our eyes to create and absorb systems of language instead is so difficult and so weird, in fact, that, as best as we can tell, and as Marriott reminds us, it’s been invented no more than four times in our 300,000 years as a species.
The written word, moreover, has been an arcane and esoteric tool for most of its history. Egyptian hieroglyphics, obscure to all but trained Egyptologists today, were just as indecipherable to as much as 99 percent of the ancient Egyptian population. Though Latin texts shaped Western civilization, estimates of literacy in ancient Rome, as Marriott writes, “usually land on a figure of 10 or 15 per cent.” Everywhere written language came into use, it was first mastered and maintained by humanity’s first learned elites—priests and philosophers, princes and politicians. And those who lived and labored under them continued making do with oral culture—verbal communication and the explanation and interpretation of the wider world “through ballads, songs and traditional wisdom passed from one generation to the next.”
That’s partially because texts were initially difficult to produce and share—our first books were handwritten, carefully and painfully, by cranky scholars and scribes. Writing, one monk scribbled in the margins of a medieval tome, “is excessive drudgery.... It dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.” That labor made books prohibitively expensive—even the grandest libraries of the Middle Ages held only several hundred volumes—and nearly sacred to the few who could read them. “In some places in Europe stealing a book was a crime punishable by death,” Marriott writes. Thomas à Kempis “advised readers to take ‘a book into thine hands’ as if it was ‘the Child Jesus.’”
The innovation that finally brought books to the wider world deepened their power by reducing their value. Gutenberg’s printing press, invented in the mid–fifteenth century, allowed books to be mass produced for broad audiences on the cheap. Within a few centuries, Europe was drowning in them and an ocean of other texts besides: official documents, pamphlets, flyers, newspapers, magazines, and more.
While near-universal literacy was still many, many years away, it’s thought that at least half of those living in Europe’s most literate societies—including, per the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich, “the Netherlands, Britain, Sweden, and Germany”—could read by the mid–eighteenth century. And our first literary celebrities were already being minted—figures respected and renowned not just for what they wrote, but for how much they read. Samuel Johnson, author of the most influential English dictionary of his day, read so hungrily, for instance, that his biographer James Boswell recalled him once “eating dinner with a book wrapped up on his knee in the tablecloth so he could resume reading the moment he had finished his meal.” No work was too random, and no interest was too far-flung or obscure—from Don Quixote to books on Icelandic natural history. He also left many of those books proudly unfinished. “Asked whether he had actually read a fashionable new book in its entirety, he famously replied, ‘No, Sir, do YOU read books THROUGH?’”
Johnson’s habits, extreme as they were, illustrate how reading changed as more texts became available and literacy widened. Once the domain of a privileged few who revisited the same texts and ideas repeatedly, reading was expanding to a broader public who wanted to read omnivorously. And they had access to a wider range of material than ever. A voracious reader could skip between a travelogue, a newspaper, “scandalous romance” novel, and a “scurrilous political pamphlet” as they pleased. The very availability of so much literature invited curiosity and encouraged skepticism, making the scientific and philosophical advances of the Enlightenment possible—“Europe bristled with pedantic pens ready to rout out mysticism or bogus thinking,” Marriott writes, and the weighty abstractions they wrestled with would have been impossible to communicate, systematize, and analyze in preliterate society.
Closer to the ground, literacy also newly empowered the masses. “To most of our ancestors books would have been symbols not of liberation but of oppression: the mysterious sources of the authority of those at the top of the social order,” Marriott writes. The printing press and the reading public who emerged after its invention changed everything—moving us from a world where “knowledge and its interpretation was tightly controlled by those in positions of power” to one in which knowledge could be understood as “something you could go out and explore for yourself.”
Marriott’s summary of this history is breezy, accessible, and charming. He does, in places, break a promise not to unduly romanticize writing, which he describes as an inherently serious and solemn task. “Writers,” he tells us, “painstakingly go over their thoughts until they have worked out the best version of what they want to say.” That claim could have used another pass—obviously, writers are often lazy, illogical, and incoherent. But, more soundly, he also disavows the idea that “reading makes you a good person,” since history is “packed with well-read monsters.”
Here and there, Marriott even goes as far as to disclaim the idea “that literate cultures are superior to so-called ‘oral cultures’ without writing,” though it’s not obvious what all the fuss in the book is supposed to be about if literacy isn’t, on the whole, significantly better than illiteracy. “Literacy involves losses as well as gains,” he offers. “For instance, Joseph Henrich tells us, becoming literate diminishes our ‘ability to identify faces.’” These passages are about as convincing as messages read at gunpoint, given what he contends about literacy most everywhere else—“society,” he also writes, “is a better and more rational place thanks to the advancement of reading.” And indeed, it’s clear in multiple places in the book that Marriott imagines a sizable mob of progressive readers ready to do him in for having the temerity to say reading and writing are good. Advocates for literacy, he warns, have to confront fashionable “squeamishness about seeming to uncritically laud the achievements of that unfashionable enterprise, ‘Western civilisation.’”
That angst about the reception of an argument for logging off and reading books indicates rather strongly that Marriott, as he freely admits, spends entirely too much time online. Apart from startup founders and grasping grifters who boast that they’ve traded books for sped-up podcasts, chats with Claude, and apps that will give you the gist of The Art of War for $9.99 a month, real disagreement that reading matters is rare anywhere on the political spectrum. The idea Marriott should be working hardest to defend isn’t the idea that reading is good but the idea that reading is dying.
The evidence he assembles will be familiar to those already following literacy discourse. Surveys suggest reading for fun is on the way out—in the U.K., for instance, “more than a third of adults say they have given up the habit.” The books that people do read seem to be getting worse—“self-help, romance, detective stories and young adult fiction” dominate bestseller lists, whereas in the 1960s, novels like “Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard” flew off bookstore shelves. “Astonishingly, in 1950,” Marriott notes, “the critic Lionel Trilling’s collection of literary essays The Liberal Imagination was a bestseller in America, shifting more than 100,000 copies in hardback alone.”
After year-on-year improvement “for almost the entire twentieth century,” IQ scores seem to be declining in the developed world. College professors are even more depressed about their students than usual—one tells him that she’s “given up trying to teach George Eliot’s Middlemarch and James Joyce’s Ulysses,” and she doubts her students will make it through Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And our politicians, as exemplified by President Donald Trump, are even more stupid, “lacking any ability to think beyond the moment-to-moment goldfish-brained chaos of likes, trends and memes.”
Given all this, it is obvious to Marriott that the literacy crisis is real. “If our politicians seem lightweights, our public discourse trivial to the point of dysfunction, and our culture stale and repetitive, it is in large part because books and newspapers have been replaced by ubiquitous screens,” he contends. And though he discusses the way television has been eroding reading habits for decades, the screen that troubles Marriott the most is, of course, the smartphone. “There has simply never been a technology like the smartphone,” he writes, adding that, while other inventions have competed with reading for our attention, the distractions and entertainments offered up by the smartphone are infinite and largely brought to us by algorithms engineered to swallow up as much of our time as possible.
Depressing as much of the material Marriott assembles might be, however, the evidence that reading is doomed is thinner than he implies. He writes, for example, that in the United States “reading for pleasure declined by 40 per cent in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.” That’s a figure from a 2025 paper analyzing data from the American Time Use Survey, which found that the proportion of Americans who reported reading for pleasure on the average day fell by 40 percent between 2003 and 2023. But 20 years ago, not many Americans were reading on the average day in the first place. The proportion of Americans reading for pleasure over this period peaked at 28 percent in 2004, while it reached its lowest point in 2023, at 16 percent. And as The New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells recently observed, the same 2025 paper found that the average amount of time Americans spend reading books each day declined by less than six minutes.
Crucially, these figures only pertain to books and printed materials. If books and the printed word really are losing ground, it’s partially because the internet and the smartphone have besieged us with competing texts to read—as anyone who’s tried to bat away the noise of emails, messages, notifications, news alerts, and tweets to settle down with a book knows. But the 2025 paper doesn’t capture any of that—the American Time Use Survey data it was based on didn’t explicitly categorize reading on the internet as a form of reading for pleasure. “Our reading measures are thus unlikely to have included activities, such as reading blogs or the news online,” the paper’s authors noted, “which may be a form of reading for pleasure.” If we exclude many or most of the things people now read for pleasure—online newspapers and magazines, social media posts, texts from family and friends—the statistics on reading for pleasure are going to look rather grim.
It is certainly true, as Maryanne Wolf has written and as Marriott notes, that the act of reading online differs substantially from reading in print. Our screens seem to encourage certain bad habits. “When reading on a screen,” he says, “the eye moves through a passage of writing in an idiosyncratic ‘zigzag style,’ as readers ‘rapidly ‘word-spot’ through a text” and “dart to the conclusions at the end.” Plenty of data suggests that processing information and retaining it are harder when reading a text on a screen rather than in print—and that is before one even factors in all the distractions of life online. For those and other more pecuniary reasons, few professional writers today, this one included, would turn down a return to a world in which printed books, newspapers, and magazines were dominant again, if such a thing were possible.
But given that it isn’t, we owe it to ourselves to think clearly and soberly about how people are reading today and how their reading might be improved. And people are, in fact, reading on the internet and on their phones. One needn’t believe reading DMs and reading Proust are the same to suspect there’s something fundamentally unsound about rooting our literacy debate in statistics that would count an adult revisiting The Very Hungry Caterpillar as reading but totally ignore any engagement at all with, say, an article like this online.
Marriott maintains, though, that the smartphone should be understood primarily as “a conduit for passively watching videos,” adding that “as the journalist Derek Thompson puts it, ‘nowadays everything is television.’” But this is an oversimplification. The short-form video app TikTok has fewer users than the messaging service WhatsApp. And all told, according to a report by the digital consulting firm Kepios, Americans over the age of 16 spend less than two hours a day on average watching video online altogether, with short-form video taking up less than an hour of that time. Even though social media now competes with books for our attention, it is by no means clear that people are reading books less because they’re vegetatively glued to videos on their phones instead.
The surest thing we can say about the impact of the internet and the smartphone on the written word so far—and the feature that most distinguishes them from television, the radio, film, and the photograph—is that they have made reading, and writing, more central to regular communication for more people than ever before in human history.
There’s also been good news lately for the printed word. As Wallace-Wells points out, more books are sold today than a decade ago, and the number of independent bookstores in the United States has also increased by 70 percent since 2020. And, perhaps surprisingly, that data from the American Time Use Survey suggests young people may be driving part of that trend. “Young Americans are—according to this survey, at least—reading more than they did a couple of decades ago,” he wrote. “In 2003, for instance, Americans ages 15 to 24 read 8.4 minutes a day; in 2016 they read 7.8 minutes a day; and in 2022 they read 11.7 minutes a day.”
Those figures sit oddly alongside the much-discussed drop in K-12 test scores over the last several years, which Marriott naturally references:
One of the most striking trends is the downward trajectory of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores. PISA tests are an important international metric that tracks the proficiency of fifteen-year-olds in reading, maths and science. Scores began falling in 2012 (significantly, as a report in the Atlantic noted, “students who spend less than one hour of ‘leisure’ time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screens more than five hours a day”). And in the United States, by 2024, literacy and numeracy skills as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had declined to their lowest level for twenty years.
Now as important as numeracy is—and as connected to literacy as it might be—it is not the subject of this book. And reading scores, at least in the United States, simply do not tell the story Marriott suggests they do. It is true, as he notes, that students have been doing worse on PISA’s reading assessment recently—on average, scores in the affluent countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development dropped by about 10 points between 2018 and 2022. But in the United States, which ranked sixth out of the 36 OECD nations evaluated in 2022, reading scores dropped by only a point, from 505 to 504—the very same average score American students earned in 2000.
Internally, the reading scores of our own NAEP, last administered by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2024, do show that our national reading scores have dropped at each tested level since 2019—from 220 to 215 for fourth graders, from 263 to 258 for eighth graders, and from 285 to 283 for twelfth graders. But these are dips on a 500-point scale, and the NAEP also notes that reading scores for fourth and eighth graders haven’t changed significantly since 1992. Scores for twelfth graders have dropped about 10 points in that time—that should be a call to action, alongside the evidence that progress in reading for younger students might be stagnating. But proof that reading is dying, this is not.
As dramatically as technology has changed, Marriott’s rendering of the state of literacy would have been recognizable to worried Americans decades ago. If headlines are to be believed, reading has been in crisis for some time. Anxieties about literacy were high in the 1980s, for instance, thanks not only to the publication of Neil Postman’s jeremiad about the coarsening effects of TV and movies, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in 1985 but to the publication that same year of the book Illiterate America by progressive education activist Jonathan Kozol. “One out of every three adult Americans,” the latter’s cover declared, “cannot read this book.” That figure came from a 1973 University of Texas study, which also found that “25 million Americans could not even read the poison warnings on a can of pesticide, a letter from their child’s teacher, or the front page of a daily paper,” Kozol added. In 1986, an article in The New York Times reported that, to the frustration of education experts, estimates of illiteracy had come to range “from less than a million to more than 100 million.” All the hubbub culminated, in 1991, with the National Literacy Act—which authorized new adult literacy grants, and whose opening clauses settled on an estimate that “nearly 30,000,000 adults in the United States have serious problems with literacy.”
By then, worries about the literacy of American students had begun to overtake lingering worries about adult literacy. In 1991, The Atlantic published an essay on college preparedness titled “The Other Crisis In American Education” by Daniel J. Singal, then a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Much of it should sound markedly familiar to readers of both Marriott’s book and more recent dispatches on literacy by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic. “When a national poll in 1989 asked professors whether they thought undergraduates were ‘seriously underprepared in basic skills,’ 75 percent said yes and only 15 percent said no...,” Singal wrote. “It’s not that freshmen in 1991 are unable to read or write. Most of them possess what the National Assessment of Educational Progress calls ‘satisfactory’ skills in this area. But is that enough for college?”
Singal’s experiences in the college classroom seemed to suggest not. “Countless times I have been amazed at how little students have managed to glean from a book I know they have read, to the point where they are often unable to recall the names of prominently mentioned figures,” he wrote. “So much escapes them; even those of above-average ability absorb no more than a dusting of detail from a printed text.” A friend at the University of Michigan similarly reported to him that students were incapable of engaging meaningfully with newspaper columns by Walter Lippmann. Worse still, a professor at Berkeley had encountered putatively literate and educated students “in her upper-level course on American social history” who were “unable to differentiate between the American Revolution and the Civil War.”
Even at Harvard, a dismayed English professor found that students vaguely “aware that someone oppressed someone else” generally couldn’t recall “exactly what took place and they have no idea of the order in which it happened.” A colleague of his, the director of expository writing, added that the average incoming student there had
a “utilitarian command of language” resulting in sentences that follow a simple subject-predicate, subject-predicate format with little variation or richness of verbal expression. Harvard, of course, gets the cream of the crop. Those of us teaching at lesser institutions would be happy with utilitarian but serviceable prose from our freshmen. More often we get mangled sentences, essays composed without the slightest sense of paragraphing, and writing that can’t sustain a thought for more than half a page.
That piece came amid a drive to reform K-12 education, animated in part by disappointing test scores. A five-point slide in NAEP results for twelfth graders between 1992 and 1994, National Assessment Governing Board chairman William T. Randall said in 1995, suggested that “reading—as a skill, as an information gathering process and as a recreation—is in serious trouble.” Many policymakers in the late 1990s and early 2000s would come to agree, even though, as Jeff McQuillan’s 1998 book The Literacy Crisis observed, reading scores overall had been stable or increasing for decades by then.
The history of the written word over the last century has been marked not only by profound technological shifts but by profound shifts in our expectations. Decades after so many of us should have been killed off, evidently, by inscrutable cans of pesticide, we live today in a society that is, inarguably, hyperliterate—albeit one where years of progress on literacy may have finally stalled. We’re right to wonder why and work toward getting ourselves back on track. The certainty that the bottom has already fallen out of reading as a skill, in The New Dark Ages and elsewhere, seems to be a product less of material facts about the state of literacy than of fuzzy, unrepresentative memories—of eloquent orations by public figures, appearances from authors like James Baldwin and Gore Vidal on talk shows, sales figures for The Liberal Imagination, and the like.
These were the zeniths of a world that will never return. Those of us who have committed our lives to the written word are right to miss them. But some of the changes in literary culture Marriott describes haven’t necessarily been changes for the worse. He ruefully cites, for example, an analysis in The Economist that found “sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.” In this shortening he sees evidence that, for today’s smartphone-addled readers, “long sentences and the sophisticated ideas they often convey are just not easy to grapple with.” But the notion that long, winding sentences are meaningful and usefully sophisticated in themselves was rightly challenged by many writers in the early twentieth century and onward. The shortening of sentences has surely been, at least in part, the product of changes in literary style among the very literate, including the rise of literary modernism and a drive toward clarity and precision.
But beyond that, long sentences and sophisticated ideas were likely even more difficult for the general public to absorb in 1930, when a report from the secretary of the interior estimated that as many as 15 million to 20 million Americans, then about 12 percent of the overall population, were too illiterate even to read the Bible or write a letter. Per census figures, just over 4 percent of the population at the time, including more than 16 percent of racial minorities, had no ability to read or write in any language, English or otherwise.
In 1930, incidentally, The Washington Post ran an article about an innovative program in South Carolina—“the first State-wide effort of its kind in the history of the country”—aimed at tackling that problem. “The method employed for teaching the pupils is simple,” it reported. “The name of the illiterate is grooved into a soft substance with a hard pointed instrument, and then the pupil is required to trace the outline until he becomes proficient in writing his name. Later the pupils will probably be taught how to write more than their names, and then an effort will be made to teach them to read.”
That story points us to another potential explanation for the declining complexity of written texts. Competing technologies that have won an increasing share of our investment and attention are a major part of the story. But if popular books, political speeches, and many of the other texts we consume today seem simpler than they would have in 1930 or 1970, we should also be asking ourselves whether that simplicity might be a symptom of increasing literacy—the consequence of a shift from texts written by and for narrower audiences of gifted, highly educated, or dedicated readers and writers to texts written by and for a widening literate public of hundreds of millions who, thanks to compulsory education, have become mediocre to fine at both skills.
That elevation of the masses to mere competence with the written word is nothing to sniff or sneer at, whatever its effects on literary style and culture. In fact, it is, in all probability, modernity’s greatest triumph. The question now is whether we can do even better.
While Marriott often traffics in hyperbole, he is right to be gravely troubled by the tech industry. Its efforts to profitably addict us and our children to its products must be opposed. But we’ll stand little chance in this fight if we don’t understand the industry’s methods and what, precisely, the innovations are doing to us. Marriott doesn’t. At times, this actually undermines the strength of his arguments against them. “We live in a world that is almost compulsively archival,” he claims early in the book, for instance. “In the twenty-first century, everything is recorded. Every draft of every irrelevant unsent email is automatically saved. Our phones are packed with thousands of pictures of holidays, nights out and pointlessly photographed dinners (the same salad from five slightly different angles).”
As internet archivists, researchers, and journalists have discovered with deepening alarm over the last decade, this overstates the web’s stability dramatically. Every day, vast tranches of writing and other online content are being lost forever—or being deliberately erased for cost savings and profit. And one of the newly appreciated advantages of a culture built on mass printing is that materials that only exist digitally on the servers of impersonal companies might be far more insecure and ephemeral than physical texts that, at least conceptually, can be protected and duplicated once they’re in the hands of readers who care about them.
But, more significantly, the nature of the screen’s allure eludes him. Television, Marriott contends, following Postman, first captured our attention not only by dazzling us with imagery our books and printed materials couldn’t compete with, but by giving us the world in interesting, but contextless pieces. “A TV producer might express nature by showing an individual tree, mountain, or stream,” but can’t examine the meaning of nature in the ways that an author can. “It is simply in the nature of TV to deal in disconnected bits of reality rather than to theorise about it as a whole,” he argues.
I don’t think you would enjoy this book if I wrote the entire thing chyron-style: SMARTPHONES DESTROYING SOCIETY … DEMOCRACY IN PERIL … MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE LIKEABLE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ESSAYIST … NEIL POSTMAN VINDICATED. On screen, enhanced by the appeal of attractive news anchors, dramatic music and exciting images, this kind of disjointed communication is thrilling and almost effortless to watch—even if you don’t really have much of a clue what is actually going on in the Middle East. If the written word imposes order on the world, the screen tends towards disorder.
The smartphone, to Marriott, is the apotheosis of this tendency toward disorder, subjecting us constantly to “a nihilistic tornado of content.” “It has been estimated that the average TikTok user may scroll through as many as 260 videos in the space of about half an hour,” he writes, subjecting the user to “a thousand disconnected and disordered fragments of information” and resulting in a “heap of broken images out of which it is impossible to construct any rational picture of the world.”
But this isn’t really how social media works at all. The algorithms that give us the images and writing on our screens are designed to create steady, predictable streams of content that we want—not chaos, but consistency. TikTok in particular excels at gathering enough data over time to determine the kind of person a user is and serving them an engrossing mix of content that tightly fits their profile. Political junkies of the left and right are sent to the appropriate pundits. Those who hate seed oils and vaccines get their health and wellness influencers. Beauty-conscious Zoomers get their Korean skin care. There are TikTok users getting regular updates on the sexploits of the AI-generated characters on Fruit Love Island, and there are TikTok users being served the same set of forgotten performances on The Ed Sullivan Show over and over again.
We’re hooked to our smartphones, as we were hooked to our televisions before them, because the content on them is palliative, not disorienting. Yes, the notifications buzz and ping at us incessantly, but we’re becoming accustomed to them in the very same way we got used to repetitive and never-ending tickers of “breaking” news. The world, or worlds, that we’ve grown used to having at our fingertips—through the buttons of remote controls and the glass of our iPhones alike—are, for the most part, simpler and evidently more comforting than the real one. This may be why so many of us sleep with our phones not far from our pillows—why it doesn’t strike us as oddly as it should that people leave televisions on to hum away silently in waiting rooms or while they do chores.
This is also what makes it profoundly strange for Marriott to write that, while books “can even console us,” a smartphone “very rarely does”—engineered as smartphones are, as he understands them, to make reality seem incomprehensible. The advantage of books, he writes, is that they’re capable of rendering the world “as a comprehensible whole, not as a whirling snow-storm of fragments.” But he has it exactly backward. It’s our screens that give us the impression, necessarily an illusion, that we’re seeing the whole world and what really matters in it—sound and vision and an infinite web of interlinked text delivered to our eyes and ears, perhaps in real time, all at once, without the work of extrapolation, synthesis, and imagination required to read bare text on a printed page. It is impossible to read a printed book, no matter how well-written, how long, and how tightly argued, with the belief that all reality lies within your hands. The smartphone convinces its users of this easily.
It was the former world of books and print, not the world of screens, that was the world of fragments, partiality, and disorienting, incomplete abstractions. And what we ought to miss the most about it are the ways it forced us—even physically, in the weight of the texts we carried—into an understanding that making sense of ourselves and the world around us is a struggle, not a matter of settling into the right channel or feed, and that our knowledge is often incomplete. The viewer of a tree on a screen thinks, if only for a second, that they have really seen a tree. A reader who comes across a passage about trees has to imagine it, conceptualize it, compare it to another description, or go out into the world and find it. And unless they are particularly skilled, writers who have made a pass at describing trees may find themselves in trouble—it is difficult to make the reader see what they see, think what they think, and feel what they feel through text alone, especially when they are in competition with the readers’ own intuitions, senses, and habits of mind.
All told, reading and writing matter because written language complicates the world as often as it clarifies it. Indeed, it often helps us make sense of it by convincing us the world is not as simple as it outwardly appears. And as Marriott suggests in the book’s more grounded moments, the written word has been fundamentally Promethean in character—it has shaken peoples out of their complacency and into new ways of thinking and seeing the world, for good and for evil.
But this is all the more reason to resist the implication that the world is getting worse because people are reading fewer books. “When I was sixteen it seemed obvious to me that the world was fated to grow ever more rational,” he laments. “I have lost my fervour now.” Yet appeals to reason and sound argumentation have only been part of the story of reading. As Marriott remarks himself, “scurrilous stories, grubby pornographic gossip and libels” were “just as important to damaging the absolute authority of European monarchies” as the rational argumentation of Enlightenment philosophers.
In truth, reason has its work cut out for it in any medium. The value of the written word lies not in an intrinsic tendency toward the rational but in its intrinsic difficulty—difficulty measured not in the complexity of any given text but in the basic demand writing makes of us to turn to resources beyond our eyes, ears, and experiences for an understanding of the world. The data on reading that Marriott and many others have pointed to suggests, so far, that we live in societies where fewer people may want to read seriously and with sustained attention, not a world in which people are now less capable of doing so than in the past. If so, that is nonetheless a problem. But it’s not one that will be solved if we understand the fight for reading primarily as a technological battle that has already been half or mostly lost.
We need a new literacy for the present and a world that has been irrevocably changed from the reading world we took for granted decades ago, not a pining for older forms that will never be dominant again. We need to discover how to read seriously not only on the printed page, but also on our screens, which will entail convincing the public that serious, difficult reading is worth their time. All the more dauntingly, we’ll have to do so without making the untenable promise that a life of reading will deliver them a world that seems more intelligible, orderly, and satisfying.
The case for reading isn’t that it simplifies life but that it vivifies and deepens it. In this Marriott does, to his credit, offer his readers a model reader to look up to: the sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne, who once said the things that mattered most to him were “variety and the enjoyment of diversity.” Marriott enjoys the way Montaigne “joins stray ideas together, leaps from one subject to another and asks weird questions,” and his ability to include in a single essay “subjects as diverse as sneezing, seasickness, farting, Socrates, amphitheaters, the Spanish conquest of Peru, the Roman general Mark Antony and more.” Montaigne’s motto, “Que sais-je?” means “What do I know?”—a sentiment Marriott admires: “It is the motto of a man of the age of print, whose books showed him that nothing could be taken for granted any more.”
While the dawn of print opened up seemingly endless possibilities for men like Montaigne, the man Marriott describes is also, very probably, one who would have loved reading the internet, and thought seriously about how readers might fight, against all odds, to think for themselves and make the most of the digital age. That is our grave and heady task. That is the nature of our crisis and the nature of our opportunity. “Even in the worst-case scenario,” as Marriott writes, “reading and a cultural reverence for reading will be around for a while yet. And that means those of us who value books and reading still have a chance to make our case.” He’s right. But we’ll need a better case than his.
