Bookworms must stave off our becoming a ‘post-literate generation’

Having converted the UK into history buffs, ‘The Rest is History’ co-host Dominic Sandbrook is hoping his new podcast project will do the same for our enjoyment of reading

As somebody who has been immersed in books since I can remember, I struggle to imagine never reading at all. But all the evidence suggests I am on the wrong side of history. Surveys show that children’s appetite for reading is in freefall: fewer than one in five British youngsters between eight and 18 read every day, with the decline sharpest among teenage boys. Another recent poll found that fully half of all adults don’t read books for pleasure at all, with many turning to the bright lights of social media instead: what has been described as “post-literacy”.

The figures are even worse in the US. The proportion of American teenagers who “hardly ever” read has risen from less than 20 per cent in 1985 to almost 50 per cent today, while the proportion who read every day has fallen from almost 40 per cent to barely 10 per cent. Little wonder, then, that English literature degrees are in rapid decline, or that lecturers – even in the UK – have long complained that their students are incapable of reading a book.

Does that sound alarmist? Look at other, more nebulous indicators. There was a time when the Booker Prize announcement made front-page headlines – how many recent winners can most of us name? How many authors under 50 have the public stature that, say, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie or Hilary Mantel enjoyed at their peak?

Ah, you may say, but what about the enduring popularity of cinematic adaptations? Well, just ask The Independent’s film critic, Clarisse Loughrey, who in her one-star review of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights wrote that it was the emblematic result of the “modern literacy crisis”, the product of a “culture that’s denigrated literature to the point where it’s no longer intended to expand the mind but to distract it”. It’s a film for people who don’t read, not so much scornful of the source material as utterly indifferent to it.

‘For a few hours, you leave the confines of your head and imagine yourself a boy wizard at Hogwarts, a sailor in the South Seas, a slave in antebellum America. No other art form can do this with such intimacy’ (Getty Images)

Does this matter? Perhaps not. After all, tens of billions of people have lived and died without reading a word. When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press at the end of the 1430s, around only 10 per cent of people in England could read. When the great pioneers of the novel, such as Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, were writing in the mid-18th century, many thought fiction was a dangerous innovation that corrupted the minds of its largely female readership. And as late as 1813, when Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice, almost half of all men and perhaps two-thirds of women were illiterate. Who are we to judge their cultural lives as threadbare or hollow?

But as tempting as it is to play devil’s advocate, I don’t really find this argument convincing. If I were to purge my imagination of all the characters I’ve met through books, it would be a sad and empty place. Fiction opens windows into glorious places, every new book the equivalent of a parallel world in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. You meet new people, have extraordinary experiences and, crucially, get a taste of what it might be like to be somebody else. For a few hours, you leave the confines of your head and imagine yourself a boy wizard at Hogwarts, a sailor in the South Seas, a slave in antebellum America. No other art form can do this with such intimacy.

The critic James Marriott, who has written more brilliantly and pessimistically than anybody about the crisis of post-literacy, argues that the decline of reading has profound political implications. Stories are central to national identity: it’s impossible to imagine Englishness without William Shakespeare, Frenchness without Victor Hugo, or Russia without Leo Tolstoy. And while reading and writing encourage careful thought, they also encourage empathy, one of the key elements of political pluralism. As Marriott notes, if you read nothing but your social media feed, you’re effectively staring into a mirror. But if you walk in somebody else’s shoes, then you get an insight into why they might think differently from you.

Can the decline be reversed, or are we doomed to post-literacy? In my darkest moments, I worry that reading may end up being an eccentric minority habit, the equivalent of playing croquet or wearing a bow tie. Maybe the future really does belong to the machines. But by God, those of us who love books shouldn’t go down without a fight. That’s why my friend Tabitha Syrett – also the producer of my podcast with Tom Holland, The Rest is History – and I are launching a new weekly podcast, The Book Club, to celebrate the sheer pleasure of the world’s greatest stories. Every week we’ll be chatting about a different book, from Wuthering Heights and The Great Gatsby to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Sarah J Maas’s romantasy blockbuster A Court of Thorns and Roses.

If you’ve read all these books, great. You’re our kind of listener. But if you recognised yourself in my opening paragraphs, then even better. We’re not just preaching to the converted. We want to show you that books aren’t worthy and improving – they’re fun. If you don’t read, you’re missing out on one of the best things human beings have ever created. What kind of mug wants that?

The Book Club will be available on YouTube and all podcast platforms from 17 February