Another day, another dispiriting survey about the crisis in childhood reading. Parents who earn more than £100,000 a year are the least likely of all social groups surveyed to read aloud every night to their children. So much for the sharp-elbowed middle classes. Even when we factor in the possibility that the cash-rich and time-poor are outsourcing bedtime stories to nanny, it’s a less than encouraging finding. It tells us something about the dwindling importance of reading to the most successful among us.
Even popular books are getting shorter and easier to read: their sentences are shorter, their paragraphs are shorter
It reminds me of something I heard the novelist Sebastian Faulks say not long ago – how when he found himself at a dinner surrounded by “prosperous and accomplished twentysomethings” he heard one say: “I don’t think I could read a whole book. Maybe a chapter, but not a whole book.” Even the educated so-called elites, the people we expect to be not only reading but pressing books on their children, are losing the habit. That likely bespeaks a market/social/evolutionary pressure: you no longer need to read to succeed.
Should we be encouraged, though, that about half of all the people the Sunday Times surveyed did read to their children daily? Personally, I’m as pessimistic about this stuff as I’ve ever been. I clung on for a long time to the idea that reading to your children will, somehow, magically give them the habit of reading for pleasure in later life. It was an article of faith with me, as I think it still is with the sorts of well-intentioned people who run “get kids reading” campaigns, that once children see that there’s something in these dead tree objects they can’t get anywhere else, that knowledge will be there for life.
An article of faith, though, is what it is. An article of faith, I’m starting to think, like the faith of those cargo-cultists who build elaborate runways on Pacific atolls in the hopes that the sky-gods will return in their shiny metal birds. I mean, sure, reading to your kids has a million benefits, not least the loving connection you make with them in the process. It can’t hurt. I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t do it.
But will it stave off the society-wide decline in grown-ups reading actual books? I’m doubting it ever more. Take my own kids, who are 12, 15 and 17. They have every single box ticked in the list of what are widely imagined to be the conditions that favour a lifelong habit of reading. I read to them devoutly when they were small. They observed their parents reading and taking pleasure in reading (they observed their father doing practically nothing but). Their dull old dad even wrote a literary history of children’s books. The house contains books: practically every room has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
And do they read? Now and again. Not much. Not for preference. They’d rather be doing something else: going to the gym; playing Fortnite; watching football or browsing cooking videos on YouTube or curating their Spotify playlists. And so would their contemporaries.
The problem, as I am growing to suspect, is a cognitive one rather than one of habit. Reading to your children will give them pleasure. It will doubtless help them look favourably on books and stories. But the whole culture in which these children are growing up – and with which, short of living like the Amish, they must perforce engage – is wiring their developing brains in a way that makes deep engagement with continuous prose next to impossible.
The default mode of engagement with online material is what the sociologist Linda Stone has called “continuous partial attention”: it is one of swift, bitty, impressionistic apprehension; of perpetual distraction and perpetual interruption; of garish and frequently changing sense impressions. That’s how tech companies make their money. More distraction: more clicks. More dopamine: more engagement. The neurons that fire together, as it’s said, wire together. It is changing the nature of our habits of attention in a way that disfavours book-length reading. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember sounded the alarm on this 15 years ago, and though there were reasons to object to some of his bolder claims I think the overall drift of his argument has been shown to be correct.
You can see the effects of it even in books themselves. Last week I was at the offices of the excellent literary magazine Slightly Foxed to guest on their quarterly podcast, where we were talking about the mid-century children’s writer Rosemary Sutcliff (The Eagle of the Ninth, etc). Sutcliff was a sublime stylist and she didn’t speak down to her audience one bit. But it struck me rereading her that the complexity of her language and syntax – and these were books devoured by ten-year-olds in the 1960s and 1970s – is far greater than you’d find in most modern YA fiction, let alone middle-grade. I had a similar experience trying to press Willard Price, or the Nancy Drew mysteries I had loved as a child, on my own children – the pacing was too slow, the paragraphs too long, the language too dense.
Same with grown-up books. Even popular books are getting shorter and easier to read: their sentences are shorter, their paragraphs are shorter, their font sizes and leading larger, their grammatical structures less taxing. Compare, say, a Robert Ludlum novel to a Harlan Coben novel; or Shirley Conran to a piece of modern chick-lit. Even people who still read books aren’t finding it easy to read the sorts of books people who read books used to read.
The modes of attention that allow you to engage with books are also, a posteriori, the modes of attention that allow you to apprehend complex arguments and rich bodies of knowledge of the sort on which our civilisation was built and on which our democracies depend. So need it be said that this direction of travel is a disaster? Maybe that’s all that can be said about it. We can keep building runways – but if I’m honest I think there’s a high chance we’ve seen the last of the sky-gods.
