In August, the journal iScience published a study showing a 40 per cent drop in numbers of people reading for pleasure. The research was a US-based study, but British papers leapt on the story. Everyone agreed this was seriously bad news. The Financial Times described it as a “lamentable decline.” The Guardian found it “concerning”.
The consensus masks deep division about what reading is for. Here is one example.
An industrialist and a civil servant are in a room. The businessman says the point of reading is to allow workers to understand Health and Safety notices. The guy from the Department of Education — a history graduate, the one who told me this story — is too taken back to reply.
The Gradgrind approach has merit. It’s a smart objective. Reading stops us injuring ourselves or harming others. The Reading Agency, a registered charity, would agree. In its 2024 report on adult reading, “awareness and information” top the list of benefits. But what comes in at second place? Reading has value because it “makes us more empathetic and understanding of other people and cultures.” That’s a big claim.
The idea that reading produces a more tolerant world, one that’s richer in mutual understanding, is attractive
Reading won’t just stop us accidentally setting the factory on fire. It means we won’t demonstrate round migrant hotels. We’ll not get sent to prison for inflammatory Tweets. A chapter a day and we’ll all be as kindly as contestants on the Great British Sewing Bee.
Why am I cynical?
Because as a kid I was an avid reader with two favourite books. They were about far-off places, children with different lives. There was Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, about a Swiss orphan with love of the Alps. I also loved The Magic Conker, a heartwarming tale about a boy with polio, whose fortunes are transformed by a horse chestnut. But I didn’t want to head for the mountains. The outings I liked were to the local park. When my younger brother came down with osteomyelitis, I was mean to him. It wasn’t fair that he got extra attention.
So little understanding. No empathy.
And the Agency’s claims don’t stop there. Reading helps us to “tackle life’s big challenges, from social mobility to mental health.” (Can’t pay the rent? Afflicted by paranoid schizophrenia? Curl up with this cosy crime novel and you’ll be all right … )
If so many ills get cured by reading, literary festivals will not be enough. Adults have to be made to read via all manner of schemes. Like the Reading Round groups, set up by the Royal Literary Fund. A promotional video can be found on YouTube.
The buzzwords are all there. Reading Round involves “diversity” and “inclusivity”, It’s “empowering”. Nobody mentions Austen or Dickens or even Stephen King. Instead it’s about Gemeinschaft, community. A participant says. “We didn’t know each other but now we’re very much a cohesive group.”
It is not just that the authors are gone. Thinking seems to be discouraged. An earnest man explains, “You experience the story together which is an advantage over a book where people come with an idea of what they’re going to do.”
When reading groups first sprang up, they were egalitarian. Everyone got to choose — and argue about — the books. Meetings were full of bickering. In Reading Round it’s down to the leader — or as the RLF terms it — “host.”
Sessions are starting near me soon, and the host has publicised them on social media. They’re going to “supply all the poems and short stories.” They warn that “being respectful of different opinions about the writings is important in the group.”
Hosting can be a useful concept. Because some of us have the qualities necessary to throw a good party. Others don’t. Helpfully, my local host sets out their stall.
I’m queer and neurodivergent and although the group is open to everyone, it is very queer, trans — and neurodivergent — welcoming. Not all poems and short stories will be by queer/trans and/or neurodivergent authors, but there will be more than you would find in most reading groups.
I passed the invitation to my own reading circle. (Some of us are lesbian but nobody is “queer.”) There was no enthusiasm for pitching up. One of our number described the initiative as:
“… a special reading group for special people who know that identity is king and there will be no boring normies who want to discuss boring things like books.”
Why do agencies and charities invest in contested theories, in practices that are undemocratic and divisive? I’d suggest that those who are keenest to promote reading also harbour doubts. If reading is to produce any of the benefits claimed, then hyper-vigilance — careful monitoring of the reader — is essential.
This isn’t just about the fact that niche charities fund book groups. It points to profound anxiety about the printed word. To the fear that breaks cover whenever reading tackles politics, religion or sex.
Joolz, who is a designer and artist, recalls how she was:
…criticised for reading Jordan Peterson … When I started reading Twelve Rules for Life I talked about it quite a bit … about half a dozen people were varying degrees of horrified … because he is a Christian and sexist. They were mostly educated people on the left. Two male American friends, one was quite rude about it. One English female friend was very “sad” that I read him as if I had somehow let her down.
It is possible that none of the horrified half-dozen had opened Twelve Rules. According to Joolz their disapproval was prompted, “not by the content but by the fact that I would read him at all.”
The idea that reading produces a more tolerant world, one that’s richer in mutual understanding, is attractive. It’s a shame that so much evidence points the other way. In a society that’s fragmented, in thrall to identitarian politics, owning the “wrong” books — and talking about them — causes trouble.
This summer an Employment Tribunal heard about a staffroom chat between two teachers, Laura Gardiner and Mairi Lagan, which took place in 2022. Laura was looking for audiobook recommendations. Mairi mentioned that, having heard about the recent stabbing of Salman Rushdie, she’d downloaded a sample of Satanic Verses wanting to find out more. Their colleague Rabia Ihsan took a dim view of Mairi Lagan’s quest for information. She told both women that Rushdie’s book was “offensive to Islam.” Laura and Mairi, who apparently had not known about the fatwa, didn’t go on with their discussion.
According to The Telegraph Ms Ihsan thought the conversation was pre-planned to trigger her and believed it was “an attempt to provoke [her], incite hatred and create a hostile environment.” She instituted grievance procedures, and went on to sue for harassment.
Even when book-talk attracts scrutiny, you would imagine private reading would stay safe. Yet in recent cases, books by distinguished authors, have become “evidence” when an arrest is made. (Section 32 of Police and Criminal Evidence Act enables police to conduct whatever searches may be “reasonably required”)
In November 2023 six officers arrested former special constable Julian Foulkes, who had posted on X about rising anti-Semitism. Body-worn camera footage shows them rifling through Foulkes’s bookshelves. One officer expressed alarm at some of the “very Brexity things” there. Another paused to leaf through Douglas Murray’s polemic The War on the West.
What happened to Jennifer Swayne was, arguably, worse.
Jennifer is a gender critical feminist and women’s rights campaigner. Three years ago, police arrested her as she was riding her mobility scooter through Newport, putting up posters along the way. Later they visited Jennifer at home, seizing her copy of Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body.
This was a shocking act. Transgender Children and Young People is an essay collection edited by two academics, Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans and Professor Michele Moore. Its contributors argue sex is biologically determined. They anticipate the findings of the Cass Review, advocating that it is dangerous to let children have sex-change operations.
The police and Ms Ihsan got it wrong. On so many levels the Reading Agency, Royal Literary Fund, the hand-wringing journalists are right. Reading is good. No sane person would argue otherwise.
Still the questions do need to be asked, What kind of goodness? What is reading for? Yet, somehow, all of us miss the mark.
It’s like trying to solve a Zen riddle with logic — an impossible task — since reading is constantly changing and full of contradictions. It can be steady and reliable, like a long marriage, yet also thrilling and disruptive, like an affair. In other words, reading is many things at once, and that complexity is what makes it so powerful.
To charities and authorities, reading is only the means to an end. It is a utilitarian and a Utopian project. One that, if rigorously implemented, will turn us into compliant, right-thinking citizens. Their model is vanilla and dull. It is deployed to justify censorship and surveillance.
And we have been here before.
In 1643, when less than 30 per cent of England’s population could read, Parliament produced an Ordinance that required the licensing of printed materials, restricting publication to license holders. Against a background of civil war, Parliament’s aim was to make it impossible for people to get hold of “false, forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed Papers, Pamphlets, and Books to the great defamation of Religion and Government.”
The poet John Milton voiced his opposition:
Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.
The reading Milton describes makes for a less manageable, more disruptive kind of goodness. One that is heretical, individual, radical.
I am with Milton. Books don’t turn us into saints. They can’t deliver us from every social evil. But I’m all for free unfettered, reading. It may be the closest we get to Paradise.
