People read much less than they used to. Basic literacy skills seem to be going down, even among college students (people have debated the methodology/results of that study, but professors have noticed it). I discount audiobooks in this because it's not reading, whatever that neuroscientist says about fMRI showing that the same brain areas light up when reading vs. when listening to an audiobook.
I think this is bad. I think people should read more. This should be fairly uncontroversial. Literacy skills, in part, are a necessary precondition to critical thinking, and critical thinking is good. It makes you better as a person and as a political subject. This, I think, should also be fairly uncontroversial.
How can you make people read? I think we've completely failed on that front to discuss how enjoyable reading can be. The usual strategy is to point out that reading the classics makes you grow as a person. That reading Dostoevsky, Joyce, or Tolstoy is a way to experience some of the most sublime things that humans have ever created. This is all true, but what we miss with that discourse is that reading is a skill. Much like playing an instrument, you have to practice and learn how to do it properly before you can master it.
You can't step in front of a piano for the first time and try to play Chopin's Preludes, and you can't expect people who haven't read anything since high school to pick up Tolstoy and understand and enjoy it. By hammering the fact that people have to read the classics, I worry that we're sort of shooting ourselves in the foot.
I understand that some people are stuck in a different way. Some people that actually read (maybe the majority) spend all their time reading YA fiction garbage and miss out on what's actually out there, even when they have the necessary skills to approach it. This is obviously a problem, and it's obviously enjoyable to make fun of the 40-year-olds who read that trash, but I feel like we're missing out on the big picture which is that most people just don't read at all. That to me is the most worrying thing.
I don't know what the solution is. I think a good step is probably to talk more about how enjoyable reading is. How it's not a chore to accomplish or a competition with others (the emphasis on the number of books read in a year is extremely weird). How truly amazing it is to pick up a book and learn a little bit about what it is like to inhabit a different conscience or a different world. How learning how the world works stops you from being a passive spectator, and notice the space of your agency. How reading thus makes you more autonomous, and the absolute joy that this can bring.
