Reading is central to being human – and yet, it’s hard to miss the signs of decline

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Few days have shaped our cultural lives more than the one in 1439 when German inventor Johannes Gutenberg loaded up his new press, inked the movable type, operated the mechanism, hung up the sheet – and gazed at the first page of printed text ever produced in Europe.

Ever since that moment, our imaginative lives have been shaped by the printed word. Generations have read for instruction, for enlightenment and, above all, for pleasure.

Our minds are inhabited by fictional characters, from Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge to modern-day heroes such as Harry Potter and James Bond. It’s impossible to imagine Englishness without the plays of William Shakespeare, Scottishness without the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Frenchness without the melodrama of Victor Hugo, Russia without the epics of Leo Tolstoy.

Reading is central to being human. And yet, it’s hard to miss the signs of decline. Surveys show that children’s appetite for reading is in free-fall: fewer than one in five British youngsters between eight and 18 read every day, with the decline sharpest among teenage boys.

Another recent survey found that half of all adults don’t read books for pleasure at all, with many turning to the bright lights of social media instead. Some critics warn we’re heading into a dark age of post-literacy.

Does this matter? Perhaps not. After all, tens of billions of people have lived and died without reading a word. When Gutenberg invented his printing press, probably one out of ten people in England could read.

When the pioneers of the novel, such as Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, were writing in the mid-18th century, many people thought fiction was a dangerous innovation, corrupting the minds of its largely female audience. And as late as 1813, when 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 wonderful characters I’ve met through books, then my inner life would be a sad and empty place.

Fiction, in particular, opens windows into glorious new galaxies, 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 precious moment, you escape the confines of your own head, and imagine yourself a boy wizard at Hogwarts, a sailor in the South Seas, a slave in antebellum America. No other art form does this with such intimacy. No other medium gives you such a sense of empathy. Lose the love of fiction, and I think we’ll have lost something truly precious.

Given the distractions of screens and social media, can we turn the decline around? I think we can. Not by emphasising that reading’s good for you; that makes it sound like a macrobiotic yogurt. But by emphasising how fun it is. The people, the stories, the triumphs and tragedies, the unsolvable mysteries and brave new worlds.

That’s what my friend Tabitha Syrett and I will be celebrating every week in our new podcast The Book Club, kicking off with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights before plunging into works like Kazuo Ishiguro’s sci-fi chiller Never Let Me Go, Donna Tartt’s blackly funny The Secret History and George Orwell’s prophetic Nineteen Eighty-Four – and many more. So many characters, so many adventures and, yes, so much fun!

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