Despite Reports, Reading Is Alive and Well

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

WNYC supporters include LiveRight, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller The Gales of November, a chronicle of the SS. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic.

The Gales of November, now in paperback.

SPEAKER_2 (0:27)

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.

David Remnick (0:34)

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For decades, there's always been a crisis of reading. Most recently this summer, an article came out in The Atlantic called The End of Reading Is Here, and it put forward some decidedly depressing statistics. If you're someone who cares about reading much less books, seeing a crowd of people swiping videos on their phones, well, it's true. It can feel like the end of civilization as we know it.

Yet, it turns out that the picture is much more complicated, and it may not be doom at all. This week, one of the big stories in The New Yorker is by staff writer Nathan Heller, and he tackles the state of reading in a very realistic and clear-eyed way. Books he discovered are in fact much healthier than you might have thought. So I asked Nathan Heller, what's the fuss all about?

Nathan, let's talk first about the notion that reading is dying or reading is dead. Where does that come from? Why does it take it hold?

Nathan Heller (1:39)

Well, it's a very old idea. It's been around almost as long as reading has, it turns out.

I was initially interested in it because it's an idea that one hears a lot about. It seems as if every few years, there is a renewed interest in the question, a renewed panic.

David Remnick (2:01)

Well, let's talk about the panic first and then the countervailing statistics and realities as you put them out. I think there have been any number of sources or places where you see this, as you're calling it, a panic plays out. There's a piece in The Atlantic, it was a cover story not so long ago that was filled with that idea, that notion that reading was on the decline. If you, and anecdotally, maybe it's me getting older and you talk to your friends who might be teachers or college professors or parents and bemoaning how infrequently they see younger people reading, or that you can't assign long books anymore in a college course, or kids these days are staring at their iPhones all the time.

There seems to be a lot of that and there's a question that you also heard that to some degree 20 years ago. But people who have been teaching for a long time think it's true this time.

Nathan Heller (2:58)

Yeah. You heard it 20 years ago and you heard it even, I mean, I'm about 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin.

David Remnick (3:06)

Sure. Go invoke Walter Benjamin. In 1928, yeah.

Nathan Heller (3:10)

He declared that the end of reading and books was incipient.

Meanwhile, a lot of books have been published in the years ever since and a number of them are pretty good, and have actually moved the craft along. So, it's a concern which has been there a long while. You hear it in particular in the academic context, from professors who say they've had to curtail what they assign because their students are having trouble with those triple-decker Victorian novels in a way that they weren't 20 years ago. I think that's quite real. I did a piece a few years ago about the struggles of the humanities within higher education. And that is a real phenomenon. In that case, all of the numbers were quite clear and it sort of came out whichever way you shook them. Right. What my reporting in that piece ended up indicating was that it was less, I mean, a case of the students and more a case of what the universities on the institutional level were valuing there. There is perhaps a little less of an emphasis and less of a value structure at this particular moment behind what would traditionally be called a liberal arts education of which the humanities has always been a big piece. So, that I think is part of what is going on in the universities. It's not going on at all in the bookstores.

I, in the course of reporting this piece, I talked with a lot of booksellers at a lot of bookstores, in a lot of cities, and what they all said universally was that they see young people coming in even more than they've ever been, and they're reading what was surprising to me and indeed surprising to a lot of the booksellers was that they're reading and they're buying a lot of the classics.