[THE BORROWERS]
My father ushered me inside with all the urgency of a man providing an answer to a question.
I had been visiting a friend’s house. I noticed that they had book cases everywhere in their house. Even in the kitchen.
It isn’t that we didn’t read. In fact, my father always seemed to be reading something, and both my sister and I always had books from school on the go.
That’s what led to me to ask my dad, “Why don’t we have that many books in our house?”.
He promptly took me into town, ushered me into a building and proclaimed, “This is where we keep our books”.
And that was my introduction to the idea of public libraries.
[HIGH FIDELITY]
Are audiobooks reading?
About 73% of adults questioned in a poll by the NPR-Ipsos think it is.
Let me ask you another question.
Is reading sheet music the same as listening to an orchestra?
I’d argue that it isn’t.
It isn’t better, or worse, it is just different.
A fundamental difference between form and content.
Listening to an audio book gives you access to the content of the book, but not the form.
It’s closer to listening to the radio.
Indeed, a lot of what you hear on the radio is scripted. From plays, through to presenters. Technically many of the lyrics of songs started life written down.
Listening to all of this, that’s not reading, and it is far less contentious to say so.
So why are people determined to say that listening to audiobooks is reading?
I think it is to do with a snobbishness that people presume. There is an idea that reading is somehow a better way to ingest stories than through your ears.
People don’t like admitting that they don’t read. They will happily tell you they don’t watch television, or don’t play video games, but they get very cagey when talking about how much they read.
Some people outright lie about how much they read. Can you believe that? They pretend they have read something when they haven’t.
There is evidence that reading does fundamentally different things to your brain. A recent Harvard study showed that regular readers, that is people reading text rather than listening to it, displayed different brain-aging patterns than those that didn’t.
If I had to say why I think this is, I’d go with the notion that listening is essentially a passive activity.
With an audiobook, the book is being read whether you are reading it or not. It’s passive. A fairground ride.
Reading is the opposite of that. It requires the reader.
It’s like driving a car.
[GOD BLESS YOU MR ROSEWATER]
My good friend Sean was, amongst many things, a manager at an Oxfam Bookshop.
Every year he would flier the local area and ask people to leave any spare books for donation on their doorstep.
A van would then slowly drive around as Sean and I would collect the donations and place them in the back of the van.
It was always a fun day. Physical work and celebrating the generosity of people in general.
Obviously, some would use it as an excuse to have their rubbish collected. Old hair dryers hidden under a small stack of Grishams.
At the end of the day, Sean would offer me a slight discount on anything we’d picked up as a form of thanks.
That’s how I started collecting Granta. Four of them in that first instance.
[HOBSON’S CONDUIT]
“Granta” is an ancient pre-English river name, likely meaning “muddy waters”. It gave its name to the early Anglo-Saxon settlement Grantebrycge, which later evolved into Cambridge.
The Home of New Writing. That’s their strap-line.
Technically, it has been the home of new writing since 1899, but I’m really only concerned with the version of it that relaunched as a magazine in 1979.
Issue one, which I own, is called “New American Writing”. It contains a piece by Susan Sontag called, “Unguided Tour”.
I think that might be one of my favourite pieces of writing. It rattles and sparks and jumps around. It’s electric and eclectic.
I’m not going to tell you any more about it. You can go and find it for yourself. It is out there on the internet even. It doesn’t matter whether you read it in a book or on a screen.
Maybe it matters if you ask a machine to read it out loud to you. Maybe it doesn’t.
We are currently on issue 175: SCANDANAVIA.
Over these issues, I’ve read poems, journalism, prose and document. There are frequently beautiful photo-essays too.
I’ve collected these books, that call themselves magazines. There are gaps in there, spaces on my shelves, issues to hunt down in second hand shops.
Granta is the muddy river where I fell in love with reading, writing and photography.
[THE LIFE YOU CAN SAVE]
The first dedicated Oxfam book store opened on St Giles in Oxford in 1987.
I have visited it.
I even found issue 53 of Granta (News: Scoops, Lies and Videotape) in there. Another gap filled.
One highlight is Dan Jacobson’s essay, “TV is Good For You”. He talks about how access to television is transformative to those who have been denied it. South Africa during apartheid, Russia, the Middle East.
It’s rather wonderful to read the defence of one medium in another. Reading and watching are not enemies, rather just different ways of communicating.
Meanwhile, back in Oxford, back in St Giles…
Everyone seems to have noticed the change in charity shops over the last two decades.
Once they were seen as places that existed to raise money for causes whilst also providing cheap second hand goods to people that might not be able to afford them new.
That’s not so much the case now.
Prices in second hand shops make them just another market place.
The rationale, Sean explained, is that you have a responsibility to the people donating goods to get the best price for them, and platforms such as eBay have made the economics of second hand trading far more transparent.
Sure, your John Grishams and your Da Vinci Codes and Twilights will be cheaper, but other more esoteric books are now priced in double digit figures in line with a global market place.
If anything, the online stores now have an advantage. A lack of brick and mortar stores, a lack of staff management (even if those staff members are volunteers working without payment).
It’s frequently cheaper to look online than it is to go into town and visit Oxfam Books. Postage included.
The last time I was in one I noticed another customer examining books and checking their phone. They were comparing prices. They were not just checking that they weren’t paying over the odds to support a charity, they were looking for bargains that could be resold for a profit.
I’m not here to judge though. I wasn’t in the store to buy books.
I was indulging in a particular hobby I have.
If you travel around like I do, you can tell an awful lot about a place by the content of the second hand book market on the high street.
Luton, for example, has a vast transient population. It is an airport lounge and this is reflected by the sheer number of holiday books in the local charity shops.
Oxford, conversely, is abundant in academic textbooks and literary classics.
You don’t often find Grantas in Luton. You do in Oxford.
[THE RAIN MAKER]
If the internet has killed the charity shop book market, then it is only part of a cycle.
I was talking to the owner of a small non-charity second hand book store that had existed for nearly 50 years.
They were closing down and I felt like a vulture sifting through bones as we talked.
The problem, they said, is that it is impossible to compete with the charity shops.
As a charity, they don’t pay rates.
As a charity they receive their stock for free.
As a charity they have a workforce of volunteers that don’t need to be paid, that don’t have contracts. They don’t have the responsibilities of an employer.
As a charity they have a vast network and a brand with comparatively huge marketing budgets and name recognition.
As a charity, people assume their purchases are doing some good in the world, beyond being something to read.
How can you compete with that? Your books are more expensive because of bills and purchase costs. You might have to hire and pay staff, although this owner admits the reality is they just have to do the work of several people with few days off.
It doesn’t sound like a particularly fun form of employment.
But, the owner admits, they will miss it. They are a reader. they love books. It is as much part of their identity as it is a way to feed themselves.
The owner jokes about closing this particular chapter of their life.
Neither of us laugh.
[THE BOOK THIEF]
Does it matter whether we consider audiobooks as reading?
Does it matter that when we talk about literacy rates, we think that passively listening to stories is the same as engaging with them?
Audiobooks are often positioned as a form of access. Access for sight impaired people, access for those with dyslexia and other forms of neurodiversity that make sitting still and concentrating more difficult. Access for those who don’t have the time to read.
However, if we argue that audiobooks are reading, what we are doing is masking that these people struggle with the form of reading, and that is an important metric when we talk about literacy.
Literacy isn’t just about reading books in a classroom. It is about the ability to communicate and navigate the world.
Text is everywhere, and it is in places where video and audio can not go. Not being able to read causes significant issues for people who become marginalised in these environments.
Masking these issues is not access. It is willfully avoiding the access issue by providing access to the content and not the form.
[LAST CHANCE TO SEE]
As I write this I spot an article in my news feed.
Oxfam books announce that they are considering shutting down up to one hundred of their brick and mortar stores to move to an online model.
It describes a difficult economic climate.
This is the other sort of climate change inflicting itself on the world.
Donations have dropped off, so they say. Sites like Vinted are encouraging people to sell their own goods rather than donating them to charity as they too struggle to survive in this difficult environment.
[THE STRANGE LIBRARY]
A free entertainment.
A free self-education.
A free escape. A holiday, if only in your head.
Did you know that if a library doesn’t have a book that you want you can request it?
Did you know that includes comics?
Did you know that includes DVDs and films of all kinds?
Did you know that includes audiobooks too?
This is why literacy matters. For people with less, libraries offer the world for free.
Whilst we quibble about whether audiobooks are reading or not, libraries make no distinction, nor judgement.
[HOT TYPE]
I suppose, with hindsight, it would be obvious that I found my way into the publishing industry.
The job specified that full training would be given, and that I’d be, in effect, an apprentice.
I just had to pass the entrance exam.
This exam took the form of four sheets of A4 that contained a mix of typed and handwritten text.
Only one question.
What would you do with this?
I went through the pages, annotating the text where I found spelling mistakes and typographical errors.
I knew the difference between a hyphen and an en-dash and, despite my wilful misuse of them, I knew when to use inverted commas, quotation marks and italics.
I performed the tasks specified in the green-ink handwritten notes located in the margin.
However, it was one comment that secured me the position. The word “flamingos” appeared several times. In one instance it was “flamingoes” with an extra “e”.
I wrote, “I have no idea, I’d have to look this up”.
That was the magic phrase. I was not expected to know things, I was expected to find things out.
As it happens, either “flamingoes” or “flamingos” is correct. It is not even a US/UK difference. So long as you are consistent, you are fine.
I think I prefer it with that “e” but, perhaps, that’s just nostalgia.
One of the duties of the job was preserving old texts. Specifically, re-setting books that had gone out of print and where no files could be found.
Many of these had been set the old pre-digital way, and so never had any files in the first place. Others had been lost to format changes as technology marched on.
Zip drives. So many zip drives.
Often there were only two ways forward. The first would be to type out the entire book by hand. This was fine for non-urgent jobs and great typing practice.
The second way would be to scan each page and convert the scans to text using Optical Character Recognition software (OCR).
This way was especially fast. A whole book could be turned into digital text in an afternoon. It would require some checking and tidying up, but even so it was far quicker.
The only problem was that it was destructive.
To scan the pages you would guillotine the spine. You would destroy the book, turning all of the pages into orphaned leaves (that’s what pages in this state are called. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?).
And afterwards, we were expected to dispose of the orphans. Shredding them and recycling them.
Even though I knew we were preserving the text and that many more books would flow from this sacrifice, it is something I never enjoyed.
It felt brutal and unkind.
Robbing the world of a book.
[THE ART OF DISCARDING]
When we collected all of those donations, I discovered a few things about the charity book market.
Aside from the hidden hair dryers (and in one case, unclean bed sheets), people would donate things that the store couldn’t stock. Things like large stacks of magazines. Not literary magazines, but things like TV guides and Bella.
It wasn’t a surprise that these were sent for recycling.
What was a surprise was the sheer number of books that were thrown in skips for disposal too.
Mostly copies of best sellers. Pulpy holiday books. Dog-eared copies of Jeffrey Archer novels.
Sean explained that they were economically unviable and it was policy that they were disposed of. Not enough people would buy them and they just didn’t have the storage space to keep them.
It still made me feel uncomfortable.
Where was that commitment to the donor here?
[FAHRENHEIT 451]
Earlier this year second hand booksellers noticed they were receiving some peculiar orders.
Large orders for obscure books.
It was good news for them. Many struggling with the cost of living crisis, these sort of orders could pay the bills for months.
It felt like a blessing.
The thing was, something felt ‘not quite right’. Orders were being shipped to warehouses, not individuals.
The book sellers became suspicious.
In 2025, the AI firm, Anthropic won a court case that determined it was not a breach of copyright to extract texts from physical copies of books they had bought.
This followed on from Meta (those lovely folk behind facebook, Instagram and whatever the metaverse is) being accused of scraping illegal online book piracy sites.
The common stance is that as these models have grown their usage has polluted the internet with AI generated content, meaning that you can no longer train AI on the internet without risking some form of auto-cannibalism.
Internal documents, revealed as part of the Anthropic court case, named the process as “Project Panama”.
Under this project, warehouses of books were prepared for scanning in a destructive process, the spines being broken and the pages removed prior to scanning and discarded afterwards.
There is, at the heart of this, a real ethical dilemma for the book shops. They need to make sales to remain viable, but they are now complicit in the destruction of books.
This destruction is by the very thing that would seek to put the book sellers out of business.
It is much like working class people being employed to train the very AIs that will replace them in their own jobs.
Furthermore, it is robbing the world of these texts entirely. Some of which may only be present in small numbers.
It is a form of gross vandalism.
There is a counter argument that no one was reading these books anyway, and that they were merely taking up space on shelves that could be better filled to attract more customers. However, books don’t work like that. You don’t have books in your home because you are actively reading all of them at once. You keep books because you might need to read them, or want to, at some unspecified time or date where they become relevant.
This is the truth about collecting books, even if you don’t read them. They are there for you when you want them to be.
Or not, as it appears.
[A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ]
Marks on a wall.
Clay tablets, meant to be read out loud.
Papyrus scrolls.
The first bound folio by the Romans.
The monastic influence. Copying books by hand and now reading in silence.
Palimpsests of new text in old books.
Endless fires and losses.
Gutenburg struts in with moveable type.
Bibles everywhere.
The Renaissance. The libraries. Ideas and stories.
A scientific revolution.
Mass literacy. Industrialisation.
Cheap paperbacks for your travels.
The Internet.
E-readers.
Audiobooks.
The end of Reading.
[THE WEALTH OF NATIONS]
The trajectory of reading has been one of increasing accessibility.
What started as a very specialist skill has become something that we expect almost everyone to be able to do, and furthermore, the things we read have gone from one-off hand made creations through to infinitely replicable tomes that can be accessed anywhere in the world.
The fact this trajectory seems to be altering is all to do with capitalism.
The first fact is perhaps unsurprising, but there is a direct link between literacy and household income.
It is a two way street, being unable to read puts you at a massive disadvantage in the workforce and that disadvantage means you have less money to access the materials for reading.
Public libraries provide an exit strategy for this, and many host their own literacy programmes where they will teach people to read. However, the austerity caused (or intended) by the 2008 banking crisis has forced libraries into retreat. Closing many and forcing others to strip back public engagement schemes.
Second hand books are, in real terms, more expensive now than they were twenty years ago. This is in part due to a market that involves charity shops and online services. A globalisation of that market means that desired books are funnelled away from poorer areas towards the wealthier ones too.
Then there is time to consider. Reading demands your sole attention.
In this endless cost of living crisis, the first thing that people sacrificed was their free time. Hobbies became hustles and any moment you aren’t working is time that is costing you.
Working and childcare, physical exhaustion, mental exhaustion. These are not great starting points for a reading habit.
I suspect this is the reason that audiobooks are rising in relative popularity. I also suspect that a lot of the move to call them “reading” is merely painting over the cracks that people are being forced away from reading by these economic factors.
Digital reading is down too. It was once thought that the internet would be the death of books. That digital copies and ereaders would take over. There’s been very little evidence of that. However, the internet itself has turned from a primarily text-based medium into one of videos. People are reading less on the internet than they used to.
Even comments, the standard text response to the content people generate have been reduced down to icons and emoticons. A thumbs up, a heart.
Awkwardly smiling emoji.
Paywalls also exist to keep high quality information away from the poor. Every time you encounter one it has a message like “for just the price of a cup of coffee…” in a way that doesn’t seem to understand that people are also not paying for coffee.
Whilst it is acceptable to expect to be paid as a writer, I’m not sure paywalls are a great thing when it comes to news and industry discussions. In these cases the poorest in society need access just as much as anyone.
It’s particularly galling to see paywalled articles as part of industry magazines discussing the very things the poorest employees in that industry have a stake in.
Meanwhile, ereaders and the books they can hold are still relatively expensive. Sure, you can read on your phone but the format isn’t ideal for reading and it comes with its own set of distractions.
Recently, Amazon effectively ended the life of some of its old ereaders, the early Kindles. Devices that were working perfectly well at displaying text on their screens. It wasn’t just a case of no longer supporting them as from May this year, any Kindle bought before 2012 would be unable to download books from the Kindle store.
The digital revolution was supposed to liberate text from the physical, but it ended up shackled by digital rights management and massive online platforms.
And you combine this with a widening disparity between public and private education, with schools in poorer areas displaying rapidly falling literacy rates that helps feed this spiral.
What we are witnessing is not the end of reading, but the return to a time when reading was the preserve of the wealthy and powerful.
[THE JOY OF SEX]
It often gets missed. The small fact that readers like to read.
That they find the very act of reading pleasurable.
That they enjoy it.
They don’t want to read quicker, nor do they want to spend more time doing something else.
It’s a bit like sex. Why would you want it to be quicker? Why would you rather someone else did it for you?
Maybe you could enjoy washing the dishes as you did it?
[AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS]
There’s a difference between travel and moving.
In my experience, being wealthy means you get to travel more, whilst being poor means you have to move more.
Everything you own packed up in boxes and loaded and unloaded and unpacked.
Every time you look at your collection of books. You think that maybe it is time for a cull.
Not thrown out, but given away.
Yeah, who are you kidding?
And then you look at the Granta section. They are not slim volumes on their own, but together they appear as a solid wall of text. They act as a form of insulation to your walls. You suspect they may even be blast proof.
These are coming with you.
At this point, you know how to put books into boxes. You know how to avoid placing too many in there, rendering the box awkward and heavy.
And yet it is still an ordeal.
A Sisyphean push with a cube instead of a sphere.
But these books are not just your collection. They are not just wallpaper. These are your travel, they are your escape, your library, your knowledge.
Whatever you may end up, and whatever you may be, you’ll always be a reader first.
[THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR]
Once upon a time there was a tiny business, or so the story goes, that was set up in a garage to sell second hand books.
This business was named, “Cadabra”. An allusion to the magic word of “Abracadabra”.
It would be changed later, perhaps because it sounds just a little like “Cadaver”, a dead body, something that has died.
Cadabra, nestled in that garage, with tables made from old doors, aspired to be the biggest book store in the world.
New copies, second hand copies. Ordered online and delivered to your door.
The tale continues with the first book sold. A copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s, ‘Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought’.
And we all lived happily ever after.
Or we could have done.
But little Cadabra wasn’t satisfied with selling books to people who wanted to read books and one day it branched into music too.
And it grew and it grew.
It devoured more and more.
Now you could buy books, and music and DVDs and toilet seats and rechargeable batteries and boxes of cereal.
As Cadabra grew, it built a new house for itself. A giant warehouse.
And the books transformed. They became digital.
And the mountain-sized Cadabra transformed too.
It had realised that selling books was fine, but it was far better to sell the platform that books were read on, and so it developed an ereader.
This ereader acted a little like a prison for books, because once they were on it, a gate called Digital Right Management would shut.
You could never free your books. You couldn’t lend them to a family member or sell them again, onto the second hand market.
You didn’t really own the books any more. Cadabra owned them, and let you visit.
It encouraged people to make more digital books, not because it wanted to hear more stories, but so that it could sell more stories. It encouraged authors to use the talents of a magical story teller.
The Story Teller wasn’t particularly good at writing his own stories, but he was especially good at stealing others and changing them just enough to not get chased out of town with pitchforks. Sure, he’d occasionally make mistakes but he made up for that by designing the covers for the books too.
The Story Teller, much like Cadabra, also had a ferocious appetite. He would read everything he could get his hands on so that he could make up stories. However, he realised, much to his dismay, that he had started reading his own stories too. And that meant that the mistakes he had previously made were getting more and more noticeable in his new stories.
Fortunately, clever Cadabra had a solution.
All of those books, the ones that had been in that tiny garage. The real books, the paper books. They were still out there. All they had to do was buy them again, cheaper than before and give them to the Story Teller.
“If only,” said Cadabra to the Story Teller, “we didn’t have to execute these books using a guillotine, severing their spine for you to devour just so that you can regurgitate their limbs in ever increasing orders of deformity.”
[I, ROBOT]
Amazon used to have a service they referred to as a global,, online access 24/7 workforce. They named it “Amazon Mechanical Turk” after a seemingly automated chess robot that was really just a man in a box making moves for it.
It was specifically developed to get lots of underpaid humans to do the jobs that AI and automation found difficult, all whilst pretending to be AI so people didn’t worry about the ramifications of paying people so poorly.
Over half a million of them at its peak.
Amazon recently announced that they would be shutting this service down.
After 21 years of people pretending to be robots, they were confident that robots pretending to be people would be the way forward.
[THE NAME OF THE ROSE]
May 17, 1996
A dark void like studio, with a table in the centre.
Present: Charlie Rose, David Foster Wallace, Mark Leyner, and Jonathan Franzen.
Subject: The Future of American Fiction
ROSE:
What’s happening to fiction, do you think, and its appeal to young people today?
I don’t know who young people, where the division is, but, In a way--
Is there an audience, do you think? Is it growing? Is it decreasing?
Is it impacted by all these things we talk about?
LEYNER:
… there’s an image I have of Bobby Fischer — you know, the chess player — when he was a kid — 16, 15. And he’s in his room every night, listening to WABC on some little transistor. Playing through all the chess games of history obsessively.
I don’t think, at that point, he cared about how popular chess was or who was interested in it or not. It was just his obsession, his compulsion, what he did.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE:
I think, in a weird way, the condition sort of commercially for fiction bears a little bit on the aesthetics of writing right now… The generation that I think of myself as part of was raised on television, which means that at least I was raised to view television as more or less my main kind of artistic snorkel to the universe.
And I think television, which is a commercial art, that’s a lot of fun,that requires very little of the recipient of the art, I think affects what people are looking for in various kinds of art and I think can make the sort of fiction that’s at least harder than average, weird, requires some work to read.
What’s interesting to me is the very phenomenon that perhaps demographically cuts into our audience is a big part of sort of what’s going on in the country that I think fiction writers are trying to capture in some way.
I guess, as far as I can see, fiction for me, as-- mostly as a reader, is a very weird, double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be difficult and it can be redemptive and morally instructive and all the good stuff we learned in school.
On the other hand, it’s supposed to be fun.
It is a lot of fun.
And what — what drew me into writing was mostly really fun rainy afternoons spent with a book. It was a kind of a relationship. Because, I mean, the love of the book make you want to make I think part of the fun for me was being part of some kind of exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff that we normally can’t talk about.
The thing that interests me in a lot of the stuff I think that I do has to do with commercial entertainment, its efficiency, its sheer ability to deliver pleasure in large doses, changes peoples relationship to art and entertainment.
It changes what an audience is looking for.
I would argue is changes us in deeper ways than that and that some of the ways that commercial culture and commercial entertainment affects human beings is one of the things that I sort of think serious or arty fiction ought to be doing right now.
JONATHAN FRANZEN:
…It cuts in in a different way, too, because I think 50 years ago, somebody setting out to write a scene at a precinct house, basically, you know, would go to a precinct house and feel that pretty much anything they had to say about it would be fresh and interesting.
And now if I sit down to write about —I won’t — I basically won’t write about a precinct house because I see so many of them on T.V.
They do such a slick job.
I’m completely captivated by that.
And so that’s in my head, whether I want it to be in my head or not. And in my reader’s head, as well.
And so you know, I consider myself my own reader and so I kind of consult my entertainment habits. To say that I don’t think about an audience is both true and not true because I think about myself as an audience.
And that audience is one that has had its expectations regarding all kinds of narrative art profoundly changed by what’s happened in the last 50 years.
MARK LEYNER:
One of the last refuges in which we can read anymore are these sorts of interstitial zones where people read — like waiting for planes, waiting for things — You know, that’s sort of the last refuge of peace and quiet.
Well, it’s no longer because now you go to an airport and they have televisions there.
Now we’re dealing with people who almost never experience any sort of down time in their life from electronic media.
[BAD HABIT]
You can blame schools. It isn’t that they don’t teach reading (they do) it’s that they teach it in a way that instills some bad habits that can persist well into adulthood.
Reading is frequently posited as a chore. Something that needs to be done on a time limit too.
Books and their content are taught, but little consideration is given to the practice of reading. It is like exercise, or learning to play snooker. It is something that needs to be done repeatedly for you to be better at it, and generally speaking, the better you get the more enjoyable it is.
The form is important though.
For instance, what do you do if you encounter a book you are not enjoying?
Do you force yourself to read until the end. Slogging away at it?
Or do you put it down and pickup one of the other books that exist?
Apply this question to TV. What do you do if a programme is on that you don’t like? Do you turn over, or do you doggedly force yourself to watch until the end?
That bad habit is taught to you at school, and I’ve seen it put people off reading for life.
Some books really are awful. Some might just not be for you. Think of it like music. Not everyone likes jazz, right? Why should we all agree that Jane Austen is any good?
Then there’s the whole thing about how much you read. As if every book you get through is a physical token of prowess.
This particular bad habit has escaped the classroom and now found a comfortable place online where people post pictures of stacks of books, claiming to have read them all.
I once pointed out to someone that if they had read everything pictured in the month they suggested they would have had to have read at a speed of 300 words per minute for eight hours every day. It’s possible, but I don’t think plausible.
They admitted they might have “skimmed” a little.
As much as it is about the ego of people who post things like that, I can’t help but feel the negative influence it has on people who struggle to get through a single book at all.
These are the the worst habits I frequently see in reading:
Feeling like you have to finish a book you are not enjoying
Feeling that reading slowly is failing at reading
Feeling that you need to demonstrate the volume you read
Again, I find it better to use an analogy. Not sex this time, but food.
We see nothing wrong in not finishing a meal that we are not enjoying, or stopping when we don’t feel hungry.
Eating quickly isn’t seen as a form of proficiency for eating.
Bragging about how much you eat seems like a strange thing to do.
You can, of course, take this analogy further too. We can talk about nutrition, about what is good for you to eat and what is bad for you to eat.
Are some things better or worse for you to read?
But we all agree, don’t we, that it would be crass to lecture a starving man on how the hamburger he has obtained isn’t great for his cholesterol.
[POSSESSION]
The Internet Archive have been scanning books for considerable time, as part of their mission to preserve knowledge.
They do not, however, destroy the books they scan, rather they take the time to preserve them. These copies are either returned to libraries or stored in a physical archive that seeks to keep one copy of every book.
The main reason they give is that it should always be possible to go an verify the contents of a digital work by referring back to the physical copy, in order to prevent malicious, or erroneous changes to the text.
The physical books and copies are a safety feature.
Interestingly, The Internet Archive lost a court case in 2023 that stated their activities were in breach of copyright law. The publisher, Hatchett, won and The Internet Archive had to remove over 50,000 books from its archive.
In 2025 Anthropic won a similar case, where the scanning of physical copies for the AI models was not deemed to be in breach of copyright.
[NOTES ON A SCANDAL]
In May, 2026, Granta was accused of publishing an AI generated story.
The Serpent in the Grove, won the regional Commonwealth Foundation prize for the Caribbean. The author Jamir Nazir maintains that AI was not used in its creation, however a number of readers found that it contained numerous, distinctive tells of having been aided by generative AI.
AI detectors also flagged the text as containing distinct patterns and syntax often found in large language models.
Readers frequently highlighted the following:
They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it.
She had the kind of walking that made benches become men
coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all
the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink
The Commonwealth Foundation conducted its own review and states that it does not believe the text was generated by AI. However, Granta has since cut all ties with the Foundation, citing editorial integrity.
[THE TELLTALE HEART]
They call it “Contrastive structure” and it is one of the simple tells of AI generated text, along with sentences that don’t really make much sense.
It’s not X it’s Y
Sometimes it uses the em dash.
This isn’t just plain wrong—it’s wonderful
Sometimes you can spot the use of “aren’t just”.
These aren’t just lemons, they’re God lemons.
It’s awful sure, but the worst thing though is that it learnt this from us.
[OLIVER TWIST]
Libraries have always been a sanctuary.
Quiet, calm places, often nestled in busy cities or frantic campuses.
I run to libraries for salvation.
When I skipped school as a teen, an act so frequent that my final school report read, “When present seemed interested”, I would hide in the library, often in the reference section upstairs.
If life makes orphans of us all, then libraries are our orphanage.
[THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY]
They tend to call it “BookTok”.
It’s a loose online community centred around books that comes across more like a marketing exercise than a book club.
From outside it can seem as if it is about owning, not reading, about collecting and covers and performing the role of reader, sometimes without bothering to do the reading bit.
Posts such as “what does my bookcase tell you about me?”.
Some of the reviews read like AI summaries or copy-pasted marketing blurb rather than genuine engagement.
And you know what? That’s OK.
I’m totally fine with it.
Collecting is fun, and if that process means someone accidentally reads a book out of curiosity, then I’m all for it.
And if writers are being paid, I’m all for that too.
And here’s the rub, the thing I know but don’t like to admit. Being in proximity of books is a good thing. As much as I love libraries, they are not just there, within reach. You can’t just take a notion. Not like you can with your own bookshelf.
In the final chapter, this ragtag group of social media poseurs might be the thing that keeps the practice of reading physical copies of books alive.
[THE WORST WITCH]
What is the worst book you have read?
Was it bad because it was long, or boring, or poorly written?
Was it bad because you were forced to read it at school and any joy was sandblasted away from between the dog-eared covers?
I’m not sure I have one. I’ll read anything. I want to read everything.
I am, however, rather fond of my reaction to Alexa Cheung’s, It.
A casual collection of scribbles, thoughts, diary entries and photographs by a trendy celebrity in the 2000s.
It was as wonderfully vacuous and shallow as I expected.
I enjoyed every minute of it.
It was not a good book.
[THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE]
A BookTok question that pops up often is, “what books are red flags for you?”.
If you were to walk into someone’s house and look at their bookcase, what books would make you immediately think there was something wrong with them?
Mein Kampf?
Ayn Rand gets mentioned a lot.
The Bible?
A full set of Harry Potter books?
No books at all?
They say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, although I have found that to be variously unsound advice. Some covers tell you exactly how to judge a book. Those covers generated with AI, for example, indicate a creator that doesn’t value human artistry, or maybe doesn’t value the artistry of other humans. Their own is excepted.
But what about judging a person through what they have read?
I have read Mein Kampf. I own a couple of Ayn Rand books.
Does that make me a Nazi, or some Neo-Con horror? Or did I read them because I wanted to know what the horror was about?
I put this question to the internet and the replies I received were illuminating…
Some suggested that I destroyed the books after reading. Others suggested that the only moral way to read them would be to steal them (I did respond that I don’t think Hitler nor Ayn rand are in any position to profit from those sales).
My favourite, and one that had a lot of backing, was that I kept them on a personal bookshelf out of public view.
‘What?’ I responded, ‘Like a naughty step for books? A shame shelf?’
Imagine if you walked into my bedroom and instead of seeing some contentious books mixed in alongside some non-contentious ones, you find a whole bookshelf of Nazi texts and controversial books?
Would that be somehow less of a red flag?
[THE HOUND]
Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA. 173 million items.
British Library, London, UK. 170—200 million items.
National Library of China, Beijing, China. 40 million items.
Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, Canada. 54 Million items.
Russian State Library, Moscow, Russia. 45 million items.
[A JUDGEMENT IN STONE]
There are two ways of looking at literacy. There’s basic literacy and functional literacy.
Basic literacy is the ability to understand the alphabet, sign your name and recognise some commonly used words that you might encounter.
Functional literacy is about being able to understand and communicate with the world through text. This includes things such as writing job applications and reading newspapers. It includes processing the information you have read.
In terms of basic literacy the UK and the US are almost identical with rates of 99%.
However, a nuanced look at the data reveals a more complex picture.
The US has a far larger low-level literacy rate, with about 28% of adults unable to score above Level 1 literacy, meaning that they struggle reading long or dense multi-page texts, following instructions that require multiple steps and evaluating hidden meanings or comparing different viewpoints.
In the UK this figure is far lower at just above 17.5%.
In 2013 the data appeared to show that younger people (aged 16—25) were less literate than older people (50+), however, this trend seems to have reversed in the UK with the younger generation now outperforming older generations at functional literacy.
In the US this reversal has yet to happen.
[NECRONOMICON]
The American magazine, The Atlantic recently declared, “The End of Reading is Here”.
The article details falling literacy rates amongst the young and the declining complexity of text in newspapers. It talks about the competition between digital screens and books. It positions Trump as the first post-literate US president.
There are references to Marshall McLuhan and Orwell and AI and Television.
The article displays an inordinate amount of bombast, culminating in framing The Atlantic itself as a saviour of reading. There is talk of torch carrying.
I think it flatters its readership.
It lacks, I would posit, level 1 literacy levels by failing to understand multiple viewpoints. It extrapolates reading as a purely American activity.
Perhaps a better title would have been “The End of Reading in The US isn’t Here But We Are Somewhat Edging Slightly Closer, Maybe”.
If you don’t want to read the article, The Atlantic handily places an audio transcript for you at the top of the page so that that you can listen.
Also, as a footnote, this article decrying the end of reading appears behind a paywall.
[REVELATIONS]
Is the end of reading here?
No.
You know this.
You know this, in part because you are reading this. If you have got this far, you have read several thousand words.
That’s quite a lot for a fanciful essay. It has taken concentration, time and effort.
Thank you for that, and also well done.
But why did you do it? I suspect it is because it was enjoyable.
The idea that reading is purely about information or narrative, misses the point.
The act of reading is, in itself, rather fun.
Or maybe you listened to this, somehow. I think that’s OK too. It’s about nuance, isn’t it? Listening isn’t reading, but nor is it the end of reading.
