By: Mia Levitin, writer and literary critic / The Financial Times
Translation: Telegrafi.com

My work as a book critic used to be the envy of cocktail parties, making people fantasize about a lifetime spent reading. Now, it's more common to hear sheepish admissions from participants who admit they don't read as much as they'd like - as if I were giving them a surprise test of Mobi Dikun [Moby Dick].

Gone are the days when Ulysses James Joyce's [Ulysses] was a magnet for men, as Irish writer Anne Enright told me during a panel marking the book's 100th anniversary in 2022. My university bookshelf once held a copy of the thousand-page book, An endless joke [Infinite jest] of David Foster Wallace, with similar aims.

Today, even literature students no longer read long books. Shakespeare scholar Sir Jonathan Bate, who teaches at universities in both the United States and the United Kingdom, recently lamented this decline. "Forty years ago, you might say to students, 'This week we're going to read Dickens. Please read the works.'" Great expectations [Great Expectations], David Copperfield [David Copperfield] and The gloomy house [Bleak House]'," he told BBC Radio 4. "Now, instead of reading three novels in a week, many students will find it difficult to read one novel in three weeks."

A recent survey by the charity Reading Agency found that only half of UK adults read regularly for pleasure, down from 58 per cent in 2015. Even more worrying: 35 per cent are readers who have abandoned the hobby they once enjoyed. My holiday friends – novelists among them – tell me that they now find themselves scrolling on their phones in bed instead of reading. And who can blame them? Social media is designed to grab our attention with stimulation and approval, in a way that makes the technology of the printed page hard to compete with.

According to neurologist Maryanne Wolf, author of the book Readers, come home: The reading brain in the digital world [Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain In A Digital World], while our brains are wired to learn language, they are not innately programmed to read; reading is a learned skill. But the brain’s plasticity works both ways: use it or lose it, and we are increasingly choosing to lose it. The 2024 word of the year from Oxford University Press was “brain rot” — denoting both the “low-quality, low-value content” found on the internet and the intellectual deterioration from overexposure to it. First recorded in author Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book, Walden or Life in the Woods [Walden], the increase in usage this year is (ironically) attributed to references in videos of TikTok-ut.

On the other hand, the dopamine hit that social media brings can make reading seem more arduous. But the rewards are worth the extra effort: regular readers report higher levels of well-being and life satisfaction, benefiting from improved sleep, better concentration, connection and creativity. Just six minutes of reading has been shown to reduce stress levels by two-thirds, while deep reading offers other cognitive benefits, such as critical thinking, empathy and self-reflection.

Ella Berthoud, a bibliotherapist who offers personalized book "prescriptions" and is co-author, with Susan Elderkin, of the book The Novel Cure: Literary Medicines from A to Z [The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies], says customers are increasingly looking for guidance on how to read more. To create a reading habit, she recommends using audiobooks, creating a separate space for physical books, and keeping a reading journal, as notes help commit what you've read to memory. For those who want to accomplish two New Year's resolutions at once, Berthoud demonstrates the success of using a hula hoop while reading.

If your "reading muscles" have weakened, instead of immediately diving into a work like Ulysses with explanatory notes, you can start with short stories or novellas, says Berthoud. Among her favorite recent books is the collection Stories [story book] from [Publishing House] “New Directions” - designed to be read in one go - and publications from the house “Peirene” which specializes in translated novels.

While the literature market is driven by genres such as crime, fantasy and romance, which are popular in booktok (community of readers in TikTok), sales of non-literary books have fallen significantly from year to year. The common thinking is that these books are easier to scan, prompting applications like Blinkist, Headway and Story Shots that provide book reviews, often suspected of using artificial intelligence [AI]. But copyright issues and AI accuracy aside, reading isn't just a means of getting information. A good non-literary book offers not only knowledge, but also a conversation: following the author's thought trains our minds to think more deeply.

My favorite book of the year - and a great antidote to brain fog - is Unlike Literature: Lives of the 20th Century Novel [Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel] by Edwin Frank. With 33 books and a bibliography of suggested readings, it's a way to practice deep reading and re-engage with some of history's greatest works.

Maria Popova, author and essayist who founded the literary site The Marginalian, described literature as "the original Internet", where every reference and note is "a hyperlink to another text". The advantage is that you can get lost in this analog internet without viral content jumping around and screaming for your attention.

Even if the ban TikTokut moves forward in the US, other platforms will emerge to replace it. So, in 2025, why not replace your bedside phone with a book? Just one hour a day of screen time translates into a book a week, putting you among the elite one percent of readers. [Herman] Melville (and a hula-hoop) are optional. /Telegraph/

factsCult