EARLIER THIS WEEK, I hosted an enjoyable discussion at Backstory with Times columnist James Marriott about his newly published polemic. Enjoyable, that is, even though having a conversation about his treatise — The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society — in a bookshop was a little like inviting an abattoir manager to convene a panel on veganism.
Marriott reckons that we are facing “a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal and autocratic”. The OECD, he writes, has found that adult literacy skills have “largely declined or stagnated” over the past decade in the mainly rich nations it studied; the UK’s National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading. One study he cites found that reading for pleasure declined by 40% in America in the first two decades of the 21st century.
He goes on to argue that, since “historians have linked the spread of literacy to the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the birth of human rights, the rise of capitalism and the advent of modern democracy”, all of those things are now imperilled.
His principal villain is the smartphone — especially vacuous social media videos — which he points out has not only robbed our time but brought bogus medical claims and politicians who trade in outright lies from the fringes to the mainstream. Dispiriting stuff, and hardly likely to prove controversial what with ubiquitous social-media scrolling on public transport and the rise of strongmen politicians. You may well have noticed your own attention span whittling down in recent years.
If you were already a little gloomy about the state of the world, then, Marriott is on hand to make you gloomier. “The entire richness of human society and culture — its love affairs, its operas, its art house films,” he writes, in one of his cheerier passages, “is rotting away as our species spends its days staring into the black hole of the screen.”
The New Dark Ages certainly makes for sobering reading. Marriott’s argument that there is more than mere correlation to the concurrent spread of social media addiction and the decline of serious, good faith, evidence-based political discourse is both plausible and alarming. So too is the idea that the book faces a serious challenge from the colourful, bleeping device that I have checked several times already while writing this.
But I think there are good reasons to be much more optimistic about the future of reading. If not, Backstory — not to mention Marriott’s publisher — ought to extract his book in the section of our annual accounts when you evaluate whether the business is a “going concern”.
First, it might be true that we are spending less time reading than in the past, but the book is very far from dead. Indeed, 191 million of them were sold in the UK last year. Data from The Reading Agency show that 53% of UK adults consider themselves regular readers, a notch down on a decade ago (58%), but hardly approaching extinction levels. Indie bookshops are enjoying a renaissance and Waterstones is opening, not closing, branches. If the smartphone has killed reading it is inconvenient that the nadir of bookshop numbers came at the beginning of that era, and that they have since bounced back.
Interestingly, although book sales are contracting a little in mature European markets, they are booming elsewhere. According to NielsenIQ BookData, sales in 2024 were up more than 10% in Mexico and nearly 20% in India, the world’s biggest democracy, where I’m told there is substantial demand for classics.
Perhaps, though, this is merely the last gasp of the older, literate generations? Marriott quotes an English don grumbling that she can no longer expect her students to read a novel in a week and has given up assigning some complex classics. Another report claimed students were “intimidated by anything over ten pages”.
There may be some truth to this — books, and sentence lengths, do seem to be contracting in an era more prone to distraction — but other anecdotes are available. My Gen Z booksellers report that on their English Literature courses it remained the norm to read two or three books a week. Among the heavyweights they and their classmates tackled were Ulysses, Middlemarch, Paradise Lost and The Canterbury Tales.
There is evidence to suggest young readers are keen book buyers: at Backstory, our average customer on weekends is in their 20s or early 30s. According to NielsenIQ BookData’s books and consumer survey, those aged 13-24 bought more physical books in the UK in 2024 than the 45 to 59-year-olds or 60+s. Including ebooks and audiobooks, the biggest book buyers were 25 to 34-year-olds.
As for those younger still, hundreds of schoolchildren dressed up as their favourite characters to visit Backstory on World Book Day and dozens sit in the children’s section every weekend to read with their parents or siblings. It is true that this is a vantage point from a relatively affluent corner of London, but the 227,000 copies of Gruffalo Granny sold nationwide in the first three days of its release last week suggest, at the least, that the post-literate society might be some way off.
(Indeed, it might be parents rather than children who are distracted: research shows that the steepest declines in reading for pleasure are among younger children — more likely to need parental coaxing or supervision — whereas the proportion of teenagers — who can choose for themselves whether to pick up a smartphone or a book — who report reading for pleasure most days is largely unchanged since the rise of the smartphone.)
The second cause for optimism is the rise of social reading. Book clubs are everywhere. So too are literary festivals. Bookshop bars like Backstory are increasingly common. So keen are readers to gather together that the Booker Prize will announce its shortlist next week to a packed audience at London’s Southbank Centre. My discussion with Marriott was one of three sold-out events hosted by Backstory this week, with dozens of readers of all ages also gathering to hear from Frank Gardner and Nicola Sturgeon. Such things not only fuel reading but also provide a helpful antidote to the doom-scrolling isolation of social media that worries Marriott.
Third, the screen and the book are not always in competition. They can, and often do, cross-pollinate. Marriott bemoans some of the senseless content on TikTok, but does not dwell on BookTok (the platform’s bookish community), one of the most significant drivers of book sales in recent years. Online book clubs run by Dua Lipa, Laufey or Jack Edwards might not be ploughing through War and Peace, but they suggest that, far from being irrelevant, for certain younger demographics books are cool. Film and TV adaptations have recently propelled Wuthering Heights, Hamnet and East of Eden back into the charts; Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey sold out on both sides of the Atlantic.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t take Marriott’s thesis seriously. (It is also a highly entertaining read. In two of several enjoyable digressions, I learned about Rousseau’s romance novel and Stalin’s “sensitive nature poetry”.) His chapters on the harms posed by social media are particularly persuasive (and alarming).
I am less convinced that the democratic recession was brought about by a mass trading-in of (serious) books for (trivial) phones, partly because I think much of the phenomenon is about switching one screen (the television) for another (the phone), not to mention economic stagnation and the demise of liberal media gatekeepers. Though fewer non-fiction books or highbrow novels are being sold than in the past, these were usually outsold by Agatha Christie or Mills & Boon, which make less obvious undergirding for democracy.
Either way, a backlash against endless time spent scrolling is in order — and, indeed, is already underway. Social-media bans for children ought to help. It would be wonderful if some of this liberated time were earmarked for reading. Excellent charities like BookBanks, which gives out books at food banks, and BookTrust, which helps get children into reading, are leading the way.
There is much we can do in our own lives too. There is nothing inevitable about reading less and scrolling more. It is hard to ignore your phone (Marriott eventually gave up his smartphone after he found himself succumbing to the urge to check it even when he hid it in another room), but it can be done. Perhaps we should approach concentration training like weight training, gradually building up our strength. There are plenty who want to try: in a very unscientific survey of attendees at our event with Marriott, the vast majority claimed to be reading more this year than last. (There may have been an element of peer pressure: one of the few to raise their hands to reading less felt the need to tell us that she’d recently had a baby.)
Ultimately, the book may well prove too resilient to, well, write off. And the best way you can prove that, of course, is to buy a few. Pop into the shop this weekend or head to our website (where, as a reminder, you can choose from 500,000 books for next-day UK delivery or in-store collection).
What do you think? Are you reading more or less than in the past? What about younger people you know? Post a comment below or hit reply to this email.
Happy reading,
Tom
Upcoming events at Backstory
SOLD OUT 22nd September, 7.30pm Joey D’Urso, More Than A Shirt: How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money and Power
SOLD OUT 23rd September, 7.30pm Victoria Hislop, The Wine-Dark Sea
29th September, 7.30pm Daniel Foxx, Fairytales for Privileged Children: Little Red Riding Hood Blows Her Trust Fund & Other Premium Tales The comedian and podcaster presents his very tongue-in-cheek, modern takes on fairy tales. Not for the easily offended!
30th September, 7.30pm Michael Cragg, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head: In Search of Kylie The music journalist chats all things Kylie Minogue with journalist and podcaster Miranda Sawyer.
5th October, 7.30pm Richard Whitehead, Victory in Australia: The Remarkable Story of England’s Greatest Ashes Triumph 1954-55 The winner of the Cricket Book of The Year award talks to Times head of sport James Restall
SOLD OUT 6th October, 7.30pm Diana Henry, Around The Table: 52 Essays on Food and Life
SOLD OUT 13th October, 7.30pm David Szalay, Flesh
17th October, 11am Robert Harris book signing The bestselling thriller writer will be signing copies of his latest, Agrippa.
21st October, 7.30pm Crime fiction with JD Brinkworth and Ross Montgomery The authors of The Pie and Mash Detective Agency and the Stockingham and Pike detective series (Murder at World’s End etc) in conversation with thriller writer Sabine Durrant
25th October, 2.30pm Caitlin Moran book signing The journalist and writer will sign copies of How To Be Hopeful, her examination of whether it is possible to stay in the same house, in the same neighbourhood, but feel better about the frantic modern world by making better days.
28th October, 7.30pm Modern ghost stories with Claire Fuller and Roisin Lanigan Join us in the run-up to Halloween as the two authors discuss the unsettling themes and ‘modern ghosts’ in their recent novels with fellow author Clare Chambers.
2nd November, 7.30pm Ella Risbridger, The Kitchen Book We’re delighted to welcome food writer Ella to Backstory once again.
9th November, 7.30pm Jonathan Coe, Lessons in Harmony Backstory frequent flyer Jonathan Coe makes his triumphant third visit to Backstory, to talk about his writing career and his latest novel, about a decades-long friendship between two composers.
10th November, 7.30pm Tim Downie, Rituals: A Folk Journey Through The Seasons The Upstart Crow actor and Folklands podcaster talks all things folklore with comedian and friend of Backstory Rachel Parris
13th November, 7pm Poetry Open Mic Night Our regular poetry open mic night is free, and there is no need to book tickets. Whether you want to perform your own poetry or prose, or just listen to a range of talented locals, come and join us. Sign ups from 6.30pm.
SOLD OUT 17th November, 7.30pm Jay Rayner, Nights Out In The Kitchen
24th November, 7.30pm Sam Caporn, English Wine: Your Essential Companion from Vine to Wine The ‘Mistress of Wine’ takes us on a journey through England’s very own vineyards, just in time to add a couple of your favourites to the Christmas table.
I'm reading less - or rather, I'm reading fewer books, largely because I'm reading more journalism (in which category I count Substacks like this). But I'm still reading. I need to find a way to tilt the balance back to Real Books, though.
Long Live Backstory!! It's been so cool watching your endeavour evolve into what it is!!
A cozy welcoming full of humour and warmth and insanely great books!!