It’s official…the less you read the stupider you’ll be

What do David Bowie, Paul McCartney and Iggy Pop all have in common? They were voracious readers. Bowie never threw a book away. McCartney cited Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde and Henrik Ibsen as inspirations. Pop wrote an essay on Edward Gibbon’s Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. The past’s most popular music has its origins in literature.

Books and rock n roll went hand in hand 

In his thoughtful and forceful book, James Marriott tackles the death of literacy debate. Journalist Marriott is a well-placed advocate for the printed word; his father was an English teacher who celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday with a cake, while he himself used to work at an antiquarian bookshop.

His purpose is to show that, in the digital era, reading is not as irrelevant as many believe. Still, the impact of the rise of TV and the smartphone makes for depressing reading.

We meet the professor who year-on-year noticed that his students could barely read a book a term, let alone the previously expected book a week. And they were unable to simultaneously reflect on plot and study characterisation or linguistics.

There are the screenwriters who, according to Matt Damon, are asked to reiterate ‘the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones’.

Then we find evidence, from social scientist James Flynn, that teenage IQs are declining: ‘The cognitive environment of… teenagers has not been enriched.’

Our society is regressing; even by the end of the 20th century, a university graduate born after 1969 spent ‘fewer hours reading each week than a little-educated person born before 1950’.

Decline in reading has hampered our ability to think critically, to focus, to debate, to consider more than one idea at a time. But we must not be too hard on ourselves. Even before the advent of screens, one of the world’s greatest readers, Samuel Johnson, declared, ‘People in general do not willingly read if they can have anything else to amuse them.’ It is heartening that even Dr Johnson struggled to focus.

While things may seem bleak, there is push back. Marriott points out that nearly half of teenagers wish that TikTok had never been invented.

He extols the virtues of reading, implores that we remain positive and thinks that the book will be at the fore of ‘a new and radical way of looking at the world’.

He ends noting that ‘the smartphone has not shown us that books are obsolete. It has shown us that books are irreplaceable.’