The death of reading

Picture it. You’re lucky enough to live in the late 19th century.

Van Gogh is wandering around the Netherlands painting haystacks and stars. Spiritualism is everywhere: séances, mediums, table-turning, and seers who communicate with the dead. Some dude named PT Barnum is criss-crossing America with this crazy melange of traveling circus and sly hoaxes. There are side shows and peep shows, theatrical extravaganzas in every town. Ragtime is just taking hold.

And for the first time in the history of man, books are available to the everyone with a few ha’penneys to rub together. The print industry has exploded, becoming more systematized, and better at shipping. Suddenly, even ordinary people can read – in their parlors, at saloons and libraries, and after dinner, once the harpsichord recital is done. Novels are everywhere: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot. In France, Victor Hugo. The Russians? They’re producing metric tons of pages. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. People are inhaling these stories, 900 pages at a time.

Academics refer to this period as the “reading revolution.” Reading was as much an indulgence as carnivals and music halls. People didn’t HAVE to read, they GOT to read. They did it ostentatiously and with zeal. And this habit lasted, in one form or another, until recently when reading for enjoyment started to tank. Blame the Internet and social media and our fractured attention span. Blame Oprah, who in her quest to ‘get people reading’ promoted one title and focused every English-speaking woman’s attention on it, to the exclusion of every other book on the planet.

But the real culprit, if you ask me, is politics. When identity and partisanship become your defining feature, when you adhere to rigid ideas and philosophies – and fear anything that challenges your beliefs – reading becomes dangerous. All those random ideas floating around? Problems that have no easy answers? Bah! Who needs that?

So here’s where we are: reading for enjoyment has fallen by 40% in the past 20 years. And despite bullshit feel-good essays about how we’re not really reading less, it just seems that way – and online influencers who hawk the classics without a single specific detail about plot, theme, or character – literacy in every single cohort is falling off a cliff. Publishing is becoming narrower, more ideological, and preachy. The books that face out in shop windows reinforce pat answers instead of asking hard questions. And the world seems smaller, because it is.

Séances, circuses, live music, theater, art…they’re all on the decline. Instead we have performative costumed protests and Netflix shows that are contractually bound to restate their plot three to four times for the benefit of distracted viewers.

And original stories, with unique characters built word-by-word and impossible quests and existential messages? These days, you cannot give them away. To wit: my friend Christina Dalcher, author of Vox and Master Class, has a new novel called Lexecution that I have read and loved. She is offering it in sections – for FREE – on X (a work that would cost ~$27 in hardcover) and takeup has been less than pale.

LEX, as Christina calls it, is about a future (present?) British society where speech crimes are policed by drone. Authoritarian rule outlaws gendered words, adjectives that imply degrees of quality (it’s unkind to say, for instance, that a person is beautiful or smart, because it might injure those who are not), and all anti-government rhetoric. Children are enlisted, through the public schools, to report their parents for what they say. Re-education of offenders becomes a growth industry. Saira Rao, anyone?

Turns out LEX hit too close to real life, plus Christina was being punished – predictably – for counter-narrative things she’d said. First her agent and then a series of publishers backed out of negotiations to publish. Hence, she is putting this cutting and very real commentary online because the story’s the thing. It’s thought-provoking and necessary and what we need to read and discuss. She’s had fewer than 100 takers, which I will never understand.

Listen, I love this book. But also, I love Dickens and Tolstoy and – well, I dislike Austen, but I get that she had talent – and I want to return to the days of circus-like joy in reading. So I’m making this proposal, to those six of you who got to the end of my screed. I will personally lead a Zoom book club, for each quarter of “Lexecution” and would LOVE it if you’d join.

All you need to do is this: Subscribe to @CV_Dalcher on X, read the sections of “Lexecution” that she’s putting up, and send an email to ann@storyaliz.com with LEXECUTION BOOK CLUB in the subject line. I will add you to the list, set up a Zoom, and we’ll go from there? Deal!

If we get critical mass, I might follow this with a séance. You’ll have to fly in, but I guarantee it’ll be worth it. We’re going to bring the spirit of literature back.