Will we ever read books again?

0:00Katherine Rundell:This is The Guardian.

0:07Katherine Rundell:Today, how to rekindle your love of reading.

0:18Katherine Rundell:Did you used to love reading books? I did. I would read on the train, in the bath, in bed. I was never knowingly without a book. And then I got an iPhone. And now I spend an average of four hours a day faffing about online and can only get through a novel when I'm on holiday.

0:36Anushka Asthana:And it's not just me. I went through a moment at which I could feel my attention leeching out of my skin. I could feel that the way I was able to engage with the text had corroded so badly over the last decade that I decided that I would have to take sort of fairly dramatic measures.

0:56Katherine Rundell:This is Catherine Rundle. She's an award-winning children's author and an English literature scholar at Oxford University. And even she found herself struggling to get through a book. So she sought help.

1:08Anushka Asthana:So I now have an enormous amount of tools, physical tools, to try to keep my brain on the path which it used to find easy to walk. Meet Catherine's Brick.

1:25Anushka Asthana:I have it nearby. Would you like me to grab it for you? OK. This is not a paid advert for the brick, which is a small plastic. It's an actual physical thing. You tap it to your phone. And when you tap it to your phone, you can block an enormous number of things on your phone. So I have blocked on my phone everything except WhatsApp, maps, music, audiobooks, and that's it. so I cannot check my email on my phone. It has no internet. It essentially functions like a phone from 10 years ago.

1:59Katherine Rundell:And when the brick isn't enough, she has a safe.

2:02Anushka Asthana:I also have a lockbox with a timer at the top where I put my phone in it so that I can't even check messages. And then I turn off the internet in my house and, if need be, put the router into the lockbox so that I can just sit and read and write and think. And the freedom that I felt that giving me very quickly was really remarkable.

2:35Katherine Rundell:All over the world, reading is in trouble. And children are losing their love of books fast. In the UK, the number of children who say they read outside of school every day has halved in the last 20 years. But what do we lose when we stop reading for fun? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus. How can we get off our phones and back into books?

3:04Katherine Rundell:Catherine Rundle, welcome to Today in Focus. Hello, thank you so much for having me. So for our youngest listeners, you will need no introduction because you're a best-selling and multi-award-winning children's author, perhaps most famous for Impossible Creatures, which was Waterstone's Book of the Year in 2023. and Rooftoppers, which in 2015 won the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for the best story. But you are also an academic. You're a fellow at St Catherine's College in Oxford. And we're talking today about the crisis in reading, but surely that does not apply to your students.

3:39Anushka Asthana:Does it apply to Oxford students, the reading crisis? I'm afraid I think it probably applies to every person in Britain at the moment. I think the exceptions are so vastly smaller than the rule. I think it does apply to my students. The main thing that everyone is reporting is the cliff edge over which reading has gone in the last few years. And the total transformation in the way that universities across the West are having to operate, faced with the advent of large language models like ChatGPT, and the way that those large language models have just put a grenade at the heart of thousands of years of the way that we have thought about scholarship and knowledge.

4:23Katherine Rundell:And do you think with the students' use of ChatGPT it's simply them looking for shortcuts or is it that they, like so many of us, have just got such scattered minds now that we struggle to finish a novel?

4:36Anushka Asthana:Young people have not got worse. what has got much much worse is the knowledge ecosystem in which they were brought up and the ways in which their minds have been formed so it is much harder for them to sit in a room and read chapter after chapter of Wuthering Heights a friend of mine is a 70 year old professor at Harvard and she said you used to very easily be able to give them you know something like The Sound and the Fury or a relatively short novel you could give them Emma and they would read it in a week it's not that hard now you have to assume that none of them will be able to do that and I think when you think about what that means at Harvard these brilliant young people and of course there will be exceptions there won't be people listening to this being like I have absolutely read Emma and I have absolutely read The Sound and the Fury and these kids of course exist.

5:31Anushka Asthana:But they didn't used to be the exception. They used to be the rule. And that is the dangerous moment we are entering.

5:46Katherine Rundell:For me, reading a book never used to be work. I was an absolute archetypal bookworm as a child. When we would go to the library every week, I would get my full quota of six books, eight books. I would have devoured them all by the time we went in the next week. But I just wonder, are children still reading like they used to?

6:05Anushka Asthana:So I think this is the question that we all need to be thinking about every day when we wake up and put on our trousers. The thing we need to be thinking about is the crisis in reading among young people, because it is a real crisis. We have a couple of brilliant charities in this country, the National Literacy Trust and Book Trust, both of which work with literacy and reading children and, in the case of the National Literary Trust, with adults across the entire UK and Northern Ireland. And for the last 20 years, the NLP has been doing surveys of children asking about their reported reading habits and the pleasure that they express in reading.

6:45Anushka Asthana:So there have been, in the last two decades, a 36 % fall in the number of children who say that they enjoy reading. and the number of children who say that they read outside of school every day has halved in the last 20 years.

7:02Katherine Rundell:Oh that's sad.

7:04Anushka Asthana:One of the things that has happened is that this used to be a crisis that also had a very distinct gap between children in vulnerable homes and poorer children and those children who are more well off but what has now happened is that children who are more off have now come down to the same reading level as children who we know are on free school meals from more vulnerable households. So now the gap is about a 2 % percentage point. There are so many reasons for that.

7:32Katherine Rundell:Yeah, why? Why are children not reading if it's not simply whether you can afford a book or not?

7:38Anushka Asthana:Right. So I think it is a couple of things that we can absolutely pinpoint point very clearly. One of them is the COVID-19 crisis. So the ways in which COVID broke for children continuity, it broke their experience of the group, it broke the idea that you might read a book and come in and talk about it, it broke the idea of reading as something you might do in a fairly communal way. We also know that a lot of it is to do with austerity and the way that library access has been decimated over the last 20 years. More than 800 libraries have been closed. And we know that that meant that books being in the ecosystem for people of all economic backgrounds, suddenly that was torpedoed.

8:25Anushka Asthana:And then I think we have to acknowledge that an enormous amount of it is to do with cell phones and social media and the global attention crisis. And then I think one of the things to acknowledge is that when we talk about young people and phones, we need to talk about it in terms of yes attention that it is eating their attention like a wolf but also what books are being replaced with that they are being replaced with turbocharged misogyny with deep fakes with ai slop with disinformation and i think that comes back to why reading has never been more important it's not that young people are not engaging with words They are flooded with words.

9:05Katherine Rundell:Yeah, I was going to say.

9:06Anushka Asthana:You know, what we need is skilled readers. We need readers who are sufficiently familiar with the cadences of truth and knowledge that they can tell when they are being fed facts that seem deeply implausible or data that is being misused. And you will not manage to build adults who are sophisticated and nuanced thinkers about justice, about power, about love, about health. if you don't first create a generation of children who love reading. Because if we don't, what we have coming down the line is a real danger in the way that people will engage with each other and with power. And it's really interesting how you said that children need to engage with books.

9:54Katherine Rundell:And I presume you were talking about fiction there in order to learn the skills that will enable them to differentiate between fake news and real news. And I just wanted to explore a little bit more about what children can get from books, because I think back to particularly when I was a sort of young teenager, I was absolutely addicted to books by this American author, Judy Blume.

10:14Anushka Asthana:One of the greats of all time.

10:16Katherine Rundell:Yes, exactly. So there was a book called Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, which is all about getting your period. And honestly, I learned more from that book than I probably did during any of my PSE lessons at school. But what do you think children get from reading fiction?

10:33Anushka Asthana:they get from books a sense that the world is colossal and it awaits them but I think what children get from books is a list that could be potentially infinite what children get from books are good jokes they can steal what children get from books are characters who come to feel like they're friends they get from books information that they might not be able to glean from the world around them because they might be embarrassed to ask. There is not just fiction, but also nonfiction. There are ways that children can engage with the world in ways that are carefully prepared for them in a way that the world itself is not.

11:11Anushka Asthana:When children enter a fictional world, they can understand the entirety of it. As a nine-year-old, I could not understand the world in which I live because it was deeply opaque and strange. But Narnia, I could understand because Narnia through the wardrobe through the wardrobe and when you were in it was a world designed for a child to understand it you get a sense of exploration I think books offer children a sense of the world not only is colossal but also is full of people just like them who have understood them who have gone through the same pains and the same desires you get a sense from books that the world is full of people entirely unlike you.

11:51Anushka Asthana:You get a sense from books of the world as being full of human difference and strangeness and therefore that there is more than one way of living a strong, bold, funny, clever, wise, warm, generous life. And then I guess finally the thing that reading can do is it is one of the easiest ways to build a family memory that has warmth at its heart. when you read to a child you are introducing them to books you are introducing them to knowledge to ways to work towards justice and political change but you're also just saying I love you and for this moment you and I will sit together under a blanket and we will turn the pages of the book and this moment belongs only to you and me you make me feel very nostalgic for lying in

12:38Katherine Rundell:bed with my dad and him reading The Magic Faraway Tree to me, one of my absolute favourites from Enid Blyton. I adored those books. There's a slippery slip that was hidden in the side of a tree. Anyway, I digress. Let's talk a bit about solutions. You make such a powerful case for why reading matters, particularly for children. So what can we do to reverse this trend and get children reading again?

13:01Anushka Asthana:So I think we would need to have two tranches. One of them, I think, would have to be at the legislative level. So I think, for instance, one of the things that the government announced is that they were going to aim to have a library in every primary school, which is wonderful. Currently, one in seven primary schools do not have a library, and one in four primary schools in more deprived areas do not have a library. That is a shocking shame and needs to change. But a library without a librarian is not that valuable. It can become an empty room that children rarely visit. Children need someone to pull them in.

13:42So we need libraries with librarians.

13:47Anushka Asthana:And I think that we need it not just at primary school. I think we treat the drop-off, the very dramatic drop-off that happens in reading for pleasure in secondary school as if it were in some way inevitable, but it is not inevitable. It need not happen. There are ways that can be reversed. So I would also argue every school needs to have a library, primary and secondary school. And then I think the other piece of legislation, there's a lot of debate about the moment about whether or not social media bans for the under 16s are viable or a valuable piece of legislation. I I personally have come to lean very strongly in favour of that.

14:25Anushka Asthana:I think social media has become a way in which a child's most valuable thing, which is their childhood, has been sold by billionaires to advertisers. And that seems to me a thing that we should be more angry about. So then again, that would be a legislative change. But then I guess the other thing would be when we talk about a reading crisis in children, I think we need to look at adults. We need to look at what we are doing. We need to treat this not just as a problem for primary school teachers and mums of seven year olds and treat it as a universal cultural urgency that every person, parent or not, needs to engage with.

15:12Anushka Asthana:But particularly parents need to read in front of their children. And if you are reading a book on your phone, it doesn't count because they can't tell. So you need to be visibly reading a book in front of them. Because if you don't read, why would your children read? Children do what you do.

15:38Katherine Rundell:throughout this conversation smartphones and tablets and social media have loomed very large but i've also got on one shoulder the voice of my 16 year old niece who is an absolute social media maven but she also reads a lot and she gets all of her book recommendations from tiktok from BookTok. She's always posting selfies, pictures of all of the books that she's read this year. So is there no world in which social media could be a good thing?

16:05Anushka Asthana:I mean, I think this is one of the great difficulties, isn't it? That for young people, one of the great ways that they have found community, particularly children from backgrounds which might leave them vulnerable, trans youth or LGBTQ kids, my stance would be that is one of the greatest things that social media has given us but the destruction that it has wrought, the cost is too high. My partner has a 14-year-old daughter, a brilliant, funny, fantastically warm and generous kid and I think if someone told me she can go to this play park and in this play park she might meet one of the best friends of her life but also there will be a man in this play park shouting disinformation about Covid vaccines and there will also be a pedophile and there will also be somebody who is insisting that women deserve to belong not only in the kitchen but potentially shouldn't vote.

17:07Anushka Asthana:I would not let her go to that play park. I think even though those communities are so valuable, they are currently in the current form in which they exist. They take place on a platform which does such harm to our brilliant, funny, clever teens that I think it is too high a cost.