Karl Petersen author

I sat up, stunned in my tracks. I’d run across an article in the August issue of The Atlantic that caught my breath, titled “The End of Reading.”

The writer, Rose Horowitch, spent months studying reading habits in the U.S. I doubt the results would be much different in Canada. Her findings, I think, should send shivers down anyone’s spine.

“The share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has fallen by 40 percent over the past two decades. In 2022, fewer than half of all adults had read a book of any kind in the prior year. Only 38 percent had read a novel or a short story.”

Note that these figures are from covid days, when you might expect we had more time for reading. Saddening statistics for any serious reader or writer. Horowitch goes on to speculate as to the reasons, which you may have guessed for yourself.

“People’s lives are filled with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions. But these snippets of text have crowded out the time necessary for sustained reading of complex texts. And over time, people have lost the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.”

Is our attachment to our mile-a-minute-info devices stealing our ability to concentrate long enough to get through a book? Oh, we read, yes, lots. Mostly garbage, I would suggest. Not to mention, we are letting AI create our garbage and then deliver it for us.

We’ve become rabid hunter-gatherers of information at a rate we’ve never seen before. And we’re quite proud to be here, a new era of human history! But what we’ve created is a modern-day Tower of Babble, resulting in less communication, not more or better, in spite of what we may think. And by surrendering our minds to garbage piles of information, texts with garbled grammar, and impulse chats and bots, at the expense of time devoted to sustained reading, I fear we are on a long decline to human brain atrophy.

The antidote? Deep sustained reading required by a book fosters critical thought. One must do the work of relating one piece of text to another and to the whole. Deep reading requires not only the logic of putting words together into meaning but also the imagination and intuition to understand subtext, inference, bias, themes, and emotion.

Here’s the kicker for me. We’ve conditioned ourselves to prefer information over formation, formation toward wholeness, to be fully human. The wonderful byproduct of books, as you may have experienced, is personal empathy and inner confidence, which comes from a deeper understanding of human nature and the world. This is what deep reading does, particularly reading good stories, both fiction and non-fiction.

So why am I so worked up about this?

For one, I’m striving to improve my craft as a writer. I have a passion for books and that the good ones actually be read, not just used to decorate our walls. Second, I’ve devoted my life to teaching, in particular, the skills of reading and writing. So, this is my bailiwick, my life’s work. After reading The Atlantic article, a broader purpose dawned on me with unfiltered light, resulting in my unfiltered mouth. My role as writer and educator have never been more tightly bound. At the risk of sounding grandiose, I’m one of millions of writers and teachers on a mission: to save the human race from brain atrophy.

Why don’t you join me in this resistance against brain atrophy? Read books, start a book club, talk about books with your friends, what you like or don’t like, and why. Make book titles and authors a topic of party chatter. You’ll sound smarter and become smarter too.