Another "Reading Is Dead" Book Just Dropped, And Critics Are Rolling Their Eyes

There’s a new entry in the“reading is dying”genre, and it’s called“The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.”Author James Marriott argues that smartphones, AI and short-form video are eroding literacy, and that democracy itself depends on our ability to sit with long-form text. Slate’s Will Oremus reviewed it and landed on a familiar verdict: correct diagnosis, recycled prescription.

The review points out that we’ve been getting versions of this warning for 25 years, from Nicholas Carr’s 2008 essay“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”to Rose Horowitch’s Atlantic cover story this summer. Marriott’s twist is the stakes: he says we’re returning to“secondary orality,”a culture of superstition and tribalism. And yes, the book really does claim nobody reads War and Peace because it’s too long and not that interesting.

The sharper criticism is that after all the doom, the book offers no remedies for our tech addiction. It’s gloom without a game plan. Which raises the question the review leaves us with: the issue may not be whether reading is declining, but what any of us are actually going to do about it. So what’s your move?