Reply to My Students Can’t Read: The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]There has been a catastrophic collapse in reading for pleasure. Real reading, not tik tok reading or whatever that is. And it's across the board, young and old. Just look at the new books published today, they're much shorter than the books of the 1980s and 1990s when a 100k word count was normal for even first time authors. 
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It's a combination of factors. The major one is certainly technology. When you spend all day on computers and phones, it's hard to pick up a book. Attention spans are warped by social media so the ability to sit down and get engaged in a book for a hour and really read it, not just the words but the meaning of what is being said, is dying out.

And it's also changes in publishing itself. There really hasn't been great books published for a while. The quality of the literary output, commercial fiction in general, has collapsed. I have friends who spent decades in and adjacent to the publishing world and they're frank about it, publishers are dominated by specific progressive viewpoints and won't publish anything different or critical. That's why there's no modern Dickens, even if our times cries for one. Tom Wolfe would never be published today. Donna Tartt probably wouldn't be published if she was a first time writer. The biggest reading audience are progressive women, but when you don't publish for other groups, they don't bother reading. So I can't blame people for losing interest in reading. And as they stop reading, the harder it is to develop the habits. [/quote]
Most people are uninterested in very long reads because most writers, even back then, don't have the chops to keep readers engaged for 600+ pages. Length alone isn't evidence of literary quality. And it's not true that long novels have disappeared: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara(800+ pages), The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese(700+ pages), etc. Fantasy, historical fiction, and literary fiction continue to consistently produce plenty of 500- to 1,000-page books.

The claim that publishers only publish one political viewpoint also doesn't explain why genres with very different audiences—fantasy, romance, thriller, science fiction, literary fiction, manga, and nonfiction—continue to sell millions of copies. If there were a large, underserved audience for a modern Dickens or Tom Wolfe, publishers would have a strong financial incentive to find and promote one. Reading habits have certainly changed because people have more entertainment options competing for their attention. But that's different from saying good books no longer exist. There are probably more books being published today than at any point in history; the challenge is sorting through them, not finding them. If you're looking for a contemporary (Dick)ens, look at David Foster Wallace. The only reason the man isn't marveled as a current critic of the times is because he decided to off himself in Claremont.
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Nonsense. There are plenty of long reads of absolute excellence to keep the most active and engaged readers busy for a lifetime. Most of us are simply lacking the intellectual curiosity that we profess to admire so much, or the attention span required to engage for sustained levels. And I don’t think DFW would care one bit if he were revered. He would hope to be both wrong and obscure.  [/quote]

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