Does Anybody Read Books Anymore?

It was brilliantly done in the Children of Men, the growing realisation that babies had stopped being born. Midwives began calling other maternity units asking if they had any births booked in. “No…” they all slowly replied. I am reminded of this scene when I talk to children about reading books. “Do you,” I ask hopefully, “read books?”

“No…” they all slowly reply.

What is even more chilling is the number of adults who have also stopped. We may buy them, but do we read them? I think the evidence of the past 20 years, or at least since the iPhone came on stream, suggests conclusively that people have stopped reading properly and allowed their empty minds to be filled with utter garbage. We are approaching the time in Anglo Saxon England, before Alfred the Great pulled things together, when there was only one man left in the country who knew what those funny shapes on bits of parchment meant.

I mentor children in state schools with a view to encouraging them to apply to decent universities. I have been doing so for over three years with a growing sense of panic. According to someone who might know, it’s only 10 books that mark out a successful prospective applicant to Oxbridge. Ten books read on top of the usual books that decent Universities once expected sparky students to have read by the age of 18. I raised this idea recently and one bright boy had a good think about this and said slowly, “I think I’ve read five.” He seemed quite pleased with himself. We then realised he meant five books in total. The other children in the group looked impressed. One shook her head and said, “They made me read in primary school and as soon as I left, I stopped.”

I teach a segment on developing opinions and we stage debates. Often, they end up being about God or climate change. At no point yet have I met any child who has read any part of the Bible or the IPCC report – but their opinions about such matters are strident. And these are the bright ones; I have no doubt they will do extremely well in their GCSEs.

“Oh, stop being snobby,” shouts my husband from his book-lined study, “Of course children read books, just not the ones you like.”  He’s wrong. They don’t. With every new session of mentees we talk about the books we’re reading. It’s a pretty thin selection: Colleen Hoover and the Bridgerton series, until one girl said, “Sorry not Bridgerton, I thought you meant books on television.” I also ask children about their daily screen time on phones – for the boys it’s an average of two hours, for the girls between three and four. That’s on top of a full day at school. No wonder there’s no time for reading. With the less academic children I mentor, we’re talking about six hours screen time a day. The record is 13 hours a day.

The same applies to adults; we’re all too busy on our phones to read a book. I am writing this opposite the spine of The Earth Transformed, a vast 700-page tome by Peter Frankopan, bought for the pretty map printed on the edges of its pages, now unseen on the shelf. It is unthinkable that either I or my husband will read it. Has anyone? Honestly?

Andrew Tate tells his followers (he has nine million on X) not to bother with books. How many of us roll our eyes half-heartedly about the fact out children ‘don’t read’? Consider your book clubs: how many members never ever read the book? We are already at the stage when people are so proud of reading a book they post pictures of themselves doing so: just think of Owen Jones holding aloft Das Kapital or Laurence Fox taking Hannah Arendt on holiday. Dominic Cummings is so chuffed when he’s finished a reading a book he writes a blog about it. Is the only reason The Rest is History is so brilliant because Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland read books and can talk about them – like most people used to? I have a childhood memory of my Grandfather and Great Uncle (ordinary folk who lived in a village) having a lively conversation about Disraeli’s novels. Today, this conversation about books and ideas would be so startling it would have been made into a podcast.

Quite possibly we’ve always been a nation of book dodgers – happy to leave it to monks, then the clergy and eventually the universities.

My fear is now that even the elites have stopped reading. Or at least stopped reading anything decent. Can we believe that Rishi Sunak’s favourite book is Riders by Jilly Cooper? Keir Starmer apparently tried to write one, but can’t. Or perhaps he has, but no-one’s read it. I do believe Boris Johnson once read books at school and perhaps at university. But he can’t possibly have read any since, because otherwise he wouldn’t have behaved in the way he did.

Does anyone apart from Cummings and Tom Holland read Thucydides? I mean the real deal. Have any of the morons trying to lead the country read The Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius (the one Elizabeth I translated in 18 hours), or the New Testament, or the Psalms, or any Epictetus or Tacitus? Reading just one of these books stuns. All are so utterly superior to anything on the Sunday Times top 10 best-seller list, any newspaper column, Substack offering, or any of the dire papers printed by any think tank. And let us not speak of Richard Osman.

Imagine how different Scotland would be if Humza Yousaf had read Areopagitica by John Milton. Surely if Johnson, Sunak, Truss and Biden had read War and Peace they would know not to attempt to take on Russia in Europe? Imagine how immeasurably all of our souls would be improved if teachers read and conveyed the wisdom within Cicero’s Tusculum Disputations.

A reading renaissance is due. A real one, where just a select few books are read by MPs, civil servants and heads of NGOs, from cover to cover: the Gospel of St. Luke (to learn love and forgiveness), the Acts of the Apostles (to learn the muddle of ushering in new ideas in a hostile age), Anna Karenina (the flawed nature of humans), and Middlemarch, (how society changes with industrialisation and the folly of being an idealist) would be a good place to start. And if the prospect of reading four books is too much for us, the Dark Ages have already dawned.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.