Post #172: To Read or Not to Read

19 Feb. 2025

“People have no idea what time and effort it requires to learn how to read properly. I’ve been working on it for eighty years, and even now I cannot say that I’ve reached the goal.”

—Goethe in conversation with Eckermann (25 Jan. 1830)

     I gather that it is hotly debated in some quarters whether listening to an audiobook “counts” as reading. The question isn’t very well put: reading is not a contest played for points, though it has often been reduced to just such a game—just another avenue for snobbery.

     A well-written, well-performed book is a work of art twice over, and you will hear this even more impressively than you will see it on the page. Bernard Mayes giving his voice to Burke’s Reflections or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, or Lolita performed by Jeremy Irons, or Heart of Darkness read by David Horovitch—hearing these may reduce a susceptible man to stunned awe or tears. It can be so with reading, too, but before a truly great audiobook the effect will be redoubled.

     Even so, is listening equivalent to reading? I think not, though it bears a passing resemblance to the kind of hurried glancing at letters that often gets mistaken for reading. To sit down with a book and work through it seriously will absorb your full attention; though you may come to enjoy such labors with practice, they demand considerable effort and concentration from everyone, no matter how experienced. (Take a look around, if you can still catch anyone—born after 1980 especially—with a reputable book, and see how long, or rather short, the intermittent stints of attention have become. Be warned: it’s a disheartening experiment if you care about the culture of reading.)

     However enjoyable it may be to listen to literature—my own experience goes back all the way to the last days of the audio-cassette, and I do really mean joy, commensurate with the sometimes stellar quality—such listening, I say, is not usually meant to absorb your full attention the way careful reading does as a matter of course. Audiobooks seem to go particularly well with driving (death-defying continental road trip in a U-Haul: the whole of Lolita), where it would get outright dangerous if more than partial attention were required; or with time otherwise wasted on buses (heavy doses of Gibbon for relief from the aesthetic squalor), on trains (Burke will do nicely), or on airplanes, provided you have noise-canceling earphones (Moby Dick read by William Hootkins).

     No matter how beautiful the performance, and however much it can bring prose to life in illuminating ways that might otherwise be missed, it was always reading the book, either before or after listening, that properly consolidated the text for me and that could in no wise be replaced by hearing it alone.* The other side of this coin is that a serious book (as opposed to the light fare that has ever been the human default, even in paper-happier times) will necessary mean a slow and sometimes tedious-seeming task that will in most cases feel like an intolerable chore to the untrained. How well or ill one must expect such diligent undertakings to be kept up in an age as rushed and attention-deficient as ours, assaulting us on all sides with so many readier sources of fun (or so our senses inform us before scrutiny), is surely not hard to foresee: about as well as a platter of celery sticks and carrots can compete with a tray of cocaine at a Hollywood party. Some will still prefer their veggies raw, but it takes great determination to so do consistently.

     Nor is reading as passive as it may appear. The purposeful kind, as opposed to merely running your eyes over a page, is difficult;** it demands active questioning and abundant reflection, or else it is not reading in the meaningful sense that some (like Alfred Jay Nock) have equated very nearly with learning and culture itself.*** Although proceeding in sequence, from back to front, remains the most customary, you are free to jump back and forth, mark salient passages, reread key sections: try doing that on YouTube! As a consequence of this active participation, serious perusals are much likelier to stick and stay with you, sometimes for life. Books worked through in this manner may become friends, not just passing acquaintances, even if the friendships may often prove troublesome. (Disagreement and disputes too can forge closeness.) The right books are bracing and uplifting, as Nock expressed it, while the wrong books are disabling and pernicious, or a waste of time at best (Nock 194). In a life well-lived, choosing your company carefully is of the essence.

     Admittedly the turn away from reading towards listening takes us back to a mode that is more natural and original to the species. Oral culture, after all, predates writing not only by thousands of years, but by thousands of generations, and until very recently, meaning no more than a century or two, it was only ever a tiny learned class that could read reliably. This began changing, very slowly, only with Gutenberg, then gathered pace through the 18th century and did not reach the masses until the 19th or 20th, depending on locale. It was the turn towards reading as a mass aspiration that was the anomaly, in other words, not the reversion we are now witnessing. Accordingly, bookish types are not likely to die out altogether; they will just be forced to retreat further and further into the universities, as they once did to the monasteries. Whether that looks like a tragedy, or not, will depend on your orientation and past experience.

     What is certain, meanwhile, is that the transformation in recent years has been so rapid and momentous as to be almost violent: when newspapers have all but disappeared from the cityscapes of London and Oxford (they were alive and well a decade ago), and when cafés known for putting up a respectable selection on hooks in Berlin or Vienna are now down to one or two paltry displays, if any, we can hardly doubt that the world has changed dramatically, and that the life of the mind will not be the same.

     The loss is real, whether one is inclined to mourn it or not. It will be most sharply felt by those most invested in it, naturally, who have put their hearts and their aching backs into the business for decades; but the repercussions will not stop there, with only a few hardened devotees. The idea that citizens ought to be readers used to be so deeply intertwined with the ideals of popular government that one wonders what will happen to the latter in the absence of the former. Neil Postman laid out this case unforgettably in his prophetic Amusing Ourselves to Death (the historical survey, in chapters 3 and 4, of America once leading the world in literacy makes for particularly melancholy reflections). Who would have thought that his dark forebodings would sound even more timely forty years later than at the time of publication!

     German has a quaint term that I first encountered, aptly enough, in Stefan Zweig’s Welt von gestern: “Buchglaube,” that is, faith in the power of reading. Like all faiths, it is open to charges of superstition when more “progressive” notions sweep the field; but like all ancestral creeds, it was with us long enough to allow for a defense on grounds not only of tradition, but of time-honored rationality as well. Much of our intellectual patrimony was shaped to its parameters, and if we take it all to the attic, or allow it to be thrown out with the garbage, we will not be able to replace it easily, or at all.

     What is at stake is not only the preservation of an ancient art—the art of writing even more than of reading, though the two cannot be separated: no one has ever become truly good at one without doing plenty of the other, and that goes even for bots who still need to work their way through libraries, even if they can do it in an instant. It is a question of structuring reality itself, of living by logos on the page, an authority not to be followed blindly, but to be questioned and weighed, reconsidered and weighed again in the unshakable conviction that it is worthwhile (indeed imperative) to keep sifting and refining our rational faculties in an attempt to give coherence to our mental world. Not that the human sense we can thus make of our condition will ever be beyond challenge (even what seems beyond falsification today may turn out otherwise tomorrow), but that inchoate rambling, rife self-contradiction, and a general lassitude towards the rigors of sound argumentation is not amusing or entertaining (on the page at least), but contemptible, irresponsible, and menacing.† Even if there were no way to prevail over the combined forces of all that is arraigned against higher literacy in our day, there is still every reason to keep fighting the good fight, not with hopes of victory, but to the end of honorable defeat.

     (To the memory of Library Café off Sukhumvit Soi 24, my almost daily refuge for over eight years—a rare spot where largely undisturbed and focused reading was still occasionally possible in the storm-gales of the past decade. I was advised today, with less than a week’s notice, that it will close for good on the 25th. Another heavy nail in the coffin.)

*Traditional parlance rightly insists, on the authority of eight hundred years of European university experience, that one goes to hear lectures (perhaps helpful but not required), one sits for exams, but one reads the subject. It is telling that under the new dispensation (witness YouTube and derivatives such as Peterson’s Academy), the first is to be nearly everything; the second, not much; the third, hardly anything at all. (Peterson, who is nothing if not a book-shaped thinker, has evidently concluded, as the premise of his enterprise, that it will now suffice, for the masses at least, to hear his own authoritative digests, or the voices of those whom he deems almost as prophetic or heroic as his own. One may have reservations about this method of education even if one would not challenge the quality of the contents, as far as they go.)

**Alfred Jay Knock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (Harper & Bros. 1943), p. 39.

***Thus Knock, p. 194: “Culture is knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world; in other words, culture means reading—not idle and casual reading, but reading that is controlled and directed by a definite purpose.”

†Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (Penguin 2006), pp. 50–51: “Reading is by its nature a serious business; it is also an essentially rational activity… In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, or try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don’t notice, or even worse, don’t care… It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with the growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America. The spread of typography kindled the hope that the world and its manifold mysteries could at last be comprehended, predicted, controlled. The printed page revealed the world, line by line, page by page, to be a serious, coherent place, capable of management by reason, and of improvement by logical and relevant criticism.”