The book, that ancient vessel of human thought, once stood as a beacon of civilisation, guiding us through the tempests of existence with wisdom from Socrates to Shakespeare. But in 2025, as Dr. Nicholas Tate's lament in The Critic suggests (see link below), the act of reading for meaning, for grappling with life's big questions, seems to be teetering on the edge of extinction. With France's rentrée littéraire churning out 484 new novels, many dismissed as ambitionless pulp, and UK surveys revealing a grim decline in reading enthusiasm (40% of adults haven't cracked a book in a year, and only 32.7% of kids enjoy reading in their free time), the question looms: is reading destined to crumble like the ruins of Rome, another casualty of a civilisation too distracted to care?
Let's face the grim numbers first. The YouGov poll Tate cites paints a bleak picture: half of UK adults didn't buy a single book last year, and 40% didn't read or listen to one either. For children, the National Literacy Trust's findings are even more dire, only 32.7% enjoy reading, a historic low, with England's kids lagging far behind the international average (29% "very much like" to read vs. 46% globally). These aren't just statistics; they're a cultural klaxon. Reading, once the cornerstone of self-improvement and intellectual life, is being shoved to the margins, replaced by the dopamine hits of TikTok and the endless scroll of social media. If even the French, those eternal champions of la culture, are fretting over a "post-literature" world, as philosopher Alan Finkielkraut warns, what hope is there for the rest of us?
The decline isn't just about numbers; it's about what reading represents. As Tate and sociologist Frank Furedi argue, books have long been more than ink on paper. From Hebraic scrolls to modernist novels, they've been tools for wrestling with existence, for forging ethical selves, for building the high culture that gave us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and beyond. But today, reading is increasingly reduced to a utilitarian chore. Schools, Furedi notes, have become "sites for skills training," churning out functional literates who can decode a text, but not love it. The 20% of the population lacking even functional literacy is a problem we can fix with policy and phonics. The deeper crisis, the erosion of reading as a cultural act, a way to confront life's meaning and mortality, is a wound that cuts to the soul of civilisation itself.
The culprits are legion, and they're not new. Finkielkraut points the finger at economic and technological forces: cinema, radio, TV, and now the internet have steadily displaced serious reading. Social media, with its 280-character profundities, is the latest nail in the coffin, turning attention spans into confetti. But the betrayal runs deeper. The elite, once the guardians of high culture, have abandoned their post. In France, Finkielkraut decries a bourgeoisie that sneers at its own heritage, aping rebellion while worshipping the present. In the UK, Tate echoes this, noting how cultural gatekeepers like publishers and universities act as "political commissars," censoring or sidelining books that don't fit the day's dogma. When even Emmanuel Macron declares there's no such thing as "French culture," only a "diverse culture in France," you know the barbarians aren't at the gates, they're redecorating the library, then burning it down. And ruling France.
This isn't just a crisis of reading; it's a crisis of Western civilisation's foundations. If the brightest minds, Oxford tutors are already sounding alarms, can't engage with dense texts, how will we pass on the ideas that built the West? Christianity, Romanticism, modernism, these weren't just movements; they were conversations across centuries, sustained by books. Without them, we're not just losing stories; we're losing the ability to think deeply, to critique, to build anew. Finkielkraut's fear of a "post-literature" world, where books survive only in the "catacombs" of a woke-resistant underground, feels less like Gallic hyperbole and more like a prophecy. A civilisation that can't read its own canon is a civilisation that's forgotten how to dream. And think.
But is the death of reading inevitable? Tate offers three lifelines, though they're more battle cries than quick fixes. First, fight the cultural gatekeepers, publishers, libraries, universities, who stifle dissenting voices and bury challenging books. Second, reorient schools to transmit heritage, not ideology, stuffing curricula with Balzac and Bunyan, not just "relevant" modern takes. Third, revive the university as a bastion of liberal education, where students read great books, not for skills but for wisdom, as the new University of Austin is trying. These are noble, but they're up against a tide of apathy and algorithms. TikTok book clubs and AI-summarised Bleak House in 15 minutes, might lure some back, but they're Band-Aids on a broken leg; Finkielkraut's disdain for such gimmicks is hard to argue with.
The truth stings: reading's decline mirrors a broader unravelling. When we prioritise clicks over contemplation, when elites scorn their own inheritance, when schools teach compliance over curiosity, we're not just losing books, we're losing the capacity to be human in the fullest sense. Civilisation isn't doomed yet, but it's on life support. If we can't rediscover the "virtues of reading," as Furedi calls them, we risk becoming a society that's illiterate, connected but clueless, vaguely alive but not fully living. The book isn't dead, but it's gasping. Save it, and we might just save ourselves.