The Atlantic called it. It's the end of reading... dense literature

Someone get Rose Horowitch a new book, stat

The reading world is in a tailspin after Rose Horowitch published a 7,000+ word article entitled “The End of Reading” in The Atlantic.

Horowitch is absolutely right that attention spans have shortened and the average person is less likely to pick up a book (or read a 7,000 word article) in comparison to past decades, given all the new and shiny distractions offered by technology.

But to call it “the end of reading” is misleading.

Not all books are dense, classic literature like the examples given in her article. I consider myself an avid, voracious reader from a young age and I have never had the patience or interest to read Shakespeare or other classics. It’s not my taste. Give me a historical fiction novel and I will devour it. It is long form prose that requires attention over hours, days (and even weeks). To take the following passage and draw from that the conclusion that young people these days are ushering in “the end of reading” is a long bow to draw:

In a study of English and English-education majors at two regional universities in Kansas, published in 2024, researchers asked students to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House. The novel follows members of the Jarndyce family through a lengthy legal dispute over their inheritance. It begins:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage.

“So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London. Dickens continues by describing the Lord Chancellor as he is “addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief.” Another student interpreted this passage as “describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers? A cat?”

If Dickens went to pitch this manuscript to an agent today, he wouldn’t even receive an email back. Not because Dickens isn’t brilliant, but because literature and our taste for it has changed. It does not mean that reading is over.

Storytelling is a bedrock of the human experience.

Reading has changed, and it will continue to change.

Our taste for it will evolve and, in many ways, reflect the broader changes to our world and society. I know countless people who became readers for the first time in their lives during pandemic lockdowns. The ability to dive into a page and enter another world built by our imagination will always have a place.

So please, if Rose Horowitch thinks reading = Dickens, can someone please guide her to a Kristin Hannah novel or a copy of The Spoon and the Sea?