National Year of Reading celebrates the “pleasure” of books. But let’s not forget that it can also be deeply disturbing Charlotte Higgins

IIt’s National Reading Year in the UK. Specifically, this government-led scheme is about ‘reading for pleasure’ and ‘the joy of reading’. This is not a matter of whim. Research has linked reading for pleasure in childhood to a range of positive educational, social, and economic outcomes. But now – 14 years after the Department for Education, in a more innocent time, commissioned a brooding report on the issue – reading books for pleasure is an activity in crisis. This decline is usually caused by a smartphone and many short-term distractions; Recent research suggests that the mere presence of a smartphone in the room has an impact on our ability to focus. People seem to lose the mental means to get lost in literature.

There are a lot of things that seem a bit erratic here. If reading was really so much fun, wouldn’t people do it anyway? Isn’t there something of a contradiction between the idea of ​​reading “for pleasure” and the idea that engaging in this activity brings a lot of external benefits (all that extra “accomplishment”)? There’s something else too: Of course it’s not just the reading itself that’s important, but what you choose to read, and what you do with the experience of reading it. The anxiety surrounding smartphones today seems to have removed all the doubts and conditions that previous eras placed – sometimes sensibly – about reading. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Byron’s work – with all its “hopeless suffering” – is not recommended as sensible reading material for a sad man, and the reading of novels in her Northanger Abbey must be defended; Homer was excluded from Plato’s Republic partly because the poems include morally questionable scenes of gods behaving badly. I’m the last person who wants to ban Homer. But it is obvious that there are some books that may harm you, even if you enjoy reading them, and spending an entire day on the Internet may harm you.

“Reading” is not a virtue in itself. Reading is simply the act of making use of an evolving set of technologies—primarily, the alphabet, or whatever writing system your culture has acquired, but also manuscript, paper, the printing press, and the digital screen. Writing things down and having people be able to read them is very helpful for spreading information. When a text is made visible—visible, rereadable, and comparable with other texts—it opens up a wealth of fascinating intellectual, artistic, social, and political opportunities. However, I can imagine long-time traditionalists, at that time a bright spark using new technology to convert Homer’s epics to papyrus, bemoaning the fact that the alphabet was destroying the creative culture of orality, memory and improvisation.

Well, I like to read. And it may be true that, thanks to my continued attendance at the BBC’s National Year of Reading, I’ve made an effort in 2026 to put down the phone and turn off the TV in favor of reading. And yes, “for fun,” I guess, if that means outside of educational or workplace requirements. I’m lucky because this is part of a lifelong habit. I know I cannot overstate my luck in growing up in a family of readers, close to an excellent local library (Newcastle-under-Lyme Library, smaller now, but still wonderful, as I discovered on my recent visit). But the current unquestioned status of “reading” reminds me of the uncritical dread that now commonly circulates around the idea of ​​“storytelling.” In a 2014 essay, “This Told Life,” author Maria Tomarkin wrote: “I’m not against stories. In fact, I’m very much in favor of stories — a big fan of them, that’s what I am — but these days when I hear someone talk about the universal power of storytelling, I feel like reaching for my gun.” Her point was that packaging experience into carefully packaged “stories” often flattens the rough and resistant matter of human life; This is no everyone Thinking can be done through “storytelling”; “Storytelling” is an inadequate and weak description of what artists do, and “of what is transmitted between people, in the process of communication.”

Something similar happens in the way reading and other cultural activities that are perceived as threatening are labeled as “delightful.” In the headline of a recent article by James Murphy, chief executive of the Royal Philharmonic Society, he praised the “pleasure” of classical music. The article discussed the way in which it “elevates or consoles.” There is nothing incorrect about this. Classical music can be uplifting, and I have felt uplifted and solace by listening to or playing the music. However, for me, it is a very partial description of the emotional consequences of engaging in that strange category of art-making that stretches from Guillaume de Machaut and Gustav Mahler to Cassandra Miller. In an amateur orchestra recently, I was lucky enough to play violin in Brahms’ Symphony No. 3. Did it bring me happiness? It is a piece laden with melancholy and nostalgia, interspersed with moments of light. It brought me a sore neck (although that’s another story) and several days of intense expressions emanating from within its shadow-filled winter depths. Music can and often does bring joy. It may also lead to dissociation, confusion, anger, or waves of traumatic memory. Some of the primary relationships I had with art had nothing to do with “enjoyment.” I remember watching Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes on TV when I was a kid. It’s a perverse, strange, and visually gorgeous story about the oppressive relationships artists can have with each other and with their art. I didn’t “enjoy” it. It was too weird and compelling for that.

The same applies to reading. Classics writer Mary Beard, chair of this year’s Booker Prize jury, recently pointed out on X that nonfiction doesn’t seem to get as much attention in the way the National Year of Reading is being discussed. Perhaps absorbing a serious work of historical or scientific thought does not fit the obvious picture of “enjoyment.” The last book I read “for pleasure” was actually The Traveler by Ulrich Alexander Buschwitz. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I obsessed over him and was obsessed with him for the two days he had control over me. But to say I “enjoyed” would be ridiculous. Every 10 minutes or so, I would let go, declare I couldn’t take it anymore, and then involuntarily pick it up again. (Quickly written by a young Jewish author in 1938, and set in post-Kristallnacht Berlin.) Because he was immersed in the world described by that author with such electric force, the pleasure was beside the point. We can demand and expect more from reading than just enjoying it.