by John Battle
One of the greatest gifts my mother gave me very early in life was the ability to read. I could read before I got to primary school at five, but, regrettably,was a disruptive child in the class until a teacher, to whom I'm eternally indebted, pulled me out and sent me with an exercise book and pencil to the public library to study on my own for a day. It couldn't happen now of course but that day inculcated in me a lifelong love of libraries and books.
Amid the usual bleak news and daily tragedies this last month emerged an enheartening story in the reports of the death of the country singer Dolly Parton. She founded a charity the "Imagination Library" in honour and memory of her Father who was illiterate, that distributes free books to children from birth to the age of five.She started it in her home of Tennessee and it has since
delivered over 300 million books worldwide, including supporting a reading project in Doncaster in the UK. The Imagination Library has been described as the biggest philanthropic contribution to literacy since Andrew Carnegie's libraries.
delivered over 300 million books worldwide, including supporting a reading project in Doncaster in the UK. The Imagination Library has been described as the biggest philanthropic contribution to literacy since Andrew Carnegie's libraries.
Here the award screen and children's writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, who from 2024 was the children's laureate, has made a huge contribution to encourage in reading, not least through the charity The Reader Organisation, championing a return to books for young people in the digital age.
In "The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post Literate Society", published recently, James Marriot spells out that more than half of UK adults say they have given up reading altogether. And in the last 20 years, reading for pleasure in the USA has fallen by 40%.
Paradoxically, this is in the face of huge increases in the number of books published. In the UK over 177,000 books a year are now published, the largest expansion since 2005. Some 190 million books were sold in the UK in 2025, yet there has been a real decline in the sustained voluntary reading of printed books. In the USA, only 45% of the population read at least one book a year. a decline from 61% in serious and leisure reading, though there has been a move to audio and e-books.
In the UK, it is children's reading that is in serious decline.The National Literacy Trust spells out that since 2005, it has fallen from 38.1% to 18.7%.
Fewer young people are picking up books and are rather fixed onto their digital devices and screens watching videos, gaming, streaming, podcasts and sometimes e-books and audiobooks.
In 1985, Neil Postman in "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness" warned of the impact of TV on our society's abilities to be attentive. Now social media has greatly amplified the impact of the delivery of quick, short time attention 'moments', presented in bite-size chunks. James Marriot cites the prescient remark of the 18th century literary giant Samuel Johnson: "People in general do not willingly read if they can have anything else to amuse them."
Interestingly, Marriott goes on to refer to the work of Fr Walter J Ong SJ whose "Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word" (1982) suggested that without writing and reading societies become "agonistically programmed", with an inherent bias towards confrontation. Walter Ong wrote "not only in the use to which knowledge is put but also in the celebration of physical behaviour, oral cultures revealed themselves as agonistically programmed", that is as competitive and contest orientated. He proposes that reading and writing "foster abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena were human beings just struggle with one another".
Reading therefore can be an antidote to conflict and violence.
The American writer George Saunders suggested that:
"reading is a form of prayer... a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we are someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the centre of the universe... suddenly (we're saved), other people are real again and we're fond of them.".
The idea of "reading as prayer" is long-standing in the Christian tradition.
Erasmus regarded reading the Gospel as a form of prayer, as through the text Christ becomes present to the reader. The ancient prayerful practice in the Church of "Lectio Divina", with its roots in early monasticism, encourages us to treat reading as prayerful reflection on the Scriptures, and to treat the text not as a source of new knowledge but as a personal transformative interaction. Of course it matters what material we read but perhaps it's a time to turn again to quiet personal reading of the Scriptures as a contribution to the continuation of the practice of reading.
