Opinion | Put Down the Phone and Pull Out a Book

Revel in words and writing. Let the world see you doing it.

By Meghan Cox Gurdon July 22, 2025 5:23 pm ET

Photo: Getty Images

Writers of horror and dystopian fiction often build tension by adding small tokens of dreadful approach to placid, ordinary circumstances. Everything seems fine, even as the characters glimpse the odd creepy thing. Only belatedly do those in the gathering drama realize they’re in the midst of something monstrous.

The same can be said of a culture in which reading is increasingly alien. Everything ticks along: Publishers still print books, libraries and bookstores still stock them, and some adults and children still read for pleasure. But we are surrounded by intimations of coming dystopia.

College English majors are losing the ability to interpret metaphorical language, as evidenced by the recent disclosure that only 5% of English majors at two midwestern schools could make sense of paragraphs from “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens. High school students taking the SAT are no longer expected to understand passages longer than 150 words. Activist schoolteachers for a decade have sidelined classic works of literature deliberately to rob them of readers and relevance. Young parents increasingly can’t be bothered to read aloud to their children.

These are darkening days for those of us who love books. But we needn’t drift apathetically into a horror story. The English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote of beauty that it is “vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter.” Well, that’s true of reading. It is vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter. We are on our phones.

Like characters in a scary story, we need to see that we are drifting toward disaster and save ourselves, before it’s too late. Each of us has the power to show that reading does matter. We can do it by reading—and being seen reading—with dedication, bravado and a bit of countercultural aggression. Be the person on the train who pulls out a paperback rather than a phone. Be the parent in the pediatrician’s waiting room who reads a story rather than letting your child zone out on a tablet. Be the spouse who chooses a novel after dinner over the television. Be the teacher who transfixes the class with a live reading rather than a canned video. Revive the old social norms by setting them yourself.

“Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov. “Then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish.” Be like Nabokov. Revel in words and in writing and let others see you doing it.

Poetry and literature are art forms that can lift a person from blinkered individual existence to sublime and broadened understanding. Books form a great reverberating conversation across the centuries, joining the minds of men and women long dead with those alive today. If we lose reading, we lose the connection, and we consign future generations to a kind of witless groping around in cultural obscurity. It is vital, though, to recognize where we are now. English majors are struggling to read Dickens. If we let this slide, in a decade we’ll be lucky if graduate students can parse “Fun with Dick and Jane.”

Mrs. Gurdon, a Journal contributor, is author of “The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction.”

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Appeared in the July 23, 2025, print edition as 'Put Down the Phone and Pull Out a Book'.