This post was written by Rex P. Nielson, Director of the BYU Humanities Center.
The constant barrage of distressing news stories took a toll on me last summer. Perhaps you can relate. Headlines of crisis impacting nearly every dimension of my personal, social, professional, and political life seemed to reach a fever pitch around the summer solstice, leaving me in a state of precarious wobble between agitation and despondency. Responding to an urgent need for some mental selfcare, I endeavored to insulate myself from a world I could only view as a constellation of “points of aggression,” to use Hartmut Rosa’s term. In that moment, I blamed the media for my anxiety and took a radical step: I shut down my phone’s news app, blocked my usual news aggregate sites, and intentionally avoided newspapers and magazines. In short, I stopped reading.
Claims that we are losing and even rejecting our habits of reading as a society have sadly become commonplace. Articles with titles like “Reading: a Habit in Decline” or “The Lamentable Decline of Reading” or even “Is Reading Still Relevant?” form part of a growing archive of texts that describe a society experiencing dramatic cultural transformations. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 23% of adults did not read a book in any form the previous year. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts study found that half of all adults in the U.S. did not read a book for pleasure the previous year, and when compared against similar surveys conducted at five-year increments over the past twenty years, the data revealed a precipitous drop in engaged reading, volitional reading, and reading for pleasure. By now, the regular stream of reports about steep declines in reading no longer surprise or shock as they once did.
I wonder, however, whether the impending death of reading is as certain as some would have us believe. Having recently returned from the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, our nation’s largest professional organization of scholars of language and literature, I see ample evidence for the ways in which reading practices and reading communities are not only resisting decline but are in fact thriving. Colleagues at the MLA this year delivered presentations on an inspiring array of reading practices occurring on campuses all around the country. I encourage you to peruse the convention program to get a taste for the many innovative efforts of faculty working to introduce students to the world of letters (I also hope you consider attending next year!). Despite the accusation that “students no longer read,” a banal axiom I confess to having uttered myself, students are in fact reading, a fact we should recognize and celebrate.
It may be, however, that students do not always understand the value of reading literature, let alone some of the strategies and ways of reading that might enrich their lives and prepare them for life outside the university. Compelling evidence gathered by researchers from across the globe indicates many benefits that result from leisure reading. Such benefits include higher literacy scores, cognitive growth, and improvements in mathematics and vocabulary. Other benefits involve gains in breadth of knowledge and understanding of the world. Some studies identify social and emotional benefits associated with those who read for pleasure.
In addition to these important dimensions, I would like to indicate briefly three additional reasons for reading that might benefit both us and our students: Resistance, Repentance, and Restoration.
Resistance—Rather than retreat from a world in crisis and one defined by doubt and uncertainty, I believe we can resist by engaging in practices of reading. Jayne Anne Phillips, a professor of creative writing, a novelist, and the recipient of the national book award, states,
We live in an increasingly literate world that is more and more puzzled by complexity or meaning. I tell my students that today’s readers and writers are like members of a medieval guild, sustaining one another through a Dark Age: When the first illuminated manuscripts were created, few people could read. Now that we are bombarded with image and information and the web is an open vein, few can read with sustained attention. Reading for understanding, to cut through random meaninglessness, becomes a subversive act. [1]
The kind of reading for understanding Phillips describes is similarly lauded by Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant in their new book Close Reading in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, 2025), in which they rigorously defend the ways that reading can help us calibrate our attention and make meaning. In an age defined by both misinformation and disinformation, the capacity to read in this way serves as a vital component of identifying and defending truth.
Repentance—I wonder, too, about the ways that deep and careful reading might also contribute to our efforts to repent, as individuals and as communities. If we define repentance as a change of heart, a reorientation of disposition, and the cultivation and refinement of our affect, then surely the value of reading prose fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, etc. becomes apparent. Reading deeply demands a kind of attention and care that offers the possibility of producing both humility and compassion, values essential for personal and communal development.
Restoration—Perhaps reading may also play an important role in the work of restoration. Reading literature can help restore our sense of self (help bring us back to ourselves) and our recognition of others, even radical others. In communities haunted by histories of disenfranchisement, oppression, and racial and gendered violence, reading literature, especially texts written by and about the victims of these troubled histories, no doubt contributes to restore dignity and humanity to such individuals, while also strengthening collective identity. The act of reading, even when focused on texts defined by pain and suffering, can thus work towards hope and the future betterment of society.
Last fall, following my brief hiatus, I returned to reading. I amended some of my former habits, and I determined to practice the kinds of reading I have outlined above. This semester, I hope you too celebrate with your students the practices and values of reading. Amid uncertainty, perhaps reading will help us cultivate the resiliency and optimism so many of us crave and society so desperately needs.
References
[1] Phillips, Jayne Anne. “Why Teaching (Writing) Matters: A Full Confession.” Literary Hub. September 28, 2015.
Sinykin, Dan, and Winant, Johanna. Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century. United States, Princeton University Press, 2025.
