Chapter 192: But Will There Be Any Readers Left? YES!

Over the summer a report appeared that confirmed every suspicion, fear, and I-told-you-so about reading habits: fewer people in the United States and United Kingdom were reading for fun.

Researchers at the University College London and the University of Florida reported that since peaking in 2004, there had been a drop of roughly 40 percent in the number of people who spent part of their day reading not because they had to – for work or school – but for the joy of it. The decline had been steady and seemingly inexorable.

Nothing about this felt surprising: for years teachers, authors, publishers, and cultural critics over the age of 55 had been bemoaning the deleterious effects on attention spans wrought by social media, smart phones – the relentless firehose of distractions. There was a lot of whining about “these kids today…“ I recall a colleague decrying his students as part of a “post-literate society,” which sounded very Ray Bradbury-dark-future-is-upon-us, even if it was not, strictly speaking, true.

Granted, the number of people reading for pleasure had declined. But, as it turned out, the country where more people read books for pleasure than anywhere else was, yes, the United States. On average 17 books a year. India was second with 16. The UK was close in third place, with 15.

As a writer you could read these findings in one of two ways:

1-The sky is falling so what’s the point of even trying?

Or

2-If a lot of people still want to read for pleasure what is the experience they seek and which I might offer them?

Pollyanish me chose #2.

Pollyanish, yes, but not naive. Reading, the report suggested, was good for you. So is broccoli. The appeal of broccoli – with apologies to broccoli lovers – are its nutritional benefits, which is how reading is often characterized: reading is good for you, so you should do it. Should, however, is the least compelling of all motivating forces: I suppose I should exercise and give up chocolate and read a book, too.

Instead, we do things that make us feel good; not having done it, but the actual doing.

Which, in turn, begged the question: does reading make us feel good?

It does.

Or more precisely, it can.

I was not a reader when I was young. That is not to say I didn’t read. I read a lot of a certain kind of book: baseball biographies, the as-told-to stories of my childhood heroes, who unathletic me was destined never to be. No matter; I devoured them. The Mickey Mantle story. Whitey Ford’s. And Yogi Berra’s, too. Every Friday afternoon my father, brother and I would head to the Brooklyn Public Library where I’d hurry to the sports shelves, while my dad picked up another thick seafaring novel in the spirit of Captain Horatio Hornblower, and my brother checked out big heaves like The Count of Monte Cristo. He’d start it on a Friday and finish on a Sunday and in my father’s view that counted as reading. My books, alas, had too many photos for his taste.

I was also, and remain, a glacially slow reader – not quite lips moving but close. This made reading what school required a burden. Reading was the activity in which I was always behind. Only decades later did one of my kids point out that slow readers tend to visualize what they are reading – even as fast readers glide over the words themselves.

I did read for pleasure over the summers – sports biographies gave way to Landmark history books – The Civil War and D-Day. But then came Back to School Day, and what joy I’d experienced in reading was washed away by reading assignments with which I barely kept up. So instead of reading I watched TV.

It was not until I was 22, in graduate school and living in London with a friend who was a voracious reader, that I began to rediscover how much pleasure I had gotten from reading. I read a lot of short fiction, still plodding along as I tried to catch up.

I tell this story because in his well-intentioned desire to make a reader of me, my dad did not take into consideration the benefits to my young and elastic brain that came week in and week out from reading the books that made me happy.

The report on reading habits left me feeling more impatient than discouraged. The reasons cited for the decline sounded so familiar: more demands on time, a measurable shrinking of attention span, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and on and on and on. But there have always been distractions. Missing was consideration of reading itself, and why a lot of people chose to do it.

As a writer, those readers were my people.

What did they want of me?

So it was that I came across a 2015 study in which a team of four researchers studied what happened to the brain when people read for pleasure. Their report “Reading Fiction and Reading Minds: The Role of Simulation in the Default Network“ concluded that what they termed literary fiction made people more aware of others, more empathic, more connected to the world around them.

They used fMRI technology to measure brain activity as the subjects read different sorts of passages. They found that the benefits from reading were greatest when the reading happened during what neuroscientists call the “default mode network.” These are the moments when our minds wander, when we daydream, ruminate, or stare out the window with no tasks waiting to be done.

You might think your brain is on shut down mode at such moments? Not so. A host of overlapping neural pathways are buzzing – the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus, lateral parietal cortex and medial temporal lobe structures; don’t worry, this won’t be on the final! – eager and ready to be taken someplace new.

The authors were quite clear about what sort of reading material was most effective accomplishing this – and therefore most socially beneficial: literary fiction. Informational nonfiction did not have the same impact, nor did “romance” fiction. In other words, in the authors’ view, it had to be good, a conclusion that made me wince.

Was my dad correct all those years ago? Did the Yogi Berra story not count?

Let me tell why neither my dad nor the authors had this right.

I read the Yogi Berra story 65 years ago, at roughly the same time I read the Whitey Ford story. I still remember the description of Berra’s childhood home in the St. Louis’ Italian enclave called “the Hill.” And I still remember the opening of the Ford story – bringing alive for me his childhood in the Queens, New York neighborhood of Astoria.

These memories are particularly revealing of the power they had to transport me, given that while I can recall scenes and moments in novels I have never been able to recall plots.

Those books took me somewhere else. The authors, as best I recall, were not Nobel Laureates. No matter. They possessed the skills necessary to connect with me at those moments when my mind was wandering – in effect taking me by the hand and saying, let me show you another life in another place.

Those books were hardly literary. But they would become what I think of as “gateway books.” They introduced me to an experience that I have spent all the decades since looking to replicate in every book I read for fun.

I do not wish to re-read my childhood favorites, any more than I want to re-read novels I loved when I was 22. What transported me then will not transport me now. But that does not diminish the memory of what I felt: reading was magical.

It also reminds me that if I want people to read what I write – narrative nonfiction – I need to reconstruct worlds and lives where they might want to go. The pressure is on me to produce; there are no shortcuts, no approximations of the experience. As I tell my students, if the reader stops it’s always your fault.

I not only believe this, but have it on good authority that there is no substitute for a writer with whom a reader can connect and feel the joy of reading.

As it happens I was assisted in my research by Claude. Claude is an AI bot. It is very good at what I’d tasked it to do. It is also candid about its strengths and limitations.

So it was that when I was done asking Claude’s help in learning how the brain works – Claude will provide all citations, lest you rely just on what it says – I had one final question, a question that is much on the minds of most everyone, especially those of us who write.

I asked: can you write stories that have the capacity to transport?

Claude paused, briefly, before replying: “Right now, AI (including me) is better at producing serviceable prose than at creating the kind of literature that genuinely transports readers into another world for hours. The best human writers do something that goes beyond technical competence—they create experiences that feel alive, surprising, and emotionally true in ways that are hard to reverse-engineer.”

Then, Claude, which while not human is apparently not without ego, felt the need to add: “But this is a moving target. AI is improving, and we don’t fully understand all the ingredients of literary transportation. It’s possible that future AI could create genuinely immersive literature, or that human-AI collaboration might develop new forms of transportive storytelling we haven’t imagined yet.”

Emphasis on yet, Claude.

Not yet.

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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

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