So, 2025 was the year everyone grew terribly concerned about declining literacy rates in the West. Yes, we heard a few grumblings about it before – about the students at elite universities who couldn’t read full novels, so had to resort to extracts and summaries – but now the full extent of the crisis has been revealed. Take it from the once-in-a-decade report from the OECD on “adult skills”: reading ability has declined or stagnated, pretty much everywhere.
Now there are reports that English literature students at American universities are struggling to parse the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House. This novel – as pointed out by James Marriott, the English critic who is most vocally despairing of the literacy crisis – was once regularly read by children. But something about mud accumulating “at compound interest” and the dogs “undistinguishable in mire” evades the reading capacity of college-age kids in 2025. Marriott calls this the “dawn of the post-literate society”. Too-clever-by-half optimists say it is all just a moral panic.
I do not think it is a moral panic; none of my friends who are teachers think it is a moral panic either. When I interviewed Steven Pinker earlier in the year, he said the comprehension abilities of his own students had declined too. A university lecturer I spoke to over dinner practically had her head in her hands when I asked: is it true? Can they not read any more?
The cause? Probably something to do with phones. The consequences? Unknowable, far-reaching and terrifying. But the solution ... The solution comes in the form of the most important day in the Christian calendar, which happens, conveniently, to be this day next week. As Shein and Temu send destined-for-the-landfill tat around the globe, and families gift each other variations on “lump of plastic”, why not seek salvation in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop? You haven’t exactly travelled on a camel from the orient, guided by the North star, myrrh in tow. But you are closer to the spirit of yuletide in gifting a book than in mining Amazon for junk. Unless, of course, I missed the bit where Balthazar swung by the warehouse on the way.
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And so, here is my one-woman Christmas campaign – launched, I know, far too late in the day. Christmas in 2025 is the Christmas of the book exchange. And I do apologise to any family members or friends reading this now, surprise ruined. But I cannot openly fret about the literacy crisis, hand-wring about the approaching post-literate society, and panic over my own reading (my attention span, like everyone else’s, is in conspicuous decline) without showing any faith in my convictions. So, sorry, Dad – I hope you don’t already have that new Seamus Heaney tome!
There is a second motivation. I am not one usually to turn my nose up at luxury. I have a relatively relaxed relationship with that pseudo-sociological term “consumerism”. And whenever I read the words “late-stage capitalism” I almost instinctively zone out (next time someone says it in front of you, ask them to precisely clarify what they meant – you will invariably be met with even more semi-academic babble and circuitous logic).
But there is nothing like Christmas to stress test this otherwise laissez-fair disposition. Maybe it is just all the plastic: the glitter (plastic!), the sequins (plastic!), tinsel (I mean, who knows ... plastic I reckon). Or maybe it is the ephemerality: not only do we produce and buy and hang up all this stuff, but then we take it all down and throw most of it away. All of this happens within the life cycle of a drone bee, mind you. And then there is the food, and the wrappers, and the sugar and the gloopiness and the Everestine indulgence. The Quality Street Strawberry Creme seems pretty far from god, to me at least.
[ Best books of 2025 to place under the Christmas treeOpens in new window ]
I do think the novel, biography, collected works or memoir is an antidote to the sugar high of the advent season; the time of transient and cheap tat. Books are not mass-produced in a factory – someone, somewhere has spent years, perhaps their whole life, pulling it together. And then the reader gets to spend weeks reading it, and perhaps their whole life thinking about it. They are demure objects, the spiritual antithesis to tinsel perhaps. And, well, the world is just not reading enough of them right now.
So take this as a one-stone-two-birds exercise. A way to very seriously, if only symbolically, demonstrate your concern about literacy; perhaps a chance to show off that you have read all 800-and-whatever pages of Bleak House (go ahead and brag!); to champion the novel over the phone screen. But also a quiet, personal protest against a holiday that has strayed far from the kingdom of god, and clearly has very little interest in finding it. Trade plastic for paper. And maybe we will all recoup a little dignity along the way.
