My tween-age daughters make me proud in countless ways, but I am still adjusting to the fact that they are not bookworms. I’m pretty sure that two generations ago, they would have been more like I was: always with their nose in some volume, looking up only to cross the street or to guide a fork on their plates. But today, even in our book-crammed home, where their father is often in a cozy reading chair, their eyes are more likely to be glued to a screen.
But then, as often as not, what I’m doing in that cozy chair these days is looking at my own screen.
In 1988, I read much of Anna Karenina on park benches in Washington Square. I’ll never forget when a person sitting next to me saw what I was reading and said, “Oh, look, Anna and Vronsky are over there!” So immersed was I in Tolstoy’s epic that I looked up and briefly expected to see them walking by.
Today, on that same park bench, I would most certainly be scrolling on my phone.
From the November 2024 issue: The elite college students who can’t read books
As a linguist, a professor, and an author, I’m meant to bemoan this shift. It is apparently the job of educators everywhere to lament the fact that students are reading less than they used to, and that they are relying on AI to read for them and write their essays, too.
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