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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Is reading in decline, again? Could this be the last generation of book lovers? Multiple news stories have reported concerns that Gen Z, the shorthand term for post-millennials born after 1997, aren’t reading for pleasure, or see books as a waste of time; other studies question their critical thinking skills or the loss of handwriting.
I like a good reading panic — properly assessed, it tells you much about pressures and pleasures across a generation. When I was a teenager, a literary deathwatch was already under way. In 1991, the Los Angeles Times lamented that “reading has begun fading from our culture”, with “young people” spurning newspapers as well as books. Sixteen years later, in Entertainment Weekly magazine, Stephen King wrote that “the baby boomers are settling for laugh tracks instead of literature”, and urged readers to return to bookstores.
But rather than fret over this perceived loss of interest in reading, we could learn a lot more about how Gen Z — currently ranging from early teens to late twenties — are finding refuge from loneliness and the endless pings of social media in wildly diverse storytelling communities.
Last year, Kathi Inman Berens and Rachel Noorda, scholars from Portland State University, published a paper on the reading habits of Gen Z and millennials in the US. Although 43 per cent of the more than 2,000 people they surveyed did not self-identify as a reader, it turned out that this “not a reader” group actually read a higher number of print books per month than those who tagged themselves as readers. The study also found that “the younger the person, the more likely they are to buy printed books”.
I believe that Gen Z are changing what it means to be a reader as they surf between print, digital and audio. If researchers asked where they found stories, rather than whether they were regularly cracking open paperbacks, they’d get a strikingly different response. At the more youthful end of the Gen Z spectrum, they read printed books — but, partly thanks to the devices they grew up with, they also pivot easily to audio books, to reading communities such as Wattpad or Movellas, to book-pirating sites that I cannot name in the FT, or to fan-fiction sites, or Viz Manga, Hoopla and Libby. BookTok and YouTube review channels drive up the sales of genres such as romantasy.
Romantasy and manga may seem worlds apart from canonical literature but have a powerful appeal, allowing readers to escape into other lives and to survive the formidable pressures of their own. Lucas Maxwell, a high-school librarian at Glenthorne in the UK, recently wrote about getting boys to read by stocking his shelves with manga comics over a decade. “They devour it,” he says; his library is “flooded with boys before school, break, lunch and after school”. Works such as One Piece, Eiichiro Oda’s series from 1997, and Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto series (1999-2014) have found hundreds of millions of readers worldwide. Jillian Rudes, New York-based author of Manga in Libraries: A Guide for Teen Librarians, notes that because manga stories can continue for multiple volumes, younger readers “can grow up with these characters”.
One of my favourite book influencers is 26-year-old Jack Edwards, also known as Jack in the Books. He’s on a mission to spread the love of reading via TikTok, Instagram and YouTube (where he has nearly 1.5mn subscribers) and his recommendations range from Coco Mellors’ Blue Sisters and Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac to James Baldwin and RK Narayan. He can be disarmingly self-deprecating: “Me reading the Goodreads reviews of the book I just finished before I decide what my opinion is on it.”
If Gen Z are omnivorous, leaping over the frontiers of high-versus-low literature, their other strength is diversity. During the pandemic, the model Kaia Gerber, now 23, started the Library Science book club on Instagram with the journalist Alyssa Reeder, vowing to “cover writers and books from all points of view”. Once Gerber overcame the pressure to read “the books I thought I was supposed to” — the classics — she was drawn to those by women, “young, old, queer, American, translated”. “They have been my companions and advisors . . . who have shaped my understanding of the world and my place in it,” she says.
Instead of ringing the death knell for reading, perhaps educators, parents and critics could meet Gen Z on their own turf. They love escapism, take fan fiction as seriously as the Booker shortlist, revive classics from Jane Austen to Dostoevsky — and can’t stop talking about books. They’ve found community in sharing stories. No surprise that across platforms, in wonderfully curling fonts or emblazoned on coffee cups, a common quote is from the great Annie Ernaux: “I realise that I am forever combing reality for signs of literature.”
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