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Does the decline of book reading mark the end of rational thinking?
David Adam is a journalist based near London and author of The Man Who Couldn’t Stop (2014) and The Genius Within (2018).
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A literary cliff edge: people enjoying the written word on World Book Day in Hunan, China. Credit: TPG/Getty
The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society James Marriott Bodley Head (2026)
The thriller novelist Dan Brown writes books that some critics complain are for people who don’t read books. The journalist and former rare-book seller James Marriott has now written a book for people who read books about people who don’t. That must have been an interesting sales pitch. What’s next — a 3.5-hour-long radio documentary about declining attention spans?
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People who read books should read this one. The New Dark Ages will make you feel both alarmed and a little smug. In Marriott’s telling, book readers are better-informed, happier people who contribute more to a rational rules- and evidence-based society and help to safeguard the rights and principles of liberal democracy. Even those who read Dan Brown’s books? Absolutely.
Reading, even airport thrillers, forces people to engage with the world and other people in ways that other forms of media simply do not require. Despite the rise of technology, reading remains the best way to experience being a person other than ourselves, Marriott says. “Cinema, video games, television: for all their virtues, these art forms are hopelessly trapped in the exterior world of surfaces.”
This short, spirited work is a love letter to the written word, penned with the heartfelt and passionate language of a jilted spouse. “Not everything that is important or true can be said simply,” says Marriott, but he seems to have managed just fine.
Indeed, for a work that exalts literacy because it enables the reliable communication of complex ideas, The New Dark Ages presents a straightforward premise. Reading built the modern world, and helped to create science, democracy and reason.