Reading is on the Rise. Hurrah. But... why?
It's counterintuitive really. You can't help but ask why.
With streaming platforms pumping out not just every single kind of show but of the highest quality too, with social media having figured out how to hook us and trap us, with gaming becoming ever more sophisticated, how are we spending our free time? With a book.
Whoa. I didn’t expect that. Excluding ebooks, second-hand books bought at charity shops and self-published books sold by your neighbour out of his garden shed, 669 million physical books were bought in 2022 in the UK. The number has gone up from there.
There’s only 69 million of us. How is it possible that we are buying so very many books?
(We’re not actually. We ship them to Europe, the Middle East, the USA and Canada. But don’t let that get in the way of a jaw-dropping stat.)
Even still, it’s fair enough to ask: why? Why read when you don’t have to. Why crack the cover of anything?
Here are six reasons why people read when they don’t have to:
1. The hook. If they find a storyline or an author that grabs them, say Stephen King, or if they find a genre that grabs them, say romantasy, then they buy what they can because it’s guaranteed, no-risk pleasure. No surfing required.
2. The setting. Paris or New York or the islands of the South Pacific. Middle Earth or aboard a starship. This could include historical fiction. The Napoleonic War. The Victorian era. The American southwest or the polar north. Locations become a home away from home.
3. The promise of friendship, that is, characters who become your friends. You feel like you know them and they influence how you go about your own life in the real world. You don’t get that depth of friendship from other forms of entertainment.
4. The language itself. You linger over beautiful writing from the sheer pleasure of engaging with art. A few writers can capture a truth in a pithy line. Like a teenage girl writing in her diary, you find yourself underlining and putting exclamation marks in the margin. You only just manage to restrain yourself from not replacing the dot over the letter i with a tiny heart.
5. Knowledge. To better understand ourselves and our world. This can include both fiction and non-fiction. Right now, the non-fiction bestseller list includes titles such as Why Democracies Fail and On Tyranny. You’d prefer the bestsellers to be Best Streams for Trout Fishing and How Chocolate Cures What Ails You. Welcome to 2025.
6. Connection. Reading in a shared experience. As odd as this sounds, reading is a group activity. Book groups, book fests, comment threads on review sites and chat groups. Reading is not nearly as solitary as one might think. We connect through a book with others.
I’ve ended with the word “connection” because that’s what reading does. It permits connection in a way that nothing else does: to each other, to ideas, to art, to imaginary friends, to far-flung places and different zones, to sheer page-turning fun.
That’s one very generous medium.
