Firemen Not Necessary

The end of reading

“The liberal world by definition is literate.”

~Marshall McLuhan

I consume a lot of words every day. I work with words every day. I have been trying to read more books than I have in the last few years, but I still always end up reading dozens of articles on current issues every single day.

I start with AP and Reuters on my phone. I move on to the Missouri Independent and the KC Star and then scroll on social media to see if I missed anything newsworthy from other states or outlets. That usually takes well over an hour, and sometimes two if I do any research on the articles.

After that, I make sure that I finish anything I skipped in my weekly New Yorker and my monthly Atlantic.

And then I try to read fiction for an hour a day. That is becoming more difficult with distractions, so I plug my phone in to charge in another room and silence the notifications so I am not tempted to scroll or respond to comments.

I have to take extreme measures to protect my reading time. I have always loved to read books and even I find it harder and harder to do.

In last month’s Atlantic magazine, I read the title of an article: The End of Reading is Here by Rose Horowitch. I was hesitant to read it because I was scared to read it. I can see the end of reading all around me, and I saw it several years ago while still in the classroom. It was becoming harder and harder to assign reading because many of the kids just wouldn’t do the reading.

And I didn’t end up actually “reading” the Atlantic article, but I listened to it in the car on the way to a speaking event way down in Cape Girardeau a few weeks back.

In fact, I was listening to the article while driving down I-70, which is an absolute mess with construction right now. The lanes turn into what appears to be narrow cattle chutes. I was about 15 minutes into the article, and about an hour east of Kansas City, when a semi didn’t see me in the passing lane and started merging into my lane — I ended up hitting a concrete barrier. I did enough damage to my car that it is still in the shop two weeks later, but I was unharmed, and what stayed with me wasn’t the wreck. It was the article.

After a quick rescue by a State Trooper and a loaner car from one of my kids, I was able to continue the hours-long drive to Cape. I started the audio once my brain settled, and I can’t say that listening and thinking about the end of reading made me feel any better. I even referenced the article in my keynote speech to the Democrats gathered in Cape.

From the Atlantic article: “According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: In 2025, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.”

My god. We are overwhelmingly choosing not to read. I read those stats and immediately thought of a book I taught. Fahrenheit 451.

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

~Ray Bradbury

I know I don’t have to explain to my audience the plot of Fahrenheit 451, but I will remind you that in Bradbury’s book, the firemen in the dystopian future actually set fires to burn books. Sometimes they also set fires to people who refused to relinquish their books. Spoiler alert: by the end of the novel, there is an outcast, but intellectual community, who is purposely setting to memory the words of the classics before the words are burned or just forgotten altogether.

That also makes me think of the Library at Alexandria, which the article also speaks to. The event that may have supercharged the Dark Ages. I can’t help but wonder if we are headed that way as well — and the new Dark Ages won’t be because of arson. It will be because our society has decided to forgo reading for short snippets of information and AI summaries and influencer content.

In red states, the issues with reading can be even deeper with book bans. These bans are created with the explicit purpose of prohibiting reading and literacy.

In St. Joseph, a city south of me, several members of a local church filed book challenges on classics in school libraries and used in classrooms. The attempted bans did not get Board approval and I can’t help but think that part of the reason is that several of the folks complaining about certain books admitted to not even reading the books.

Just yesterday in Missouri, two Republican lawmakers, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and State Senator Rick Brattin, threatened to pull funding from the Columbia, MO library system because of a Rainbow Story Time in which two age-appropriate storybooks about inclusivity were read to young participants. In a statement to the press, Hoskins admitted to not reading the books he was threatening to ban and pull library funding over.

I don’t know how this timeline gets any dumber. I feel like we’ve been plunged into a real life Idiocracy, a movie I couldn’t even finish because it is as prescient as it is ridiculous.

It can feel hopeless to slip into a postliterate society with an entire political party rooting and cheering for illiteracy.

McLuhan was right. The liberal world by definition is literate.

And if literacy is the foundation of liberal democracy and of empathy through shared stories and of citizens who can think critically about power, than we have to defend books and literacy. We can’t be at the end of reading.

Every book we read and every story we share and every library we defend is an act of resistance.

So, go start a book club. Go to your local library’s story time. Open a free little library. Donate your used books. Join your library board. Encourage your friends and family to read more.

I hope you join me in resisting. And in reading.

~Jess