Adrift

I, now thirty-two, am a child of the internet. Like so many of us, screens have a hold on me I can’t quite wriggle out of, screen-time warnings and Brick apps notwithstanding. Spare hours between responding to emails seem harder and harder to find. My spells of reader’s block are part of a greater cultural shift—a so-called crisis in reading in the United States. Americans are no longer reading as well or as often as we once did. Adult attention spans are waning: a 2025 study based on twenty years’ worth of American Time Use Survey data showed that rates of adult pleasure reading have fallen by roughly 40 percent between 2003 and 2023. Many college students are less able to read and comprehend long works than they were in generations before, as the journalist Rose Horowitch reported in a 2024 article in The Atlantic. Libraries have been noticing downturns in circulation. Frank Skornia ’04, a digital librarian for information and adult services at the Ferguson Library in Stamford, Connecticut, told me that books that once circulated forty to fifty times during their lifespan are now checked out less than half that often.

Publisher’s Weekly reported in July 2026 that overall book sales are relatively flat compared to a year ago, but those numbers are buoyed by strong sales in adult fiction. Christina Clifford ’93, an agent at Union Literary in New York City who specializes in literary fiction, agrees. “I only have the perspective of what I am selling and what is making it through and what is not,” she says, “but I think adult fiction is doing quite well. ‘Romantasy’ is a trend, and of course, the romance sub-genre of the hockey/sports/college novel is still in full swing.” Whether adults will continue to read fiction, though, is harder to tell. Both children’s fiction and children’s nonfiction—categories presumably purchased mainly if not completely by adults—were up in the first half of 2026, but the segment of young adult fiction, where readers would more likely be choosing for themselves, was down more than 25 percent in the same period. Clifford also worries about magazines, but for reasons that readers don’t really control. As a kid, she says, she grew up reading “stacks and stacks” of magazines that her mother, a journalist, brought home from work. Now, she laments, those magazines are all out of print. “I am not worried that we won’t have writers,” she told me. “I am more worried that publishers cannot pay these writers enough to make it be their livelihood.”

At the same time, schoolchildren are struggling to meet literacy goals. The 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that, nationwide, last year’s high school seniors had the lowest reading scores since 1992, with roughly a third lacking basic reading skills, according to Dana Goldstein’s reporting in The New York Times. In addition to phones and screens, our methods for teaching reading may be partially to blame. For the past several decades, many school districts have eschewed science-based methods like phonics in favor of curriculums based on the “whole language method,” which encourages children to use context clues to guess the meaning of words, as David Owens reported for The New Yorker in December 2025. This has corresponded to a decline in reading skills, and schools that have returned to a science-based curriculum are seeing better results. For example, since implementing science-of-reading methods in addition to other reforms, Mississippi has soared from forty-ninth in the nation in 2013—in terms of reading standardized test scores for fourth graders—to ninth in 2024.

But course-correcting nationwide will take some time, if it happens at all, and in the meantime, many kids aren’t reading at grade level.

In the fall of 2026, I began teaching at Denison University, a small liberal arts college in Ohio not too dissimilar from Bowdoin. These days, I’m thinking about my own inability to pay attention for long stretches, but also about how to get my students to read deeply, thoughtfully, and, above all, with pleasure. In the age of AI summaries and notification overstimulation, I set out to find an antidote to my students’ reader’s blocks and my own.

When I start to get upset about all of this, I take a deep breath and remind myself that, if you take a bird’s-eye view, we’re living in an unprecedented age of literacy in the United States. Enslaved people were legally forbidden from learning to read throughout the American South during much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and women’s literacy rates were much lower than men’s during the colonial era. In my research, I study medieval England, when the vast majority of people were not literate by today’s standards. Back then the biggest libraries that even existed in England were 323 times smaller than Bowdoin’s Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, with its 647,026 volumes. Their largest collections, by contrast, topped out at under 2,000 books.

And readers have always read in spurts and amid distraction, as the scholar Leah Price argues in her book What We Talk About When We Talk About Books. The idea of a golden age of reading, when we sprawled on sofas and devoured brainy tomes with perfect focus, is certainly overblown. Readers of yore used books as coasters and decoration, casting aside Aristotle and Dryden in favor of dice and drinking. Many Victorian novels we now consider classic literature were once seen as trashy and mind-numbing. Screens may be a scapegoat, but Price argues that the real culprit for reading decline is the degradation of work-leisure boundaries. Reading War and Peace might be harder now not because of the e-reader’s pixels, but because of the constant pinging of work email notifications that distracts us from tales of the juicy love lives of nineteenth-century Russian aristocrats.

When I confided in Maggie Solberg, the Bowdoin English professor who taught me to read Chaucer, about my reader’s block, she also emphasized the importance of meaningful leisure time for cultivating a reading life. We know that reading has immense cognitive benefits, but in a world that so often pushes efficiency, bleeding work into free time, it can be hard to preserve reading time as sacrosanct. We know that reading has immense cognitive benefits, but in a world that so often pushes efficiency, bleeding work into free time, it can be hard to preserve reading time as sacrosanct.

Solberg questioned the reasoning behind rushing through reading for the sake of self-improvement: “Those Silicon Valley guys who want to hear the Odyssey summarized for them by AI at double speed while they drink their protein plasma—what are they saving that time for? What is the true use of time that they love?” Solberg takes a different approach, asking her students to slow down and making sure that they have print copies of reading assignments. “Reading is a very slow, personalized, organic way of getting information,” she told me, and that’s why we can’t outsource it. “It’s about deep focus and patience.”

That deep focus is part of what’s become so precious in the flurry of distractions on digital devices. And it’s part of what’s at risk. A review of thirty-three studies of screen use in young people conducted between 2013 and 2023 found that screens correlate to problems in concentrating, learning, and sleeping. Screens also seem to impact reading comprehension. One major study from the University of Valencia found that, unlike reading in print, digital reading for leisure does not positively impact overall reading comprehension. Another study found that print readers may better understand a story’s chronology and temporality than their digital reading counterparts.

The negative impacts screens have on attention and reading comprehension may have to do with how our brains learn to read and how reading works in our brains. In her book Reader, Come Home, the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf describes how our ability to pay attention, to see and hear, and to associate words with memories, all come together to form the neuropathways that allow us to read, creating what she calls the “reading circuit.” We develop these circuits as children, but because our brains are plastic—that is, capable of changing into adulthood—they too can change throughout our lives. So, when we pick up bad digital reading habits like task switching or skimming, we become more distracted readers. Those bad habits can then translate to other mediums, even if we switch back to print.

Still, it’s important to remember that the reading crisis is systemic, and it’s complex. Our digital environment certainly shoulders some blame, including tech companies that push their products on schools and foist addictive algorithms on consumers. But there are other culprits too: years of cuts to library funding, cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, districts pivoting to reading curriculums that aren’t based in scientific evidence, the dismantling and devaluing of humanities programs at some colleges and universities. Part of what makes the reading crisis so difficult to address is its many facets. My adult struggles with reader’s block are different, for example, than the difficulties of a dyslexic third grader—but both contribute to an overall picture that’s looking more and more alarming.

Interpreting changes in reading patterns can also be made difficult by shifts in our understanding of what literacy means. Since Horace Mann first introduced standardized testing in Boston public schools in 1845, we’ve been able to track reading skills with a much finer grain than when literacy could be “proven” simply by signing one’s own name. When the media we consume changes, our view of literacy often changes too. Most of the medieval people I study would probably score poorly on standardized tests that today’s schoolchildren take, like the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But they were likely better on the whole at interpreting visual iconography in stained-glass windows and decoding complex oral stories that bards recited at feasts. As digital material changes literacy once again, our understanding of what literacy means may change too—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Still, basic textual literacy matters: the capacity to read a menu, to fill out medical forms, to understand legal paperwork. And so does higher-level textual literacy. Alicia Rogers ’01, a tween services librarian for the Worcester Public Library, emphasized that reading can be a portal to places outside our own communities and can enrich our imaginations. Reading’s capacity to foster empathy is actually visible on a cognitive level: as Wolf describes in Reader, Come Home, when we read about running, or crying, or feeling embarrassed, the parts of our brain associated with those things also light up. John Kim, a Bowdoin professor of Asian studies, sees reading as a way of helping students develop ethical relationships with the world around them. For Kim, what students are reading matters less than the fact that they interact deeply with books, film, and art “as things that can be given attention, as things that can be interpreted, as things that can be empathized with, connected with, and given time and scrutiny.” In today’s world of push notifications, Kim told me that “the greatest form of respect and empathy is to give someone your attention and to listen.”

Even as “literacy takes many forms, such as financial literacy, digital literacy, and political literacy,” as librarian Skornia puts it, “if we are not textually literate, basically being able to read and write languages, then everything else in our society becomes an order of magnitude more difficult.” That includes our sense of the value of difference, our curiosity, and our critical thinking. For literacy to be a positive force for democracy, everyone needs equal access to develop those skills. When children perform worse on reading tests, that can translate to difficulties throughout their lives. Literacy can quickly become a force for inequality instead of a vehicle for empowerment.

Of course, if you’re reading this essay, you may be a reader yourself. You may already feel that literacy is valuable and know firsthand its pleasures and feel its stakes. Preserving it will be the hard part, and addressing the crisis in reading will almost certainly require a multitiered approach. Restoring funding to the institutions—libraries, humanities programs, after-school programs, and more—that support literacy will surely be part of that puzzle.

Public libraries are especially important because they can help get books in readers’ hands and create spaces for reading. At Worcester Public Library, Rogers holds events like babysitting classes and workshops where kids make sushi out of candy, so that even kids who aren’t big readers learn to use the library and spend time with adults who love books. Adult readers also benefit from programming that brings them together with other readers and into the library—Skornia’s library, for example, hosts a variety of book clubs, including a silent book club that allows readers to read together in peace and quiet.

After-school literacy programs can help bridge gaps in literacy as well. My friend Nicole Wetsman ’16 volunteers as a reading tutor for children in her neighborhood in Brooklyn through Read 718, a nonprofit literacy organization on her street. “Reading was such a big part of my whole life and my childhood,” Wetsman told me, so she was outraged about the state of child literacy after listening to the podcast Sold a Story, which reported on the correspondence between literacy declines and the turn away from phonics methods in school curriculums. Now, twice a week, Wetsman sits with elementary school students who aren’t reading at grade level and works with them on phonics and reading worksheets.

As these systemic issues unfurl in the background, wayward readers like me are trying to find ways out of the algorithm and back to our bookshelves. As much as I feel in my bones that reading is a tremendous social good, that doesn’t help me with my own reader’s block. When I sit down to read the new Katie Kitamura novel, or Octavia Butler’s sci-fi, or a Tana French mystery, I don’t think to myself, “This will improve me as a person and also society as a whole.” I want to be thrilled and moved and entertained. I want to enjoy myself.

I spoke with Jessica Devin ’92 about this conundrum. Devin co-owns Brewster Book Store, a Cape Cod-shingled independent store with large windows and raised flowerbeds in Brewster, Massachusetts, with her friend Sue (Sorter) O’Malley ’85. I told Devin that sometimes, because the stakes of the crisis in reading are genuinely so high, the framing of reading as a form of self-improvement makes it feel for me like the opposite of pleasure—like eating your vegetables. “If you find the right match,” Devin reassured me, “reading is dessert.”

In Devin’s view, it’s important not to stigmatize popular genres, like romantasy or graphic novels. “Reading is reading,” she emphasized. “There are a million and a half books out there. But not every book is the right book for a person and where they are in that moment.” Clifford also highlighted the importance of connecting readers with books that interest them: “We have to keep reminding readers that there is such an array of voices out there, that there is absolutely something out there for every taste or interest.” Rogers, who works primarily with readers aged eight to twelve, agrees. Her readers love books that make them laugh, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Dog Man. “A lot of adults in kids’ lives want them to read something that they consider more ‘serious,’ or with more words or less pictures.” But people should read what they like, Rogers told me, so they develop a positive association with reading.

These positive associations go a long way. Devin has fond memories of working at the bookstore under its previous owner when she was a teen. Now the store is a community institution, and generations of kids who have visited the store return with their families. Reading spaces have always been important for Devin. “Going to the local library was foundational to my experience,” she told me. “Some people walk in through our space and they are readers. But it’s not unusual, in the summertime, for families to bring kids in with this hope that their kid will become a reader. And it’s such a wonderful opportunity to help them along in that journey.”

“The way business is done has changed a bit since COVID-19,” says Clifford. “There used to be a lot more in-person interactions—most notably going to lunch with editors and discussing business. It’s just not done as much anymore, which changes the dynamics.”

Over the course of my many conversations, the Polar Bears I talked to emphasized the joy they find in communities of other readers. At Bowdoin, one such community is developing around a new club called The Wandering Polar Readers. Anaïs Létard ’29, the club’s president, told me that each semester the club votes on a book (their first was Martyr, by Kaveh Akbar) and meets twice a month to discuss it. For Létard, it’s been a way of taking an “intellectual break” without resorting to scrolling. “It allowed me in my first year to connect with people on campus and be like, ‘Oh, you like this genre? You like this author? Let’s talk about it.’”

Speaking to her, I fondly remembered a short-lived but enthusiastic poetry club I took part in during my Bowdoin days. We met at night in Mass Hall, usually over a bottle of wine. Often we forgot the wine key and spent much of the evening trying to figure out how to extricate the cork. But when we did read poems, it was heaven: the snow falling outside, the big conference table, someone reading Philip Larkin or Joy Harjo aloud. I thought of my conversation with Professor Kim, and of the work of the poetry scholar Lucy Alford, who describes poems as “events of attention” because they make us focus in new ways on language and images. That is how I remember evenings with my poetry club friends—events of attention, moments of my life when I was fully present, surrounded by the sound of my friends breathing and the murmur of someone reading a poem. I felt what Devin put succinctly when we spoke: “Books connect people together, they connect people with ideas, they connect people to themselves.”

In the middle of writing this piece, I came across a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of the Class of 1825 that was published in his collection In the Harbour the year before his death, as his vision dimmed and his capacity for reading diminished. The poem compares Longfellow’s neglected books to the unused armor of an “old mediaeval knight,” who gazes at the equipment that he once used with “secret longings for the lost delight of tourney or adventure in the field”: 

I pictured the books I’d been meaning to read, sitting neglected on my bedside table. Longfellow’s poem is about difficulty reading in old age, at the end of a long reading life, and I hope I still have many reading years to go. But I resonated with the confusion and cloudiness that Longfellow describes. My long bout of reader’s block made me feel disoriented, disconnected from the reader I know myself to be. Perhaps that is why it felt so alarming: it alienated me from fellow readers, but also from myself.

Don’t worry about me, though. Over the course of researching and writing this essay, I spoke and read and thought about the value of books with readers of all stripes. And, slowly but surely, my reader’s block waned. I’m now a hundred pages into Norman Rush’s Mating, and I’m about to request a book that Devin recommended, Last Night in Brooklyn, by Xochitl Gonzalez, from the library. It’s a relief to feel the turn of pages again, the immense pleasure of deep attention and true leisure. And it’s good to be reminded that literacy is something I shouldn’t take for granted. I have to keep fighting for it—all of us do. 

Katherine Churchill ’16, a writer, researcher, and historian of late medieval English and French literature, is an assistant professor of English at Denison University. She earned her PhD at the University of Virginia.

María Medem is a Spanish illustrator from Seville who produces comics and zines. She is regularly published in The New York Times, Wired, and other magazines.

This story first appeared in the Fall 2026 issue of Bowdoin Magazine. Manage your subscription and see other stories from the magazine on the Bowdoin Magazine website.