Students Who Can’t Read Books,” caused quite a stir
online. The article puts a spotlight on college professors’
surprising realization that many college freshmen struggle
with reading multiple books per semester. Being able to
read so much used to be standard, but because of a lack
of preparation by middle and high schools, many college
freshmen struggle to read whole books, being more used
to excerpts or chapters.

It seems that smartphones are to blame. “Reading books,
even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram,
and YouTube,” said Rose Horowitch, the article’s author.

She also pointed to test-oriented education steering
instruction away from reading whole books, instead
assigning students to read excerpts and individual chapters.
Indeed, look no further than the format of the new digital
SAT: in the Reading and Writing sections, the “archaic”
poems have completely disappeared, and the infamous
100-line reading passages have shrunk to single paragraphs.

These diagnoses seem reasonable but are incomplete.
Smartphones aren’t the first challenge books have
faced. According to Britannica, the popularity of radio
broadcasting in the 1920s already spelled trouble for
reading. The Atlantic reported that by the 1960s, Americans
were spending on average four to five hours a day watching
TV and reading time had dwindled down to just 15 to 30
minutes a day. In the battle for our leisure time, books
have sadly already lost a long time ago to other easier-toconsume media formats.

Even when students do sit down and read, classical
literature is increasingly crowded out by a sea of choices
in YA fiction. Thanks to the phenomenal commercial
successes of “Harry Potter” that made J.K. Rowling the
highest paid author to date and Suzanne Collins’s “The
Hunger Games” series that garnered $3.3 billion worldwide
through movie adaptations, authors and publishing houses
have flocked to the YA category, hoping to replicate these
earlier triumphs. In the 1990s, only about 400 to 500 YA
book titles were published each year. That number soared to
1,400 to 1,500 only two decades later. Don’t get me wrong
– some YA novels are quite fun to read. It’s definitely better
to read them than to not read at all. The problem is that
the reading levels of many popular YA novels are simply
too elementary to prepare students for post-secondary
education and beyond. The top ten most popular YA books
on Goodreads sport an average Lexile measure, a scientific
indicator of text difficulty, of just 775. That’s the equivalent
of a fourth-grade reading level.

 While the sales of YA books have plateaued in recent
years, graphic novels and comic books saw a 62 percent
jump in sales in 2021. Publishing industry insiders
argue that the manga versions of classics like
“Pride and Prejudice” and “Macbeth” make these
works more accessible. While that may be true,
graphic novels provide immediate representations
of characters, settings, and emotions, removing
the element of imagination and the critical
skill of interpreting the author’s words
that are an integral part of the reading
experience. Even worse, graphic novel
adaptations often end up serving as
substitutes rather than springboards to
the original texts.

This includes our school too —
according to PHS librarian Jen
Bigioni, between the 10,121 titles
borrowed across physical and digital sources, most were
in the fantasy Young Adult (YA) and manga genres.

Just because students are short on time and commercial
interest is reducing reading to the most basic level, it is still
worth it for us to fight this uphill battle for reading whole,
sophisticated books.

I don’t object to reading excerpts and chapters. But
just like how food samples in grocery stores can never
replace regular meals, reading whole books is a completely
different experience to only sampling chapters. Reading
whole books offers the thrill of the twists and turns of
the plots, the satisfaction of the grand finale, and most
importantly, the understanding of the complexity of the
human experience. If you only read the courtroom chapter
of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” you would mistake Atticus
Finch as an anti-racist advocate and miss the nuance that
he, too, possesses the racial biases of his time.
Through reading whole books, we learn to
see the world not just in black and white, but
also the infinite shades of gray in between.
Moreover, reading books cover to cover
will be a great way to acquire new
knowledge after we complete our
formal education. One of our school
district’s goals is to instill passion and
curiosity in students to become lifelong learners. Without the skill and
stamina to complete whole books,
learning comes to an end when there
are no more tests administered to us.

Adding on to all of this, education
was once affordable only to the rich and
powerful; reading books was an upperclass activity for much of human
history. However, in the 1400s, the
invention of the Gutenberg printing
press revolutionized the dissemination of information and
increased access to knowledge. It was the spread of books
like John Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” and Jean
Jacques Rousseau’s “Social Contract” that ushered in the
Enlightenment Age and built the philosophical foundation
of modern democratic societies. Throughout history, the
widespread access to books has driven human progress,
but if we let reading once again become a luxury of a few,
it will be a major step back in human progress.

The Tower

Sarah Chen's Work

The Tower