Reading about the reading life: September 12, 2025 edition

Welcome to another edition of "Reading about the reading life" here at The Itinerant Librarian. This is where I collect stories about reading and the reading life. Basically, these are items related to reading, maybe writing and literacy, that I find interesting and think my four readers might find interesting as well with a little commentary. As with other features I do on this blog, I do it when I have time or feel like it. Comments are always welcome (within reason).

Last time I put together one of these posts was back in June, so not too bad in terms of length of time between posts in this series when compared to the time before June. So here are some stories about books, reading, and literacy that have caught my eye since June 2025, with some commentary on my part, that I figure my four readers may find of interest as well. If any of the stories catch your attention, feel free to comment and let me know your thoughts.

A big issue in recent weeks seems to be people losing the ability to read, not wanting to read, or just reading less overall. 

• Constance Grady, writing for Vox, looks at childhood literacy and the narrative that kids today, whenever today is, can't read, or can't read as well as the previous generations.  She looks at the history of people complaining about the reading skill of previous generations, but there are still concerns about reading ability nonetheless. 
• This reminded me of a book I read a while ago, Literacy in America (link to my review). The book was not great, but it does show that over time the complaint about "the kids can't read" has been around for years now.  
• In another issue to blame Gen Z, it seems that as parents they are not reading to their children, or reading a lot less to the kids. This may cause children to not develop an interest nor the ability to read down the road. Story via Futurism. Other concerns include kids spending more time on screens and for schools, the rise of A.I. 
• The big news this month or so has been that study reporting a decline in adult reading for pleasure. The media has been on top of it; here is The Guardian's coverage as an example.  The study looked at Americans in a 20-year period from 2003 to 2023 based on the American Time Use Survey. For purposes of the study, "the definition of reading in the survey wasn’t limited to books; it also included magazines and newspapers in print, electronic or audio form." Pretty much as usual, women lead men when it comes to leisure reading. On a positive, the study also found that "those who read for pleasure have tended to spend even more time reading than before...". I know I am doing my part and trying to read more as I can. 

These days you cannot go far without some reference and/or concern about the effects of A.I. (i.e. large learning models, or LLMs) on reading, literacy, education, and so on. 

•  At Attack the System, a comparison between the fall of the monasteries and their literacy monopoly once the printing press was invented and the impact of A.I. in higher education. In case, you wonder, higher education would be the monasteries in the analogy. A line in the article that caught my eye: "At the same time, universities have become engorged on tuition fees, research grants, and endowments, providing an easy and luxurious life for armies of well-paid and under-worked administrators, as well as for those professors who are able to play the social games necessary to climb the greased pole of academic promotion." I've known quite a few academics who were both quite adept and ruthless in those social games necessary to get promotion and tenure. I unfortunately are not quite adept and lack the ruthless qualities to climb, but then again, as long as I can do my work I am good (but that is another story). That aside, the piece offers some serious food for thought for academics and higher education. 
• Meanwhile, the Cambridge Dictionary has announced they are tracking AI generated words and adding to the dictionary as necessary.  Language just keeps evolving, even if it includes AI Slop, which is recognized by the Cambridge Dictionary.
• At The New Yorker, they ask what has happened to reading with the arrival of technology and now AI.  It considers also what happens when AI machines basically gobble up all kinds of texts. By the way, this came before stories like the Anthropic settlement (via AP). 

On social media and reading. The YouTube algorithm jumps on just about anything you watch. Watch one or two videos about books, and suddenly the feed gets filled up with videos about Booktokers (TikTok book influencers) and influencers complaining about how awful the Booktokers are. The topic could be a whole other blog post. Meanwhile, I did come across a few articles about the intersection of social media and books and reading that I felt were interesting enough to share. This also goes along a bit with the book I am currently reading: Hoodwinked, which goes a bit into influencers and how they work, and they often work just like cults. I will have a review of the book here on the blog sometime after I finish reading it. 

•  The RA for All blog highlights and discusses an article out of Booklist comparing doing a book talk in a library versus doing it on Booktok. Personally I have little to no use for Booktok in particular and TikTok as a whole. I even briefly tried TikTok; it is not for me. But as a librarian and reader I feel that I have to at least be aware of Booktok and some of what goes on over there. Lucky for me, plenty of other people do the hard part of hanging out in TikTok, write about it, and I can just read it, be informed, and move on. 
• Speaking of TikTok, apparently there is a thing called "bookshelf wealth." That is when you make content to show off very carefully curated shelves of books, books that they influencer likely never read. The books are there to look pretty. Story via The Conversation. However, big shelves filled with a lot of books as a social marker are not a new thing. There is plenty of history for the trend. Article also looks a bit at book culture, home libraries, and book clubs over time. 
• On BookTrib, this article looks at the question I mentioned earlier: are those Booktokers buying books and talking them up to read them or just to show them off? Odds are it is the latter, and that would be another reason I have little to no regard for Booktok. And it is not just TikTok. YouTube is also flooded with book influencers showing book hauls, filled shelves, etc. that no one would be able to finish reading even if they suddenly had the life span of a vampire. As the article's author writes, "Social media has transformed books into lifestyle objects. TikTok posts featuring artfully arranged paperbacks function as cultural currency, signaling taste and identity to viewers." They may have taste and identity, but did of those folks actually read anything they featured on their social media? Probably not. The publishers however likely don't care. As long as the influencers keep selling books for them, it matters little if they get read or not. 

Finally for this week, let's look at a few other stories in general: 

•  Peter Wortsman at Literary Hub writes on "the Ever-Difficult Task of Saving and Discarding Beloved Books." This caught my eye in part because I've had to weed out my personal library during moves from one place to another. It is never an easy thing to do, but it is often necessary. 
• Chuck Wendig writes on reading print magazines in a time when so much content, including magazine content, is electronic and online. I can attest that I do not read print magazines very much if ever. In part because magazines I may be interested in, if they have an RSS feed, I just read them online through the feed reader. Another option, though one I do not use much, is that our local public library has Libby. Libby has e-books and other media, and it includes magazines, so I could read the magazines that way too if I had or made the time to read them. Heck, we get a couple of magazines at home, and I don't really read those; I should make the effort probably. Nothing fancy, we get the AARP magazine, which the Better Half got us the membership now that we qualify, and we get the one from Costco from the membership. I may need to try Wendig's advice sometime and just read a magazine or two. It's just that at times it feels like if I am not reading a book I am not really reading. Part of that may be because I read and/or skim articles and other short form content at work, so I want an actual book when I doing my leisure reading. Anyways, food for thought, for me at least. 
• I don't think the comparison of Charlie Brown to beloved Argentinian comic Mafalda is quite accurate or even in the same league. Mafalda as a whole is nothing like the charming loser Charlie Brown is. I like Peanuts in small doses, but I can't really stand Lucy's constant bullying of Charlie Brown. Anyhow, Literary Hub has news that Mafalda has finally been translated into English. To be honest, all I had to say to that was "what took you so damn long?" I've been reading Mafalda in and out since I was a child. You Americans have been seriously missing out. 
• In feel good stories (that actually feel good), a man read 3,599 books, wrote down the list by hand, and after his passing, his family put the list up online for all to see. The list by now has also been transcribed and digitized for searching. Story via Open Culture. 
• Via Electronic Intifada has an account on a book stall that perseveres in Gaza.