Yesterday, I was shocked to read the news about a leading TikTok influencer with 9m followers, a Netflix series to her name, and a $20m net worth. She is Alix Earle, and she caused a bit of an internet kerfuffle this week when she said that in her 25 years on the planet, she has never read a book. Not one. None. Zilch. Well, apart from the fact that she thinks she might have read something by Dr Seuss.
Unsurprisingly, she received something of a backlash. One commenter said, “Not having read a book since elementary school is not ditsy and cute, it’s embarrassing.“ Another commented, “That can’t be true. You went to college; you read books then surely.” The suggestion made by Alix Earle might or might not be true. The statement may have been designed purely to attract publicity. In which case it worked.
However, it has raised the fact that many commenters supported reading, although a few praised her for dispensing with books. Despite the growth of a variety of forms of entertainment, including a never-ending stream of TikTok videos, it appears that many people still love reading.
Indeed, according to the Publishers Association, we have recently had a record year for books. Sales are up and the book market continues to grow. Alix Earle might not be reading, but plenty of people do.
Even so, some issues are worrying. According to a YouGov poll last year, four out of every ten people hadn’t read a book in the previous 12 months. Similarly, data released by the National Literacy Trust show that in the past decade, reading among younger people has been dropping.
Reading is good for you. It doesn’t matter too much what you read. Reading itself seems useful. A review just published in the journal Psychological Medicine shows that reading brings health benefits. These include lower stress levels, a reduced risk of dementia, and slower cognitive decline. In addition, the authors showed that reading improves attention and memory, as well as “executive control”. That’s the way the brain organises everything it needs to do. Furthermore, neurological studies show that reading positively changes the structure of your brain. There is a significant link between reading and good mental health.
It has long been known that reading helps improve exam results. Research in Australia and the USA found that children who grow up with books around them at home do better across a range of skills. Other studies have shown that when children read for pleasure, their maths skills improve too.
Reading clearly has a range of benefits, from improving educational attainment to developing skills and supporting overall mental wellbeing. We all started to read when we were at school – unless you are a TikTok influencer, perhaps. Yet in adulthood, only around half of the population reads regularly. Despite a small recent uptick, the Reading Agency says reading has declined over the past decade.
It is possible we could see a further decline, as more and more people use artificial intelligence to summarise things for them. The very tool that provides such convenience could also be reducing our skills while harming our mental wellbeing.
A far better way of using AI is to ask it to recommend books for you to read. Tell it your preferences, give it examples of books you have loved, and it can tell you what else might interest you.
You could also use AI to help you schedule regular reading. One reason people tell me they don’t read as much as they used to is a lack of time. But there is no lack of time. We have the same number of hours in the day as we did as children, when we read books daily. What has changed are our habits. Instead of reading every day, we have replaced that habit with something else, like scrolling endlessly through TikTok. The habit you learned at junior school has not gone anywhere. It is simply waiting for you to pick it up again. AI can help you choose the book. The reading is up to you.
Just finding half an hour a week to read will help you think more clearly and cope with work pressure better. And it is linked to a healthier brain as you age. So here is a small challenge for this weekend. Tell an AI tool about two books you have loved and ask it to suggest three more. Then put 30 minutes in your diary on Monday to start the first one, and treat it like any other appointment you would not cancel.
If you want to pass the habit on, you could do no better than support the late, great Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. It sends a free book every month to children from birth until they start school. Its whole purpose is to make sure no child grows up with just one half-remembered Dr Seuss book to their name.
