Reading aloud has become an act of punk rebellion. Something like listening to a recording of The Clash, flirting in a coffee shop at noon, or sitting down to watch John Wayne’s entire filmography. Rich Lowry complains that children no longer read. They say screens and smartphones are to blame. Lowry concludes that this is a major failure of the education system. But I don’t entirely agree.
It’s true that the absence of paper books in classrooms is a tragedy. It prevents children from acquiring the mechanical habit of opening a book, reading it, and caressing its pages. The smell of printer’s glue is strangely addictive. But I think schools have never really managed to produce good readers. Required reading is necessary, but it has never made children fall in love with books. Love emerges in another way: you need a book you choose voluntarily to find you at exactly the right moment and place, and pierce your heart with a romantic arrow. There is something almost sexual about that moment; in fact, almost everyone remembers their first time.
The habit of reading is contagious. Readers will appear when someone else — another lover of literature — hands them a good novel.
I’m the youngest of four siblings. When I was 10, my sister was 15, and my brothers were 18 and 20 respectively. Until then, we used to play together at home. But from that point on, every Friday after school, my brothers disappeared into the streets with their friends to do typical teenage things, while I wandered alone through the rooms of our house, slightly melancholic. Those hours of boredom forced me to stretch my intellect in search of entertainment, to push my imagination to its limits, and, of course, to fall in love with reading. I’m grateful for that. How things have changed: now my siblings stay home reading while I have to be thrown out of bars before sunrise.
On the other hand, screens distract young people not only from reading, but also — and perhaps more importantly — from learning how to be bored. For many children of earlier generations, boredom was the main driving force behind a love of reading, as well as games and every other activity requiring imagination and creativity.
I’ve spent the last two years working on what should be the great novel of my life as a writer. I’ve written twelve books, but only two belong entirely to the realm of fiction. Writing an essay, even a humorous one, is essentially an intellectual exercise. Writing a novel is an act of love — or heartbreak — something that necessarily involves emotion.
I’ve written few novels because my brain is not designed for the complex intellectual structures required to sustain a long story. I find it enormously difficult, partly because during periods of intense writing I become possessed by the story, and the characters speak inside my head constantly, even when I would rather they stayed quiet for a while. Yes, in a sense, I become schizophrenic. But, as I say, it is an act of love. And I can only conceive of the reader of a novel as someone in love with reading — someone capable of empathizing and stepping into the protagonist’s shoes in the same way I am doing these days.
I published my first book 20 years ago. Since then, the writer’s greatest problem has not been children’s lack of reading habits, but adults.’ I cannot reveal the plot of my novel, but I can say that it deals precisely with the paradigm shift between the analog and digital worlds. There is something frustrating about delighting in the great collapse of the culture we once knew, but at the same time I admit that crises are always fertile ground for humor, which is what interests me most. If Western civilization is going to hell, the least we can do is preserve the ability to laugh during the collapse. Even so, for the first time, I’m afraid. Yes, I’m afraid that by the time I finally finish this novel and hand it to my editor, there may be no readers left on the other side.
Twenty years ago, I could lock myself away for three months and devote myself exclusively to finishing a book. Today I can’t do that, because without my journalistic work I could not afford to dedicate myself to writing books; most authors now have to juggle writing with other financially rewarding activities. A good writer friend of mine says — and he’s right — that writing books has become the most expensive vice we have.
Everything connected to the world of books has changed: readers and authors alike. Only one thing continues to happen, and will remain magical even if it happens to only one person in the world: the moment a book blows your mind when you least expect it. Lowry is right, but only partly. We need readers, but they will not emerge from schools. The habit of reading is contagious. Readers will appear when someone else — another lover of literature — hands them a good novel as though sharing a secret from the depths of the heart. “I thought of you while reading this novel” is one of the most beautiful declarations of love.
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