A book I haven’t seen, merely heard about, is James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate society. It sounds very interesting. I know that there are people who think that Tik-Tok videos and other (very) short-form content is a kind of literacy that’s on a par with reading, but I have my doubts. I think of reading as a slow activity, one that lends itself to stopping and thinking about what you’ve just read. I don’t think the pause button is quite the same. But as I say, I haven’t read the book so cannot really comment on it. It is published by Bodley Head.
