Across the board, Australians are reading less than ever before, with young men reading the least and older women reading the most.
The trend is reinforced from a young age, with parents more likely to read to their daughters than sons.
Australia Reads, a book industry initiative, is calling for a national strategy that reminds people of the fun and comfort that reading can bring.
For me personally I blame school.
It went from reading in the library for fun to breaking down texts and trying to make-up some deep meaning for a grade. It destroyed the fun of reading and made it a slog, I’ve never recovered the passion since.
I have to agree with @jjjalljs@ttrpg.network. I have seen the perspective that @Longmactoppedup@aussie.zone, yourself, and others have shared many times, and obviously I haven’t been in your lives to know exactly why you think that way, but I can’t help but think that you they had an exceptionally bad high school English teacher, or just completely failed to understand what your teachers were saying.
You should never be “making up some deep meaning”. You’re reading the text and working out what meaning is contained in the text. This might have been meaning intentionally put there by the author, but it also might have been subconsciously done by the author because of their own life experience and the culture in which they live, or even something that becomes possible to interpret out of the text based on the reader’s lived experience which may not have made sense as an interpretation when and where the author wrote it. Often a combination of all three.
Recognising how a text can contain ideas that carry more meaning that just the surface leaving reading adds so much depth and meaning to them. How a text can actually say something about the real world and the people within it. Reflect our hopes and fears. Reinforce or reject society’s norms and mores.
I’m reading Dracula right now, as part of a book club in !vampires@lemmy.zip, and it’s one of my favourite books because of the many possible readings and themes contained within it. Its commentary on “women’s place in the world” (as @jjjalljs@ttrpg.network put it) is an incredibly strong one. The difference between Mina and Lucy; the one engaged and later married to her one love and completely chaste, the other a rather more sexually free woman (by Victorian standards) who receives three marriage proposals in one day, and regrets “why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” This latter is the one turned into a vampire who, as a woman vampire, feeds on children and babies, unlike the titular male vampire who feeds on adults. But before she is turned, she receives blood transfusions from each of those three suitors. I’m sure there’s no possible subtext in that: the three men who loved her each, in turn, injecting their bodily fluids into her in the aim of giving her life.
And it’s not limited to books. Film and television are literature too. As I write this I’m watching a video (not available on YouTube yet) that does literary analysis on my favourite TV show, Avatar the Last Airbender. A show I love precisely because of how deep and ripe for thematic analysis it is. Earlier today I had a chance to ramble some of my favourite themes at an unfortunately uninterested audience in a thread on Lemmy. Earlier this year, discussion about Star Wars: Andor was very popular because it is full of themes with very obvious applicability today. Heck, learning how to analyse literature can help you better appreciate dumb meme stories shared on the Internet.
If you didn’t learn an appreciation for literary analysis in school, you have my sincerest pity. Because it adds so much richness to the world when you can do it.
Funny how folks are different. I always enjoyed reading stuff and making up the ways it can mean stuff. Like, it’s easy to read Dracula and think about feminism and women’s place in the world. (a foreign entity shows up and now women are abandoning their motherly duties, wandering the streets at night? That won’t do. Get some men to hold her down and penetrate her with this big wood. Hmm.)
I often find the opposite mode, the absolute refusal to think about the story beyond “some things that happened”, tiresome. Like, “Ok I get that the story is about how they have to remove, possibly with violence, the competent women ruler and put the child boy on the throne because the rules say that only a man can rule, but why do you have to make this political? it’s just a fun story.”
I read a lot of fiction books in my own time when I was in primary school for the enjoyment of it.
When I got to highschool I hated English so much. Analyse what the author’s theme was in this bla bla fuck off! Sucked the joy out of reading. Didn’t give me any useful skills for the career path I was heading in to either.
There needs to be an academic English subject for people who just need it to get in to STEM courses.
Took some years after high school to get back in to it, but I do occasionally read fiction when I have time these days.
We had that basically from the first grade of primary school. Each month a new book. It started with just summarizing the text, then gradually went from writing what you think the moral of the story is, to giving a full breakdown and analysis. 12 years of that, for the books I found mind-numbingly boring, that I ended up weaseling/cheatig my way through most of it without even reading. I remember giving my best to try read through the entire Crime and Punishment, but giving up 1/3 into the book. All the classic literature—just not for my brain.
Didn’t help that while my primary school teacher had tried to cultivate my creative writing (45 minute, graded assignment), my secondary school teacher was a snob who graded me lower just because she “didn’t like my style”. God, I hated school, lol.
I still like reading modern fantasy and some other genres, so there’s that, but school almost completely turned me off from reading.
We had to read the Illiad and I gave up after 5 pages. I just cannot be bothered to read when it’s all writen in such weird prose. Achilles being called 3 different names on the first 2 pages. Fuck off with that. And then when we went through it with our teacher she asked what kind of wood Achilles’ ja elin was made of. Like what?? How is that fucking relevant. But I do still to this day know it was aspen (I think that’s the correct translation).
Illiad was in our curriculum, too. But I think the worst I gave a shot to were the few works from my country’s literature several centuries old that literally over half had to be translated to the modern language for us to understand. It was exhausting to read.
Lol, thanks for reminding me of something with the Achilles bit. We have state exams at the end of 12 year education that are also a requirement for college admittance. There are (were?) two levels of difficulty. I took the higher one. But the lower one had an especially egregious question. It was so controversial, it ended in newspapers, was debated among teachers and politicians alike. The question was which color a certain character’s ring was from a book we had as required reading at some point in school. Something, as you can imagine, absolutely irrelevant to test in the final state exams (which test knowledge of the four high school years on multiple subjects).
School systems nowadays suck so much for so many reasons.
Oh yeah our finals also have lower or higher levels. Except for slovene (the main language) which is only on the higher level. And is usually the worst one since Half the grade is a long essay which is of course graded subjectively and there are a lot of parts like pronounciation and other shit which literally cannot be solved 100% correctly since you would have to know the whole dictionary.
slovene
Howdy, neighbor 😁 Matura is such a joke, lol.
Quite right.
You’re certainly right that the way I did it in school felt rather performative and didn’t leave me with positive impressions of the books I had not read previously. I’m not going to say there’s no purpose in trying to understand the meanings/symbolism in a work but it’s not going to make a good impression on someone if that’s their first introduction to the book - or worse their introduction to reading books in general.
I know it’s almost exclusively negative experiences here, but I do think it depends heavily on the student and their teachers as to whether that type of coursework is appealing. Personally I devoured English throughout high school, it was my favourite subject by far and the only one in Year 12 where I felt empowered, confident and challenged myself. It really established my ability to think deeply about complex issues and articulate my arguments with more clarity (and listen to and engage with those of others), which are some of the most widely applicable and useful life skills I learned in school.
I can report something similar; the last several years of high school, literature class is just miserable shit written hundreds of years ago that seems to be deemed important because the limp dick grey hairs in charge of writing the state curriculum were forced to read it when they were in school, and they were taught not to question their elders so you WILL fucking study this.
Anyone who goes back in time to kill Hitler, could you get Emily Bronte as well?
Fuck me that might have been me as well. Never even considered that.
It competes with other entertainment forms, takes time, energy and focus. Seems natural to me.
Exactly. And no loot box dopamine hits.
I’ll upvote your comment if you go read a couple pages. You want the dopamine hit, don’t you? Little bit of validation?
Do it.
That’s a pretty concerning trend IMO, particularly when the article mentions 44% of Australians have issues with literacy.
A lot of comments saying why they think reading has declined (boo evil school… They made me critically analyse stuff…) but not even touching on why that’s evidently having more effect on boys than girls?
That’s odd.
Compare to the other post asking why Tate bro manosphere brainrot is on the rise. The kind of garbage that specifically discourages boys from higher order thinking because that’s not “alpha”. Some of the comments there basically boiled down to " not my problem, shut up".
Interetsing juxtaposition.
Misogyny holds men back, but as long as that won’t be acknowledged, nothing will improve.
What happened to Gen X men? That gap is massive, their numbers are nearly as low Gen Z men.
Gen X here. I was such an avid reader until my late 30’s and I have no idea what happened. It was either when I emigrated from my country and maybe I had too much on my plate, or the internet finally taking its toll on my ability to concentrate.
I’ve no substantiation for these guesses but one thing that comes to mind is that boys were more likely to get into computers in the early eras of tech and that time sink could lead to them being less likely to build the habit of reading. TV is another possibility, Gen X was the first to grow up with TVs being widespread and boys probably spent more time on that.
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Same thing that happened to the generations after x: computer games, consoles. Books were big for me when I was young, but I hardly have time to read now
Also not much of generation X is retired
Gen x here. Techy from 12 years old roughly. My hand writing is atrocious. I read until about 17.
Probably because books cost like twice as much here. Use your local library.
I didn’t read in school. I read sporadically as an adult, mostly science fiction. I completely dropped the ball during the pandemic when I got hooked on reddit. I think that, and working in tech has addled my brain. Now I just listen to audiobooks but it feels like cheating. The only books I look forward to buying.and reading is whatever Greg Egan puts out.
If you’re into sci-fi, how much have you gone through the classics? Most are novel length so don’t require a huge commitment (I too struggle with long books).
A bit but having googled ‘sci fi classic authors’ I can see many more I haven’t picked up. I’ve been trying to catch up/keep up by listening to audiobooks but even then I find myself lacking time. At this moment It’s Revelation Space. I bet if we had a much shorter working week reads rates would skyrocket.
Loved revelation space, but yeah long read.
Arthur C Clarke and Asimov both wrote loads of good novel length SciFi so I’d start there if you haven’t gotten into them.
From an interview with Ron H. Barassi (not to be confused with Ron Barassi):
Art Income Dialectic, on the B side of the single, is a delightful soliloquy of yours Ron. May I ask you which Shakespearian character’s soliloquy do you feel most comfortable with; that of Hamlet -
"Drown the Stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech
Make mad the guilty, and appal the free";
or that of Macbeth?
"I am in blood
steeped in so far that, should I walk no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er."
RHB: Blood haunts Macbeth. It becomes synonymous with the gradual flooding of his wife’s subconscious sense, or morality, and the destruction of his own. My copy of that play is still marked by the notes I made in my HSC year. I can remember sitting at 11.30pm, when the rest of the family had gone to bed, with the lights just on enough to read and making lists of the references to blood in the play. With growing surprise, as the scent from my father’s flower-beds drifted in, I realised blood was a cohesive pervasive symbol throughout the play. It was a warm night because that was only four weeks or so before the exam. I realised that Shakespeare could be read as poetry, with the compression of language that the word poetry implies, as well as a drama. In fact it was this poetic notion of Shakespeare that attracted me the most because I’m yet to see a production of his which doesn’t bore the shit out of me.
Honestly, I analyse and satirise literature in my spare time, and I’ve read a few nonfiction theory texts that are well above high-school level, but I don’t think I have ever read an entire assigned text in its entirety. Every addition material I selected for exams was a film.
Funny that the retirees read a lot. Their friends are dead and they don’t have a steam account
