Australia’s last reader was on my tram, travelling to another world

The last reader in Australia turns out to be a young woman. No surprise. John Logie Baird rendered men illiterate at a stroke when he invented the TV in 1926.

I’m waiting for her eyes to widen as Oliver Twist asks for more. I’m waiting for her to shake her head and hold the book out and stare at its cover and silently mouth the words, “Doris Lessing ... girl, what the absolute f---?” Reading requires sharp neurological footwork. It is not a passive activity. Scans of the brain show areas of it are lit like aurora when you are reading. Imagining 1930s Maycombe, Alabama during the Depression, its streets and stores, its loungers and livery, is a mental workout that the cleavage vignettes on OnlyFans and the skateboard pratfalls of TikTok don’t require and can’t supply.

People now see reading as a quaint, historical diversion, a pastime for those who lacked more splendid options, a drag, something akin to needlepoint or whittling, a distraction for castaways and folk who got snowed-in for long winters without power, a hobby for paranoid misanthropes, abandoned widows and anti-social geeks – for Victorians, Edwardians and colonials. The citizens of the TikTok epoch think of libraries as a type of asylum.

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