We’ve forgotten how to read long novels – and we’ll pay the price

2022 is a big year for the birthdays of big books. In February we observed the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s. In November it will be a century since the death of Marcel Proust, author of the gargantuan novel sequence first translated into English asAre the big books of Proust and Joyce underrated? Obviously not. They’re rated as masterpieces by most people who’ve read them. But how many people have? Considering their quality, both books are gravely under-read.

Meanwhile, online magazines have started warning us how many minutes each story on their home page will take to read. The times specified are always piddling. Four minutes. Six minutes. Maybe 10 if the story’s really earth-shaking. The implication is clear: reading is a luxury we can barely afford. The sooner a writer gets out of our hair, the better.

The trend was accelerated by the rise of literacy and novel-reading in the 18th century, Pinker believed. Reading fiction civilises us, he argued; it takes us beyond our “parochial vantage points”, expanding our “circle of empathy” by “seducing [us] into thinking and feeling like people very different from [ourselves]”.If reading makes us less self-centred and nasty, does our waning patience for books explain why we now spend so much time having trivial online squabbles? It seems possible.

Interestingly, some of the best-loved long novels of recent years have been written for children. At the height of the Harry Potter craze, J. K. Rowling published the 750-page. My nephew, who was 10 at the time, immersed himself in that brick-thick hardback for days, viewing its extreme length not as a bummer but a bonus.

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