Thriller novelist Dan Brown has written a book that some critics say is aimed at people who do not read books. James Marriott, a journalist and former rare-bookseller, has written a book for people who do read—about those who do not. It is an intriguing sales pitch. What comes next: a 3.5-hour radio documentary about dwindling attention spans?

People who read books should read A New Dark Age. Marriott’s argument can make readers feel both wary and a little smug. He says that people who read books are better informed and happier, contribute more to a society based on rational rules and evidence, and help uphold the rights and principles of liberal democracy. Has anyone read Dan Brown’s books? Absolutely.

Reading—even reading an airport thriller—requires people to engage with the world and with other people in ways that other forms of media do not. Despite the rise of technology, Marriott argues, reading remains the best way to experience being someone other than yourself.

“Movies, video games, television. Despite their strengths, these art forms are hopelessly trapped in a world outside the surface,” he writes.

This short, lively book is a love letter to the written word, expressed with the passion of an excited spouse. Marriott says, “I can’t simply say everything that’s important or true,” but he seems to have managed to say a great deal.

Reading, attention and the competition for focus

For a work promoting literacy and the ability of books to convey complex ideas, A New Dark Age has a simple premise: reading helped build the modern world and contributed to the development of science, democracy and reason.

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But books are now supposedly dying out, and as the amount of reading decreases, so too does the ability to think rationally. Marriott argues that rational debate has consequently stalled in many areas of politics and national life.

If books were truly dying, no one would have told the people writing them that publishers were releasing more books each year. The problem, Marriott says, is that many of the books selling—and perhaps being read—are the “wrong” books, including self-help books, romance novels, detective stories and young-adult fiction. Meanwhile, sales of books about economics, current affairs and politics are plummeting.

There is good news for popular-science authors. In May, the Royal Society declared the previous 20 years a golden age for the genre. Annual sales rose from 1.2 million copies in 2000 to more than 5 million at their peak in 2019. By 2024, total sales had fallen to 2.9 million copies, but the number of titles had grown to 20,000—about four times the number reported in 2000.

Books have become simpler, with shorter sentences and less demanding prose, Marriott says. That means readers do not have to concentrate as much as he did when, as a teenager, he struggled through Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s pages “without understanding” them. The experience taught him a valuable lesson:

“To discover what truly enriches us, we must be attentive. We must patiently endure initial feelings of embarrassment and irritation…until what seemed strange and wrong enough to make us uncomfortable reveals itself to us to be true and profound enough to enrich our lives.”

How smartphones threaten literacy

Generations of readers have wrestled with Dostoyevsky. So what is different now? Marriott’s “Great Simplification” asks whether today’s teenagers and adults are unwilling or unable to sustain the effort and focus that difficult reading requires. Why do teachers complain that their students can no longer understand the opening sentences of Charles Dickens’s novels?

The answer, Marriott suggests, is in your pocket, bag or hand.

Smartphones have taken television’s role as a distraction from the written word and spread it across the entire day. They offer constant, instant and unfiltered access to content that Marriott describes as “pathetically ill-equipped to speak to the deeper human desires of curiosity, learning, storytelling, attention to detail, and artistic fulfilment.”

Dense text requires concentration and time to decipher and appreciate. It cannot easily compete with the ever-present, addictive stream of notifications and instant “rewards”—messages, featured takes and videos—that provide entertainment while primarily functioning as distractions.

Marriott recalls that Dickens could write hundreds of pages filled with expansive digressions, playful linguistic deviations and hyperactive asides because there was little more interesting for 19th-century readers to do at home. Dickens wrote in Rational Belief: “It may be the most absorbing entertainment in your home.” Marriott adds that no modern writer could write with more confidence.

A readable warning about the future of books

If you avoid reading because of its complexity and cognitive demands, there is nothing to fear from A New Dark Age. I read its 170 pages in a few enjoyable hours. Marriott, now a newspaper columnist, has a talent for concise phrases and an enviable ability to anticipate and answer questions that occur to readers—even questions they have not yet asked.

I did have to look up the word perifrastic. Once I learned that it means “redundant”, I wondered whether I had missed the joke.

And a note to anyone shaking their head and pointing out that they are probably reading this review—and Marriott’s book—on a smartphone: Marriott is looking at you.