Why Adults Can't Read Classic Novels Anymore
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- The author, once a voracious teen reader of classics, found Tristram Shandy 'inexcusable,' struggled with Dracula's epistolary format after 150 pages, and put down Our Mutual Friend after 60-odd pages, repeatedly checking football scores he didn't care about.
- Gloria Mark's research finds screens compel users to switch attention toward interfaces and ads; Chartbeat data shows one in three online readers spend less than 15 seconds on any given article.
- Oxford's Kate McLoughlin says people read more than ever — social media, blogs, comments, texts, emails, and AI outputs — just not books, while the National Readership Survey reports a shift from manual to managerial roles that keep workers staring at screens all day.
- Yale's Nancy Yousef attributes the difficulty of 18th- and 19th-century novels to 'thickets of syntax' with subordinate clauses and shifts in register that modern readers are no longer used to parsing, a point echoed by UCL's Helen Hackett.
- St Andrews' Katie Garner recommends a 'Read like a Victorian' approach of one chapter per session, replicating the serialised format in which Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell were originally published, and suggests audiobooks as a legitimate on-ramp.
- The author's own parents illustrate the divide: his middle-manager father crammed classics into two-week summer holidays, while his childminder mother read novels every evening.
Why it matters: Screen-dominated managerial work, now the majority of jobs per the National Readership Survey, is eroding adults' ability to engage with novels that demand 'thickets of syntax,' Yale's Nancy Yousef says. The experts' prescription — chapter-by-chapter serialized reading and shorter entry points like Chekhov or The Metamorphosis — is pragmatic, but the underlying tension is structural: a workforce drowning in emails and instant messages still cannot finish a book.
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