Readers in the Wild

Will reading disappear? My book club wrestled with this question on Tuesday as we gathered in our usual circle, reliving bits and pieces of our latest selection and debating the merits of text and author. One member had just finished a class on AI, in which the instructor lauded the ability of AI to generate concise summaries of any book, thus eliminating the need to read the actual work. We all groaned—the author's perspective lost, the brain stimulation and attention span workout avoided. A collective "say it ain't so" moment rippled through the room.

I brought good news from our recent family trip to New York: on the subway, you can observe humans reading actual books in the wild, turning real pages as the train zips from stop to stop. When I told William how wonderful I found this, he rolled his eyes and noted that almost everyone else was reading, too—but on their phones. My older kids dismissed physical books as "performative," done to win approbation from strangers like me who find visible reading attractive.

Performative doesn't bother me. I told my son to go ahead and read his book club selection in the flesh—who knows how many other (much younger) people find an open paperback irresistible? My husband reads on his iPad at night, using the app Libby to borrow books, and I find that attractive too. Reading in bed seems infinitely more conducive to sleep than watching movies or scrolling through ultra-short videos that leave the brain spinning.

On a hopeful note, William belongs to a book club called "Millennials and Gen Z Read the Classics." He's met people with similar interests and abilities—reading an actual book from cover to cover constitutes a genuine skill in these days of texts, TikTok, and Instagram teasers. When we visited MoMA, we spotted Sunday readers scattered throughout the subway cars and art lovers of all ages standing transfixed before the museum's walls, gazing at Monet and Van Gogh and Pollock with the kind of sustained attention that can't be replicated by a screen's flicker.

Art can't be summarized by AI, can't be reduced to bullet points, can't be skimmed. The experience of standing before The Starry Night—the texture of the paint, the swirling depth that photographs flatten, the collective hush of strangers sharing the same arrested breath—this remains irreplaceable. Let's keep making art, seeking it out, celebrating it. Our brains and future generations depend on our insistence that some things are worth the full attention, the unrushed encounter, the turning of actual pages. The subway readers give me hope. So do the museum-goers, the book clubs, the people who still believe that some experiences can't be outsourced to algorithms—that presence, attention, and the slow work of reading remain worth protecting.