Відео

First sentence: "less and less people are reading books."" If people read more, they would know that the correct form is "fewer and fewer people." The simple explanation: nobody cares.

I don't know what you're talking about. People read every day. From street signs to Twitter.

I think the major cause of the decline is "diversity." 🫤

Exactly. I am a tutor to German high school teens (grade 10 to 12) who literally hate reading. It's boring, they say, a waste of time, and since I only have 90 minutes per week to convince them of the contrary, you can imagine that my attemps aren't very successful. With your permission, I would like to use parts of your video in my lessons (will translate it into German), hoping that this could be helpful.

Less and less people? Uncomfortability? Generations? Use of basic spoken English degrading, so of course literacy is too.

Thankyou for these recommendations

You should read "The Woman in White" (Wilkie Collins) & The Count of Monte Cristo ( Alexandre Dumas).

Max Bialystock rejected _Metamorphosis_ because it was too good.

I find it extremely difficult to downshift my brain to the point where I can sit and read. There are so many distractions, with social media being the most insidious. Apps like TikTok are the perfect attention grabbing machine. Still, the payoff from reading is always worth it. I find that 15 minutes of reading is more enriching than hours of TV or doomscrolling. I’m often surprised at how little time has passed when I am reading and stop to take a break.

As I Hungarian whom follows you for a long while now, I'm glad you are picking up Hungarian literature, if you want a really good recommendation The Tragedy of Men is really good, it's like the divine comedy or paradise lost, a journey and a conversation through time between Adam and Satan.

This is not the people's fault but the Fascist billionaires. Truth is gone. Trump reads his own Bible that he wrote and sells ! Personally, I love the smell and touch of a book !😂

I think we do a disservice to young people when we tell them "reading is fun." Sometimes it is, but mostly the books that have had a profound and lasting impact on my life were challenging to read or understand. It took hours of labor and reflection to get through these books, but that makes it more rewarding in the end.

That twist at the end!

Awesome book!

A fine novel.

I’ll have to check it out!

Hmm .. well, de Maupassant would be up there. "The Horla" for example. M.R. James. "Count Magnus." Lovecraft, why not, "Haunter of the Dark." These are stories I have re-read many times . More recently, couple Canadians: Alice Munro , "The Turkey Season." Morley O'Callaghan "The Snob" (very short stories usually, 10 pages average) .. Salinger of course "Bananafish" .. Somerset Maugham "Mister Know-All" .. Isaac Singer :The Cafeteria" , . etc

Now 35 years old, a couple years ago I began to have the same feeling toward social media as I did when I didn't brush my teeth after a meal. It was like my brain was coated with the social media equivalent of ingredients in a highly processed food. I very quickly turned back to books and rejected most forms of social media, and those that I stuck with I made sure were only showing me content that I didn't deem garbage. It's been incredibly enjoyable and done wonders for my mental health and personal growth, which is not at all surprising.

Brock, Thank you. Your video confirms what I had noticed going back 30-45 years ago. I spent most my life working in academic libraries and book stores. I’ve witnessed undergraduate and Master level graduate students who did not read and who did not try to get the most of their education. I have acquaintances and friends who are unable to have meaningful conversations because they don’t read and spend the majority of their free time watching videos and online with their phones. What is happening to my fellow citizens is tragic!

Great video! Toni morrison has an incredible writing style. I just finished beloved and it was definitely confusing at certain times and it left me so impressed on how she could cultivate quite the story with such amazing literary capabilities. Definitely going to be a reread for me.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." (Blaise Pascal, Pensees) 🤔

Boo

Good video. You got a new subscriber. I may have to read along with you guys but I’m a really slow reader so Tolstoy could take me all Year!!!! Love your list! I was watching your video about how reading gone down. I have to admit I have a hard time focusing and I use to read all the time as a child. Like even in school when teachers were teaching. I’d hide my book and read instead of listening. I want to get back into it but it’s been a struggle!!!!

So here I was, taking a break from the second reading, second translation of the Iliad so that I could hear this alarm about people no longer reading. I don't know what to make of this emergency. If people don't want to read, it's hard to force them. There is some merit to some movies as a means of story telling and also audio books. "They avoid the discomfort of a difficult book" - that’s me! But I’m used to many years of suffering with potentially boring books, so I can suck it up and take chances with difficult books.

Just discovered your channel. Good on you for starting Russian! I mostly clicked on this video to see if there would be something about cases and I was not disappointed haha. Being Greek, it is normal for me to think in terms of declensions,as we still have them in the modern form of Greek (nom., gen., acc. and vocative : Ancient Greek had a dative case as well that disappeared over time). It is a bit tricky in the beginning, but you'll get used to it! In any case, learning a language is based, as you probably know, on listening, speaking, reading, writing. The more you expose yourself to the language and develop all 4 skills, the easier it will get. See, for example, if you can't find easy little readers that are appropriate to your level so that you get used to reading in a different language.

This video is 10/10. You nailed it. Going to send it to all of my friends and family.

Just know it's not finished. That made me cry. Loved it

I think there’s truth to what you say, but at the same time I feel like this might be one of those perennial mirages, like the moral decay of youth.

I find every point you make perfectly apt. Reading is, at least for a while, tedious, and the payoff is not obvious. Unfortunately, there's a need-or maybe it's a pressure born of ceaseless comparison-to have our time be pragmatic and efficient, and that's a huge factor in why reading slips to the wayside: it gives the impression of being inefficient and seemingly impractical. The loss of interest in reading seems to portend a general loss of art, a loss of seeking sublimity in the expansive and ambiguous, the non-answerable. It is difficult to communicate what it's like to be well-read, the fullness of that inner life, to someone who's yet to feel subtle, spacious bliss. I'm glad you're one of the channels to offer that nudge; curiosity may be the first essential step, and I hope we're a part of stirring that drive toward sitting quietly with a great book.

Good choice! I’ll never think Dostoevsky is ‘dark’ again after watching Baby Reindeer in its entirety last night at the prompting of coworkers. It’s one of the darkest things I’ve ever watched. It’s given me a new perspective on what society considers sober, serious introspective, etc.. Even though books and television shows are apples and oranges I now view Tolstoy and Turgenev as upbeat and light-hearted 😁

Hi Brock, Happy New Year. I'd like to share a few observations which I make here in Germany (in big towns like Berlin and Duesseldorf): The number of youngsters in the big book stores is rising. More girls than boys. They are mainly not browsing the literature shelves, but the "Young / New adult" section (we use the English terms here) and the book design (colorful all around) seems to play an important role, maybe even more than the content of a book. I also observed, that the big stores enlarged their section with English books and many youngsters really join this section. One of the bestsellers in English currently is "A Little Life" by Yanagihara. I'm just describing, what I observe, and don't want to judge. Greets, Reiner.

In 6:42 you criticise modern paperback books as shallow and predictable and say that modern readers try to avoid complicated books, but then beginning in 7:52 and especially in 8:26 you appreciate modern booktok trends and reading modern books, even if they are mostly entertaining and not complicated. That's confusing. Apart from that, I really liked your video and it added some inspiration to think about.

Seems like people first come up with a theory ("phones make us dumb") and then try to prove it by finding facts that bolster up the thesis. That's called confirmation bias and not a proper way to do research. It's basically the age old complaint of the older generation that the younger generation is useless because it's not interested in the same things the older generation was interested in. Only packed slightly more sophisticated so it's not as obvious. One needs only look how reading was criticized in the past for making women hysterical, etc. Whenever a new medium is introduced, the fans of the old medium demonize it. When I was young, my mother complained about TV, comic books and computer games. Today it's the phones and the short form content supposedly rotting the brains of our children. But at the same time my son for instance has no problem following a 3 hr wendigoon podcast or an anime series with hundreds of episodes. So basically all that's happening once again as so many times in history is that story telling found a new medium - basically we're back to sitting around the fire having stories told to us instead of reading. It's not "attention span". It's nothing to be worried about.

Yesss so underrated!

For me, I don't read much these days because I read something I'm not interested in, like productivity books, and I feel that authors write a lot of unnecessary things. It is possible to summarize these books in a few minutes, so read what you are interested in.

I have never read this one. I guess I have to get a copy. The premise sounds compelling! 👊🏻

I reread “Ivanhoe” once every three years because my 9th grade literature teacher completely destroyed it for me. We had frequent quizzes and few in depth discussion about the book. I was miserable and finally just gave up reading it. If students today can’t read it’s because a teacher or parent(s) failed to instill a “love for books.”

Another dostoevskij's book to read!

Let's not let the publishers off of the hook. I read non-fiction, and it's very rare that I come across something that couldn't have made a decent, 10-page magazine article in The Atlantic. In order to justify the $30 price tag and front table space at B&N, however, these glorified magazine articles are stretched into repetitive and padded, 320-page, expensive hard cover books. Wide spaced, large font, etc.

My experience has been that reading is the best way to commit information to memory. The takeaway: the ease with which you receive the information corresponds with the ease with which you forget it.

Talking about literature in a casual setting becomes more and more difficult. When I meet someone new I might ask, "hey, what are you currently reading?" (in a friendly, not stuck-up way). 9 out of 10 times the answer is, "nothing" 🤷‍♂️. 20 years ago maybe 3 out of 10 gave me that answer. I mingle with people from all kind of demographics. So yeah, this feels a bit disheartening.

Hi, another teacher here, I teach 5th and 6th grade. I agree with what you said about the current state of kids and reading, and the reasons why, although the one piece I think you missed is that it is also generational, my students parents in general don’t read either, so they do not learn to love to read at home either as earlier generations did. I have actually been pretty successful with teaching kids to enjoy reading and to be able to focus better. Not 100% of course, but students leave my classroom able sit quietly and read a book for 30 minutes and look forward to it every day in class. Long explanation how, can’t type it all here, but would love to discuss because I do think influencers like you are an important part of trying to help close our literacy gap. I will be retiring soon, and I want to help with this as it is definitely something that keeps me up at night.

I know someone who used to read a great deal, in fact he would routinely recommend new authors to me. Now when I discuss a novel or even a short story I read, he says he's jealous ... He continues to study art, as that is his obsession, and "read" books on art, as mostly that involves flipping thru picture books and reading captions. Almost like he had a brain injury!

Good video. Now im about to go sit in my office, in the quiet, and read The Corrections by Franzen 👍🏽

Things that aren't helping the reading literacy: 1) People have to have two to three jobs while going to college. 2) Early schools have done away Phonics. 3) Book bannings/burnings. 4) Unschooling. 5) Books not being created for men. (The book industry is mainly woman dominated and most books out there now are more catered towards women). 6) 3 queuing What is helping reading literacy: 1) Phonics 2) Funding Libraries to create a safe place for all people. 3) Having more time for ourselves to read. 4) Internet detoxing. 5) Forming a good habit of reading. 6) Listening to an audiobook while doing chores etc. 7) Having books be catered to ALL people. When I was doing an internet detox a few months ago. I noticed that everytime I was bored, I would have the urge to be on my phone. So I would either write, read, walk etc. What I found was that my brain would be all over the place if I wasn't occupied with something. This was normal since human beings aren't meant to sit down and do nothing all day, we are meant to do something. Now I was already a voracious reader before all this so I was well prepared and had books to read while I was bored but it made me wonder how others would do if they weren't so lucky. Also, I think society tends to criminalize introverts as well. Hell, I even remembered that one part in Fahrenheit 451 that reading makes people antisocial and not wanting to spend time with others was weird. (Yes, we humans are social creatures but we also like to be alone too).

The point that you made around 8:30 is an interesting one. There have been a few times that I’ve recommended a book to a friend and then they were surprised when I either said I didn’t like it or that it was good but boring to read. Sometimes a book is a trudge to get through, but it sticks with you after and you have a change of heart

It's an extremely worrying trend that needs to be addressed, how that should happen, i'm not sure.

Meditation and staying away from my phone 90% of the time has helped me.

Right - this is the first wave of a chain-reaction disaster. Literacy consumed by a wildfire. To me, the ultimate distraction is a good book. A good one really takes me away.