Literature is so back.
The decline is over.
For years we have heard that fewer people are reading, and especially that fewer people are reading the classics. All charts point downwards.
I think that’s over now. We hit the bottom. Literature is coming back.
A novelist I met in London recently has become so obsessed with reading the classics that, when we chatted about the best modern novels of the last few years, she opened her Kindle and Goodreads and said, “No, I’m just reading classics right now.”
She’s currently obsessed with Moby Dick, as is who I just interviewed. Helen has recently come back to reading literature.
I was chatting to someone from Silicon Valley this week, and they can feel it shifting. Matt Yglesias is reading literature. So is Patrick Collison. At lunch in Westminster, I heard the same thing.
Someone tweeted today about a builder who is blasting George Eliot on the scaffolding.
Look around Substack. We have so much energy here for all forms of literature, from science fiction to the Mahābhārata. So much of the enthusiasm I see about literature (on social media and in my WhatsApp), is from people in science, economics, and technology. Reddit is full of people reading the classics. 4chan too.
There are articles in the Guardian about spending less time with Twitter and more time with Jane Austen. Libby is showing strong numbers. Classic novels are selling well thanks to TikTok and fancy new editions.
Who knows why this is happening? Why did Middlemarch go viral on Substack? Maybe it’s a long run effect of the spike in reading classics during covid. Or maybe we’re all escaping from the chaos of the modern world. That’s what people keep telling me.
Maybe.
But maybe we’re taking literature seriously because the times are complicated. We need humanism to help us see things clearly now.
Maybe instead of escaping, we are seeing something more like the trend of reading War and Peace in 1940. Helen Gardner said that for a while during the Phoney War it was everywhere. On the bus. In restaurants at lunch. People were taking Tolstoy wherever they went.
We might be stagnant in terms of modern culture. But the great works are still great. Wisdom is sitting on the shelf, waiting for us. And we need it.
We might be starting from a low point, but the literary recovery has begun. In a world of chaos and slop, the best stands out.
We’re in the middle of great uncertainty and upheaval, possible chaos. The new normal is that there is no normal. Of course we are turning to the best that has been thought and said. Of course we are.
This is my second year exclusively reading classic literature and I think I might do that forever. It really feels like uncovering 2,000 years worth of civilizational genome.
Could it be people wanting to learn how to talk about the upheaval, the historic times, and how those who lived with them survived? Classics deal with complex subjects, and one of them is how to stay human in the hardest times. Whatever the reason, I love it!