Can Notre Dame students read?

For me, and all my fellow readers around campus, this January meant not only the beginning of another semester, but the beginning of a brand new reading year. Reading as a hobby has undeniably become more and more popular among Gen Z.

The rise in reading as a trend on TikTok (“BookTok”), Instagram (“Bookstagram”) and even YouTube (naturally, “BookTube”) has seen its viral books break sales records, dominate bestseller lists, and according to some experts, even saved bookselling chains such as Barnes and Noble, who opened 60 new stores last year after closing over 150 before the pandemic.

But despite the clear evidence that young people are reading, or at least engaging with books, recent rhetoric in some academic circles has implied that college students are less able to read than ever before. A widely circulated article, provocatively titled “The elite college students who can’t read books,” was published in The Atlantic last October. The article, written by Rose Horowitch, a recent Yale graduate, controversially argued that students at elite universities like Columbia and UC Berkeley (and presumably Notre Dame) were assigned less reading because they are incapable of focusing long enough to complete or understand entire novels. 

Horowitch blames all of the usual suspects for Gen Z’s lack of willingness to engage in long-form text: technology (especially TikTok), the public school system (where “excerpts have replaced books across grade levels”) and even grade inflation that allows college kids to “get by without doing all of their assigned work.”

Horowitch also points to another horrifying finding in her article. Rather than undying classics such as “Wuthering Heights,” college students are naming young-adult books like “Percy Jackson” (horrifying) as their favorite novels. 

As I expect most Notre Dame students will tell you, we are hardly skating through college, blowing off our work and benefitting endlessly from grade inflation. While your average engineering major may not be reading “The Iliad” cover to cover, most of us feel pretty adequately assigned in the reading department — if the measly fifty or so pages per class that most of my fellow Arts and Letters students read isn’t enough, I’m not sure what is. 

It is true that TikTok can be a distraction from our homework and dedicated reading time, just as it can be a distraction to any average adult from any average task. I will assume it is also true that Notre Dame students, like most college students, have a lot of extracurricular and work commitments that take up time that might have otherwise been devoted to the American literary canon. But part of the reason that students are less inclined to read in their free time is the demonization, including by authors such as Horowitch, of genre fiction and “non-literary” works.

As Barnes and Noble, the New York Times bestseller list and the publishing industry have certainly found out with the rise of “BookTok,” the dying business of print books was not saved by maintaining a superiority complex about what kind of books count as “real reading” and what kinds don’t. Newsflash: people are reading. The top-selling genres include romance, fantasy, young-adult, memoir and true crime, among others. Notably absent from this list are Greek epic poetry and Elizabethan British theater. 

While I have no doubt that there is benefit in reading the classics, and a class whose syllabus includes classic novels could be both educational and entertaining, there is also value in books read just for fun. My favorite authors, from Emily Henry to Alex Michaelides to Rachel Gillig, range genres.

For the average Notre Dame student, who likely reads so much for classes they feel overwhelmed by the thought of picking up a book in their spare time, I encourage you to try reading a “silly” book from your FYP this summer if you’re interested in reading as a hobby. 

I have read and enjoyed many classics, but I have also found many dry and genuinely hard to finish. The pain of forcing myself through countless pages of a Shakespeare play (no offense Shakespeare lovers) or history textbooks has understandably turned me off of reading in the past, in a way that many students can likely relate to. Just remember, all reading is reading. If Hemingway and Austen don’t speak to you, listen to a science fiction audiobook, pick up a true crime paperback or try the romance that your favorite​​ TV show was based on.

You could discover a buried ability to read after all.