Review: Cherished Belonging

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One of my sons-in law sent me this book. Since he is a widely-read, intelligent and very likeable guy, I have read it and enjoyed it.

Cherished Belonging was written by Gregory Joseph Boyle (born May 19, 1954), who is an American Jesuit priest and the founder and director of Homeboy Industries, the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program. He is the former pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Los Angeles.

Gregory Boyle

At the conclusion of his theology studies, Boyle spent a year living and working with Christian communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Upon his return in 1986, he was appointed pastor of Dolores Mission Church, a Jesuit parish in the Boyle Heights  neighborhood of East Los Angeles that was then the poorest Catholic church in the city. At the time, the church sat between two large public housing projects and amid the territories of eight gangs.  Referred to as the “decade of death” in Los Angeles between 1988-1998, there were close to a thousand people per year killed in Los Angeles from gang related crime.

By 1988, in an effort to address the escalating problems and unmet needs of gang-involved youth, Boyle, alongside parish and community members, began to develop positive opportunities for them, including establishing an alternative school and a day-care program, and seeking out legitimate employment, calling this initial effort Jobs for a Future. 

In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Jobs for a Future and Proyecto Pastoral, a community organising project begun at the parish, launched their first social enterprise business, Homeboy Bakery. Initial funding for the bakery was donated by the late film producer Ray Stark. In the ensuing years, the success of the bakery created the groundwork for additional social enterprise businesses, leading Jobs for a Future to become an independent nonprofit organization, Homeboy Industries.

This book doesn’t really have a plot, but that doesn’t make it any less readable. The nine chapters each have a title which may serve as a summary of the content. But for me, the chapters are unimportant, apart from dividing the book (212 pages) into nine convenient parts. The content, alone, is what makes this book a thought-provoking, fascinating collection of stories and reflections on the stories.

Here’s an example of a story. “Adrian stands in front of an almost entirely white group of criminal justice majors and graduate counselors at Lorcas College in Dubuque. He’s a stocky guy, with the expected tattoos etched on his neck and face and shaved-smooth head. After fifteen years in prison and only a brief three months with us at Homeboy, his trip here was his first on a plane and the only time he’s stood in front of a group to tell his story. Actually, he had been out of state before. During his tenure locked up, they had transferred Adrian to Oklahoma from Calipatria State Prison. It took them thirty-nine hours on a bus. He was shackled at the ankles, the waist, and the wrists. The inmates never got off the bus the entire time. ‘To me,’ he tells me. ‘it was torture’. The most noticeable feature of Adrian’s presentation is his sweet-natured voice. It’s not just younger than his thirty-four years it has a quality that is so pure and gentle. It is soulful and true. You just want to listen to him. His authenticity keeps folks spellbound: ‘I know that most people would take one look at me . . . i mean you would see me walking down the street, and you would cross to the other side. But what you don’t know about me is that if I had only one dollar left and you needed it, it would be yours. If you were shirtless, I would give you mine. If your car conked out, I’d help you push it.’ Everyone in the room believed him,”

There are about two hundred stories like that in the book. What’s more each of the characters in those stories stands out as unique: each with his/her own peculiarities. So, the theme of the book is that God loves each of in spite of our faults, and that each of us should show love to the other regardless of the circumstances. It is clear that the culture of Homeboy is primarily one of love. What isn’t covered by the book is how Homeboy gets new members to shed their aggression and defensive nastiness. Apparently the culture of love is so strong that it is both a magnet and a force for change. There are also coaches who are assigned to the new ‘homies’.

Why don’t we have Homeboys in every major city?

Is Gen Z Stupid?

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There is an article on the Telegraph by Liam Kelly dated 12 February 2026 which I had to read. Its title was “Why Gen Z are too stupid to read Wuthering Heights”. My interest was simple: I have a few relatives who are Gen Z, and I always thought they are quite bright.

Liam Kelly is a senior culture writer and covers the full sweep of arts and entertainment, from literary prizes to Eurovision. He reported live from Oasis’s reunion gigs and played The Traitors on location in Scotland with Claudia Winkleman. Liam has been shortlisted for a number of awards. He has even won a few.

“The hotly anticipated film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has led to a surge in sales of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. Bookshops shifted more than five times as many copies last month (10,670) as in January last year (1,875), according to publisher Penguin.

Many of the books have been bought by young people eager to understand the story of Cathy and Heathcliff before Emerald Fennell’s big-screen version hits cinemas on Friday. But if stories circulating online are to be believed, many of these newly bought novels are being left largely unread.

Social media is awash with Gen Z readers who claim to love literature but lament that they find Wuthering Heights – a book regularly taught at GCSE and A-level – too difficult.

Why Gen Z are too dumb to read Wuthering Heights

“Guys, this is testing me for real. I feel so stupid,” says Grace Deutsch, whose profile goes by the name Grace’s Mini Library, in a typical TikTok post about Wuthering Heights. “And I have a theory that anyone who says that they absolutely loved this book only says that to sound smart. I’m so serious, because, like, what do you mean?!”

Another TikTok user, who goes by the alias Wagesylie, has put together a popular five-part plan to help readers tackle Brontë “if you’re overwhelmed and don’t know what’s going on”. It includes alternating between chapters and study guides – a “gut check” to see if you are “understanding the plot” – and listening to the audiobook while reading a hard copy.

These struggles are not confined to social media. A colleague reports that at a press screening for the film earlier this week, two women discussed their thoughts on the book. One, who was reading it for the first time, said her “brain rot” – a Gen Z term for chronic short attention span – had left her unable to grasp much of the plot or language.

What is going on? There appears to be a growing consensus that the prevalence of smartphones has systematically eroded attention spans, particularly among the generation that has grown up knowing nothing else.

Is it really so surprising that, as we enter what critics have described as a “post-literate” age, young people who have spent much of their lives scrolling through mindless videos might find a masterpiece of Victorian literature a struggle? After all, university professors in the UK and the US have reported that literature undergraduates are increasingly unable to get through a whole novel. That it may not be surprising, of course, does not make it any less depressing.

Gone are the days when literature students could move from discussing Pride and Prejudice one week to Crime and Punishment the next. A viral piece in American online magazine The Atlantic in October 2024 featured professors who said students were struggling to read full novels, or even poetry. One reported that only extracts from Homer’s Odyssey are now set, supplemented with “music, articles and Ted Talks”, because even elite students are unable to grasp the full text or its themes.

We all know that people read less than they used to. A survey conducted for World Book Day last year found that 40 per cent of Britons had not read a single book in the past 12 months, a worrying trend that is even more pronounced among children. According to the National Literacy Trust, only a third of those aged eight to 18 now read books in their free time. It is not hard to conclude that comprehension skills are being diminished as a result.

The commentator James Marriott has described the collapse of reading as “one of the most profound social and cultural developments of modern times”, given that the spread of mass literacy was one of the foundations on which stable, prosperous democracies were built. If people do not – or cannot – read, but instead take their cultural sustenance from short videos or podcasts, there is a risk that society could drift back towards oral storytelling, which largely faded centuries ago. Surely nobody wants to return to the Dark Ages?

That so many people appear to be struggling with Wuthering Heights is no surprise to experts. Claire O’Callaghan, a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University who has written extensively on the Brontës, tells me the novel is a “difficult text” with a “convoluted structure, multiple narrators and overlapping names. You have several generations and movement across time – you go backwards and forwards”.

O’Callaghan, whose biography of Emily Bronte has been expanded and updated ahead of its republication in June, adds: “It’s a book that, in my experience, often takes quite a few reads to really get a sense of all those things clearly.”

The corner of TikTok that has helped encourage young people to read – inevitably called “BookTok” – has largely been a boon for publishers of schlocky, unchallenging “romantasy” titles and thrillers rather than classics. Perhaps the marketing of the new film has led would-be readers to assume the source text was a romcom, rather than an at-times-harrowing account of unrequited love and generational trauma. That may be what a Valentine’s Day weekend release does to potential cinemagoers.

The marketing machine behind the film has been in overdrive. Press tours have featured Robbie – practising “method dressing”in elaborate corseted gowns – and Elordi walking the red carpet together, embracing embracing and swooning. Official merchandise tie-ins range from snacks to lingerie, bedclothes and massage oil. All are a far cry from the desolation of the Yorkshire moors.

There is some self-awareness among those who now find themselves unable to get through Wuthering Heights about what has hindered their comprehension skills. “It has not taken me long to realise that there is some brain rot happening,” Mary Skinner, another bookish TikTokker, says in a recent video. “It’s actually been a wake-up call for me. I don’t think I’ve read anything other than books that were extremely easily digestible in… it’s got to be over six months. I’m finding this much more challenging than I would have a couple of years ago.”

 Declining literacy skills have also fuelled an explosion in AI reading apps, including Clippit, Reedy and Amazon Kindle’s “Ask” feature, which promise to simplify language (often by modernising it), signpost plots and explain characters’ intentions before they are fully fleshed out by the author. Don’t have time to pore over hundreds of pages before bed? Simply scan the text and get the gist of the story, without exercising your brain or stretching your intellectual capacities. How very dystopian.

But how hard is it to get through Wuthering Heights, really? My recent re-read was largely trouble-free – and not because I am some sort of singular genius. There was the odd word to look up, such as when Heathcliff is described as “an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone”, or when the narrator says, “I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium” – but Brontë’s language is, for the most part, fairly accessible (though the same cannot be said for her eccentric use of commas). This is hardly late Joyce.

While the new film has been criticised in some quarters for straying too far from the source text, it includes plenty of verbatim quotations (think “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” and “I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine”). “There’s just no better dialogue than Brontë’s,” Fennell said at a British Film Institute talk last week. “She’s got these extraordinary, extraordinary words.”

One reason readers may find Wuthering Heights challenging comes down to expectations. Is the novel a love story? A tale of revenge? Some combination of the two? Or something else entirely? “We tend not to make people comfortable with ambiguity, and that requires deeper reading, more critical reading, and reflection on the multiple perspectives within a novel,” says O’Callaghan.

That is all well and good – laudable, even. But if we really are entering a post-literate age, are people who struggle with a book such as Wuthering Heights capable of deeper, more critical reading? Or are we drifting towards a bleak future in which novels must guide readers by the hand?

Why Read Classics Now?

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There is an article Why you should revisit the classics, even if you were turned off them at school on The Conversation website, dated March 3, 2025 by Johanna Harris.

This caught my attention because with all the current publicity about Lord of the Flies, I have decided to buy and read a copy. I’ve had plenty of chances to do that, but I thought, ‘It’s such a grim story!’ We won’t go to the movie; my wife would hate it, so it’s now or never.

The author of the article, Johanna Harris, is Associate Professor, Literature, Western Civilisation Program, Australian Catholic University.

Johanna Harris

Ms Harris writes: “Throughout my school years I had an exuberant, elderly piano teacher, Miss Hazel. She was one of five daughters (like me) and, like many young women of her generation, had never married her sweetheart because he did not return from the war.

Her unabashed gusto for life and infectious, positive outlook left an indelible impression upon me. So too did the memorable fact that Miss Hazel read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from beginning to end once every year.

As a younger girl I wondered about the ways Pride and Prejudice could be so important to a woman in her eighties that she would want to read it annually. Was it to do with Austen’s depiction of a family with five daughters, or to relive an endearing love story?

Since those years I have seen, more through lived experience than through academic study, just how deeply meaningful the reading of classic books, like Pride and Prejudice, can be.

I no longer simply read this book for Elizabeth Bennett’s love story, but for the finely crafted replication Austen gives us of human character, with all its flaws. Hers are imaginary yet imaginably real situations, all depicted with humour and a sensitively calibrated dose of sympathy for even the most unlikeable literary figures.

The clergyman Mr Collins, Elizabeth’s distant cousin and her rejected suitor, was always repellent for his obsequiousness but I see more readily now his self-serving nature cloaked in altruism. The haughty snobbery of Darcy’s aristocratic aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, hints at a deeper layer of sadness and fragility only rereading can illuminate.

Box-ticking and speed

When we’re at school or university we may read for speed. I remember managing my reading of Ann Radcliffe’s 432-page gothic romance The Romance of the Forest to work out how many pages per hour I would need to read across a weekend in order to finish the novel before my university tutorial. (It was an ungodly ratio and I don’t recall much of the novel.)

Or we may read for the tick-box exercise of writing for assessment requirements: accumulating knowledge of a novel’s original metaphors, descriptions that best capture a prescribed theme (“belonging” or “identity”), or of poetry by which we can demonstrate a grasp of innovative metre.

But how and why do we reread classic books, when we are not constrained by class plans or prescribed exam themes. And why should we?

‘Like a graft to a tree’

Rebecca Mead’s The Road to Middlemarch offers a compelling exploration of one writer’s five-yearly revisitation of George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch.

Mead first read the novel at school, and Eliot’s subtitle to the novel, “A Study of Provincial Life”, captured precisely what Mead was trying to escape at that time: provinciality.

Eliot’s central character, Dorothea Brooke, captivated Mead as an unconventional intellectual heroine yearning for a life of meaning and significance. Mead marked out important moments with a fluorescent pen, such as when the intellectual and spiritual inadequacies of Dorothea’s husband, Casaubon, dawn upon her. Mead writes, quoting Eliot:

‘Now when she looked steadily at her husband’s failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness […]’ These seemed like things worth holding on to. The book was reading me, as I was reading it.

This idea of books “reading us” can sound like an odd animism. But books can prompt us to reflect on our own lives, too. Eliot makes Middlemarch almost compulsory to reread later in life: the idealism of youth captures the young reader, while the novel’s humour becomes more sympathetic as we age. To reread a novel like Middlemarch is to trace the ways we too have experienced idealism turn to illusion, or have seen the restless pursuit of change turn to a retrospective gratitude and a recognition of grace.

Our ability to acknowledge new depths of meaning in our own lives and to recognise within ourselves a subtler sympathy for the lives of others can be articulated almost as precisely as lived experience itself. As Mead says, “There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.”

Feeling for Lear

The same can be said of Shakespeare. As young readers, we won’t necessarily capture the full vision King Lear offers us of the tragicomic paradoxes sometimes presented by old age. The play depicts the loss of power and control over one’s life and decision-making, the tender fragility of family relationships when the care of aged parents is suddenly an urgent question and the madness that can prevail when an inheritance is at stake.

Some of these things might abstractly be understood when taught to us in the classroom, but they are far more powerfully seen when revisited after we have lived a little more of that imaginably real life ourselves.

As students we might have squirmed with discomfort at the literal blinding of Lear’s loyal subject the Earl of Gloucester (the horror of witnessing a visceral, grotesque injury).

But as we age it is the tragedy of moral blindness that lingers, making the final scene so extraordinarily moving: “Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. Look there, look there,” Lear pleads, as if to say that Cordelia, lifeless in his arms, still breathes.

Does he really see her lips quiver? Does he really believe she lives? Is this some consolation with which he dies or is it delusion? Lear’s heart is broken. So is mine.

Each time I revisit this final scene, the grief of Lear as a father is profoundly felt, but my heart is broken even more so by his continuing blindness; his vision (what he thinks he sees) is desperate, untrue, and ultimately meaningless.

Sites of discovery

When we read we inhabit imaginary worlds and each time the reading can be different. Philip Davis, a professor of literature and psychology has written,

Rereading is important in checking and refreshing that sense of meaning, as the reader goes back and re-enters the precise language once again.

Davis points to an idea advanced by the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, of the reader’s collection of special, memorable fragments, which serve as metaphors for the reader’s self-utterances, developed over time. These are “nascent sites for thinking and re-centring”.

This is a similar idea to the novelist and journalist Italo Calvino’s description in Why Read the Classics? of the way classic books “imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable” and “hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.”

Works of imaginative literature are not manuals for life, though they might along the way gift us with some wisdom; they are sites of discovery and rediscovery.

The classic works we are introduced to at school may establish such sites for thinking about ourselves and others, but it is in rereading them as we grow older that we can better see the ways we have grown as imaginative, moral beings.”

Reading Is Down; Book Sales Are Up?

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Yesterday the Telegraph had an article to this effect written by Hannah Boland, the Retail Editor.

Hannah said, “Across Britain, fewer and fewer people are reading books. The data are plain as day.

The number of children who read outside of school every day has halved over the past two decades, while the number of children who say they enjoy reading in their spare time is down by 36pc.

Among adults, reading numbers are also in freefall. In a YouGov survey last year, two in five people said they had not read or listened to a book in the past year – compared with around a quarter of adults in 2001.

For Waterstones, figures such as these would be expected to raise alarm bells. With the high street in crisis, you would think the decline of reading would put businesses such as Waterstones next in line to face the chop.

Yet the mood is anything but sombre at Britain’s biggest bookseller. In fact, Waterstones’ owners are so confident in the business that they are gearing up for a multibillion-pound stock market listing, with a float expected as soon as this summer.

This month, it emerged that Elliott Advisors, the company’s owner, had lined up advisers at Rothschild to work on the process.

The private equity group is preparing to list both Waterstones and its US cousin Barnes & Noble together as one business.

In a sign of just how well Waterstones appears to be doing, Elliott is understood to be leaning towards the London Stock Exchange for a debut of the combined company.

James Daunt, the bookseller’s lauded chief executive who also runs Barnes & Noble, is himself a Briton.

Daunt, who runs both booksellers, described 2025 as a “fantastic year for us”, with both the US and UK businesses expanding into new areas.

Barnes & Noble opened 67 new stores while Waterstone is adding around 10 new shops a year, even though expansion is harder given it is so well-established.

“Stories of declines in reading evidently do not correlate to book buying,” he says. “Publishers and independent booksellers, as well as ourselves, are all doing well in both the US and the UK.”

The figures back him up. The number of independent booksellers across the UK rose slightly last year, even as the high street was struck by a series of retail collapses and store closures.

Between them, Barnes & Noble and Waterstones made a profit of $400m (£300m) last year, with sales standing at $3bn.

That is despite Barnes & Noble facing the same problem with declining reading numbers as Waterstones. A study by the University of Florida in August found that the number of Americans reading for pleasure had plunged by 40pc over the past 20 years.

Official accounts show that Waterstones’ sales rose to £565.6m for the 12 months to May 3, compared with £528.4m a year earlier, according to documents published on Companies House this week. It made pre-tax profits of £40m for the year.

Barnes & Noble opened 67 new stores while Waterstone is adding around 10 new shops a year, even though expansion is harder given it is so well-established.

Waterstones recently said it had been boosted by growing demand for “romantasy” novels – known colloquially as fairy porn.

These fantastical tales of heroines being swept off their feet by knights and wizards have gained huge numbers of fans among British women.

Sarah J Maas, author of romantasy novel A Court of Thorns and Roses, has sold more than 75 million copies of her books globally. Publisher Bloomsbury said demand for Maas’s books helped it to the highest first-half sales and earnings in its history last year.

Elliott is understood to be planning to remain as the biggest shareholder in the combined bookselling business for some time following the market debut, which may give new investors more confidence in its future.

One banking source suggested now was as good a time as any for Elliott to kick off the process of listing Waterstones on the stock market and realising some return on its investment.

“Everything is a bit s–t,” they said. “But that’s not going to change anytime soon and there have been so few returns back on private equity that if they can, they probably should.”

For Daunt, his focus continues to be on the day-to-day. Over the past week, he has been travelling down the west coast of the US to visit Barnes & Noble shops. Despite falling reader numbers across both the US and UK, Daunt says stores are thriving.

“Bookselling is presently vibrant,” he says.

Soon he will find out if investors agree.”

“The Book Began to Take on a Life of Its Own”

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There is an article, written by Bridget Collins, on the Writer’s Digest website dated 20 August 2024 with a title very similar too the above. It caught my attention because I have written one novel where I experienced the same feeling that the book was writing itself. That novel is Seeking Father Khaliq, which is the best novel I’ve written. I wanted to find out what Ms Collins experience was.

Bridget Collins is the international bestselling author of The Binding and The Betrayals. She is also the author of seven acclaimed books for young adults and has had two plays produced, one at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Bridget trained as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art after reading English at King’s College, Cambridge. She lives in Kent, U.K

Bridget Collins

Ms Collins says, “I’ve been fascinated by the concept of silence for a long time, especially the way that it can be both a blessed escape from noise and a prison—I wanted to write a story that evoked that ambivalence and explored what it would mean to be able to control not only what you hear but what everyone else hears. The book is about silence as a luxury, as a magic spell, and as a weapon, but most of all it’s about power and seduction, and about how we become complicit in huge and terrible things—and about how we can try to put that right.

“I can’t remember exactly when I had the idea, but it would have been some time in 2019. Then I actually started writing in January 2020—so it took a long time to get from first draft to publication. And it went through three major redrafts, and changed an enormous amount—everything, from the central relationship to the narrative voice and the structure, changed! The only thing that stayed the same was the ending. It was probably the most difficult book I’ve written to date, with characters coming and going and taking an enormous struggle to pin down. But as I wrote and rewrote, the book began to take on a life of its own, and there was something quite magical about that.

“One of the most interesting and rewarding features of writing the book was working with an authenticity reader from the d/Deaf community. She was absolutely brilliant, and although I’d tried to do as much research as possible in advance of her input, it was really special to have the benefit of her experience and expertise. She had some fascinating insights into the characters and historical background of the book, and also made me think a lot about what I was saying in the context of d/Deaf culture and the current political conversations around that. Not to mention the obligatory moment of any editing process where someone points out something that should have been obvious and you cringe inside…!

“I think because this book was such a hard slog and I had to start from nothing over and over again, there weren’t many surprises—what seemed to happen was a very slow process of revelation and refinement. The book told me, over the course of those drafts, what it wanted to be; but it was like chipping away at a block of stone, watching it take shape inch by inch. That said, the biggest (and in some ways most exciting) change was the female narrator, who only began to speak for herself in the second draft, and then became more and more important.

“I would love it to transport my readers to a vivid, immersive world where they can watch a compelling story unfold—and if it stays with them after they come back to real life, that would be lovely too.”

I can confirm that there is something magical when the book begins to take control in your mind. I didn’t have Bridget’s experience with The Silence Factory of having major rewrites, because I had an idea of the two major characters, the setting and the issue between them. The book wanted the additional characters, and settings and plot. I had to do a lot of research to produce a credible story, but that was part if the fun.

Is AI Killing Reading, Too?

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There is an article on The Conversation website by Naomi S Brown, Professor Emerita Linguistics at American University, dated 13 August 2025, which makes just that point.

Professor Baron is interested in language and technology, written language, reading, the history and structure of English, and higher education. She is a former Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her books include Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (which won the English-Speaking Union’s Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Award for 2008), Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (2015), and How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio (2021). Her newest book (forthcoming) is Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing.

Naomi S Baron

Ms Baron says:”A perfect storm is brewing for reading.

AI arrived as both kids  and adults were already spending less time reading books than they did in the not-so-distant past. A new study shows the amount of reading for pleasure that Americans are doing is down 40% since the early 2000s.

As a linguist, I study how technology influences the ways people read, write and think.

This includes the impact of artificial intelligence, which is dramatically changing how people engage with books or other kinds of writing, whether it’s assigned, used for research or read for pleasure. I worry that AI is accelerating an ongoing shift in the value people place on reading as a human endeavor.

Everything but the book

AI’s writing skills have gotten plenty of attention. But researchers and teachers are only now starting to talk about AI’s ability to “read” massive datasets before churning out summaries, analyses or comparisons of books, essays and articles.

Need to read a novel for class? These days, you might get by with skimming through an AI-generated summary of the plot and key themes. This kind of possibility, which undermines people’s motivation to read on their own, prompted me to write a book about the pros and cons of letting AI do the reading for you.

Palming off the work of summarizing or analyzing texts is hardly new. CliffsNotes dates back to the 1950s. Centuries earlier, the Royal Society of London began producing summaries of scientific papers that appeared in its voluminous “Philosophical Transactions.” By the mid-20th century, abstracts had become ubiquitous in scholarly articles. Potential readers could now peruse the abstract before deciding whether to tackle the piece in its entirety.

The internet opened up an array of additional reading shortcuts. For instance, Blinkist is an app-based, subscription service that condenses mostly nonfiction books into roughly 15-minute summaries – called “Blinks” – that are available in both audio and text.

But generative AI elevates such workarounds to new heights. AI-driven apps like BooksAI provide the kinds of summaries and analyses that used to be crafted by humans. Meanwhile, BooksAI.chat invites you to “chat” with books. In neither case do you need to read the books yourself.

If you’re a student asked to compare Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” as coming-of-age novels, CliffsNotes only gets you so far. Sure, you can read summaries of each book, but you still must do the comparison yourself. With general large language models or specialized tools such as Google NotebookLM, AI handles both the “reading” and the comparing, even generating smart questions to pose in class.

The downside is that you lose out on a critical benefit of reading a coming-of-age novel: the personal growth that comes from vicariously experiencing the protagonist’s struggles.

In the world of academic research, AI offerings like SciSpace, Elicit and Consensus combine the power of search engines and large language models. They locate relevant articles and then summarize and synthesize them, slashing the hours needed to conduct literature reviews. On its website, Elsevier’s ScienceDirect AI gloats: “Goodbye wasted reading time. Hello relevance.”

Maybe. Excluded from the process is judging for yourself what counts as relevant and making your own connections between ideas.

Reader unfriendly?

Even before generative AI went mainstream, fewer people were reading books, whether for pleasure or for class.

In the U.S., the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that the number of fourth graders who read for fun almost every day slipped from 53% in 1984 to 39% in 2022 . For eighth graders? From 35% in 1984 to 14% in 2023. The UK’s 2024 National Literacy Trust survey revealed that only one in three 8- to 18-year-olds said they enjoyed reading in their spare time, a drop of almost 9 percentage points from just the previous year.

Similar trends exist among older students. In a 2018 survey of 600,000 15-year-olds across 79 countries, 49% reported reading only when they had to. That’s up from 36% about a decade earlier.

The picture for college students is no brighter. A spate of recent articles has chronicled how little reading is happening in American higher education. My work with literacy researcher Anne Mangen found that faculty are reducing the amount of reading they assign, often in response to students refusing to do it.

Emblematic of the problem is a troubling observation from cultural commentator David Brooks:

“I once asked a group of students on their final day at their prestigious university what book had changed their life over the previous four years. A long, awkward silence followed. Finally a student said: ‘You have to understand, we don’t read like that. We only sample enough of each book to get through the class.’”

Now adults: According to YouGov, just 54% of Americans read at least one book in 2023. The situation in South Korea is even bleaker, where only 43% of adults said they had read at least one book in 2023, down from almost 87% in 1994. In the U.K., The Reading Agency observed declines in adult reading and hinted at one reason why. In 2024, 35% of adults identified as lapsed readers – they once read regularly, but no longer do. Of those lapsed readers, 26% indicated they had stopped reading because of time spent on social media.

The phrase “lapsed reader” might now apply to anyone who deprioritizes reading, whether it’s due to lack of interest, devoting more time to social media or letting AI do the reading for you.

All that’s lost, missed and forgotten

Why read in the first place?

The justifications are endless, as are the streams of books and websites making the case. There’s reading for pleasure, stress reduction, learning and personal development.

You can find correlations between reading and brain growth in children, happiness, longevity, and slowing cognitive decline.

This last issue is particularly relevant as people increasingly let AI do cognitive work on their behalf, a process known as cognitive offloading. Research has emerged showing the extent to which people are engaged in cognitive offloading when they use AI. The evidence reveals that the more users rely on AI to perform work for them, the less they see themselves as drawing upon their own thinking capacities. A study employing EEG measurements found different brain connectivity patterns when participants enlisted AI to help them write an essay than when writing it on their own.

It’s too soon to know what effects AI might have on our long-term ability to think for ourselves. What’s more, the research so far has largely focused on writing tasks or general use of AI tools, not on reading. But if we lose practice in reading and analyzing and formulating our own interpretations, those skills are at risk of weakening.

Cognitive skills aren’t the only thing at stake when we rely too heavily on AI to do our reading work for us. We also miss out on so much of what makes reading enjoyable – encountering a moving piece of dialogue, relishing a turn of phrase, connecting with a character.

AI’s lure of efficiency is tantalizing. But it risks undermining the benefits of literacy.”

Differences: Author Voice vs. Character Voice vs. Tone

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There is an article, about just this subject, on the Writers & Artists website by Claire ADMIN (sic) It is dated 4 December 2024, and, as it is well written, I’m presenting it.

Unfortunately, it isn’t clear who Claire ADMIN is. A search on the website reveals four authors named Claire, and the link to ‘Claire ADMIN’ doesn’t work.

“Writing terms can be difficult and confusing. We break down the difference between author voice, character voice and tone.

Voice is the author’s personal style. It’s all about how you – the author – describe things; your choice of words, punctuation styles, whether you use short sharp sentences, long running sentences, or a mixture of both.

Voice isn’t something that can be taught, but it is something that can be developed. An author’s voice is instinctual and unique, just like a finger print, however it can take years for an author to develop their own clear voice.

So what makes a strong author voice? If you hide the cover of a book, read the opening page, and know who the author is then they’ve done a great job of creating a strong voice. Here are a few examples from some of my favourite authors and how I recognise their writing.   

  • Kiran Millwood Hargrave has a distinct poetic, melodic prose.
  • Katherine Rundell writes playfully and has some of the most visual metaphors out there. I bet good money that I could pick a Katherine Rundell metaphor out of a line-up!
  • Sally Rooney writes clean, simple language. Snappy sentences and short, sharp scenes of action are then followed by lengthier moments of character interiority

Think about the authors whose books you will automatically pre-order. What keeps pulling you to them? What is it about their writing that stands out? 

Character voice

Yet, an author’s voice isn’t to be confused with character voice. This is all about how your characters come across on the page and how they express themselves, both externally and internally. Character voice can be dictated by many things including their backstory, background, quirks and foibles, motivations and inspirations, personality traits, which can include strengths and flaws, as well as their dialect and word choice. 

A character’s voice will end with that book (unless it is a series) whereas the author’s voice will usually remain consistent throughout all of their books. Each character in your book should have a distinct voice and this is all to do with creating a band of characters who have different interests, quirks, strengths and weaknesses etc. 

The strength of a character’s voice is intertwined with the strength of the initial character creation. Think about some of your most memorable characters in fiction and make a note of what it is about them that stands out. 

For example, Violet Baudelaire in A Series of Unfortunate Events is always rational and brave, even in dire circumstances. When she ties her hair with a ribbon, she is able to access her technical, logical mind and come up with an invention that will save her and her siblings from harm.

Tone

Tone is a writer’s attitude toward the subject and the mood implied by an author’s word choice. Tone can change throughout a story, based on the different situations, conflicts or settings that are introduced. A clear tone can help readers to understand the emotion of a particular scene or part in a story. There are many different types of tone, from happy to sad, sarcastic to serious, creepy to light-hearted, curious to conflicted etc. Sometimes, If you don’t convey the right tone for the right situation, readers will feel confused and unsure as to how they are meant to be feeling towards specific characters or moments in your plot. 

Finding your author voice, character voice and the right tone are important to get right because without them, your story might lack depth and your readers could struggle to fully connect with your story.

Review: Dealing with Feeling

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When I saw the announcement for this newly published book, I recalled how my mother had taught me to deal with my feelings: “banish them, unless they’re good.” You won’t be surprised that I’ve spent many years dealing (often ineffectively) with negative feelings, and on reading the book I found that many others have had the same experience.

The book was written by Marc Brackett, who is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center of Yale University. He is the author of the bestselling book Permission to Feel (translated into 27 languages) and which has transformed how individuals, schools and organisations approach emotional intelligence. He has headlined at more than 700 conferences, and advises Fortune 500 companies on integrating emotional intelligence into workplace culture.

Marc Brackett

Marc begins the book with a story about a short-tempered encounter that he had with his mother-in-law after a stressful day. His point is that even he is learning.

He then describes the seven reasons we can’t deal with our feelings:

  1. We don’t value our emotions
  2. We don’t recognise that dealing with feelings is a useful skill
  3. Nobody taught us at home
  4. Nobody taught us at school either
  5. We love the quick fix
  6. We rather treat ailments than prevent them
  7. There is no institutional support for regulation (of our emotions)

He then introduces the concept of regulation of emotions, which is a series of steps we can take to get control of our emotions. Co-regulation is the steps we can take to influence the emotions of others. There are detailed examples of how these concepts work in practice.

He says that it is important to correctly label the emotions we are feeling; this introduces clarity to the process. Next, he introduces four strategies for emotional regulation: quieting the mind and body; thinking critically about what is or has happened; gaining emotional strength through relationships with others; and keeping ourselves healthy. There are further chapters on how children learn emotional regulation and becoming the best version of yourself. The book also includes a practical guide to building emotional regulation skills.

For all the numbered reasons mentioned above, mastering emotional regulation is not am easy subject to teach. One can come across as a superficial expert or a ‘wannabe’ expert. But Mr Brackett’s use of personal examples from his learning experience, his sympathy for people who get it wrong, and his use of familiar language, give the reader confidence in him as a teacher. He also connects emotional regulation to such familiar topics as mindfulness, empathy, yoga, cultivating friends, and personal health care in order to make ER seem less esoteric and more ordinary. His tone and his language are inclusive and friendly. This book will be a valuable guide and handbook for many of us.

Just Jump

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Harry Bingham, the Founder and CEO of Jericho Writers, makes a good point about the inertia we sometimes feel as writers.

He says, “Just Jump!”

Harry says, “

Ray Bradbury, the author of Farenheit 451 and much else, was a fan of the future. A fan of boldness and technological adventure.  In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business because we’d be cynical: ‘It’s gonna go wrong.’ Or ‘She’s going to hurt me.’ Or ‘I had a couple of bad love affairs so therefore …’ Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”  That cliff-jumper is you. It’s me. It’s all of us.  It’s certainly true for any first-time novelist. My first book was a giant 180,000 words long. (And yes, it went to print at that length. And no, it’s not a length that publishers are especially looking for. But if a book is good enough, the length is kinda immaterial.)  I was naïve. I literally had no idea that writing a book and getting it published might be hard. I just assumed I could do it, and would do it. My track record (Oxford University, fancy American bank) was one of achievement. I knew I liked reading. I’d always assumed I’d end up being an author. So: write a book – how hard could it be? I knew how to write a sentence, so just do that over and over, and I’d have a book.  Everyone receiving this email is less naïve. The tone of voice needed for a fast commercial adventure-caper was not the same tone as that had produced success in Oxford philosophy essays. Once I’d written 180,000 words, I looked back at the start and realised it was … ahem, in need of vigorous editing. The kind of editing that involved selecting 60,000 words and hitting Delete. So I deleted the rubbish and rewrote it. Wrote it better.   But:  That wasn’t a failure. It was the second most important step on the road to success. The most important was writing the first word, the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter. The most important step is always the same: it’s jumping off the cliff in the first place.  Deleting 60,000 words was the next crucial step: acknowledging that what I’d done wasn’t good enough; that more work could fix it; that I needed to design and use some better wings.  But you don’t get to the better-wing-design stage until you’ve got to the plummeting-downwards-out-of-control stage. You need them both.  And honestly: the challenges probably get a little bit less as you write more books, get them published, get paid, learn the industry, build a readership. But each book is its own cliff – its own well of uncertainty.  As you know, I’m a huge believer in nailing an elevator pitch before you start writing. I don’t care about pretty formulations – I don’t mind whether you have the kind of phrase that would look good on a book jacket or movie poster. But a list of ingredients that would spark interest in a potential book-buyer? That’s essential.  But oh sweet lord, there is a huge gap between knowing that you have, in theory, a commercially viable novel and actually making it so. I have sometimes written books that flowed, start to finish, with no huge mid-point challenges, but those have been the exception. Mostly, there’s been a hole – a gap – a problem.  I’m not a huge fan of pre-planning novels in vast detail. (But do what you like: it’s whatever works for you.) The only way to find that hole is to leap off the cliff. It’s the flying through the air that tells you what wings you need.  So jump.  Be uncertain.  Jump anyway.  Take the biggest boldest leap you can, knowing that you don’t have the answers.  Just jump.  Jump knowing that your wings aren’t ready. They get born by jumping. Wings that surprise you and delight you and complete you.  So jump.  Good luck. And happy Christmas.     

Could AI Write a War and Peace?

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In last Saturday’s Telegraph there was an article by Tom McArdle with the title “Waterstones chief: AI could produce the next War and Peace”.

James Daunt, CEO, Waterstones and Barnes & Nobel

THE chief exec­ut­ive of Water­stones has said he is open to the com­pany selling books cre­ated by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, as long as they are clearly labelled.

James Daunt said it would be “up to the reader” whether to pur­chase them if they end up on his stores’ book­shelves.

There are major con­cerns from authors about the impact AI-gen­er­ated con­tent will have on the book industry, after a recent study found most writers feared their jobs were at risk from the tech­no­logy.

But Mr Daunt, who has been the CEO of Water­stones since 2011, told BBC’s Big Boss pod­cast that AI could pro­duce “the next War and Peace”.

“There’s a huge pro­lif­er­a­tion of AI-gen­er­ated con­tent and most of it is not books that we should be selling,” he said. “Hope­fully, pub­lish­ers avoid it; we as book­sellers would cer­tainly, nat­ur­ally and instinct­ively, dis­dain it.”

A Uni­versity of Cam­bridge study last month found wide­spread con­cerns from nov­el­ists about their jobs being replaced by the tech­no­logy and fears that work writ­ten by humans could become “an expens­ive lux­ury”.

In response, Mr Daunt said: “At the more lit­er­ary end I don’t see that being the case. There is a clear iden­ti­fic­a­tion of read­ers with authors, and book­sellers play an import­ant role in join­ing authors and read­ers.

“That does require a real per­son.

“As a book­seller, we sell what pub­lish­ers pub­lish, but I can say that, instinct­ively, that is something we would recoil [from]. It’s really import­ant that authors earn a liv­ing.”

Asked whether the high-street book­shop would sell AI books, he said: “We would never inten­tion­ally sell an AI-gen­er­ated book that was dis­guising itself as being other than that.”

When pressed on whether he would con­sider it if they were clearly labelled, he respon­ded: “Yeah, if it was clear what it was, then I think it’s up to the reader.

“Do I think that our book­sellers are likely to put those kinds of books front and centre? I would be sur­prised.”

He warned that given the exor­bit­ant sums of money being spent by tech com­pan­ies on AI, it was hard to know its lim­its.

“Who’s to know,” he said. “They are spend­ing tril­lions and tril­lions on AI and maybe it’s going to pro­duce the next War and Peace. If people want to read that book – AI-gen­er­ated or not – we will be selling it. As long as it doesn’t pre­tend to be something that it isn’t.”