Why reading books is thriving in an age of reduced attention spans

Book clubs, books on the underground, even dating apps for readers are among the modern-day tools urging us to read for pleasure again

Imagine you are on your way to work, wading through a sea of fellow commuters in the early hours of the day. You dread facing the grind for the zillionth time, until you encounter a book—a serendipitous occurrence that leads you to meet what goes on to become one of your favourite reads of all time.

Something similar happened to Richa Kumari in July 2017, now a government employee in Indore, who lived in Delhi as a student back in the day. Growing up, Kumari had been a voracious reader. So, when she chanced upon the ‘Books on the Delhi Metro’ page on Instagram, she decided to follow their trail of books in the hope of finding one tucked away in the bustle of one of the stations. “I found it in the Chawri Bazaar station, and it was Munawwar Rana’s Maa. I can’t forget how beautiful the book looked when I discovered it,” shares Kumari.

Books on the Delhi Metro is the Delhi chapter of a worldwide initiative called ‘Books on the Move’, started in 2012 by Hollie Fraser, as ‘Books on the Underground’ in London. It’s a not-for-profit initiative—with other chapters in New York, Montreal, Boston, Washington DC, and Australia—that aims to inspire the habit of reading. How does it work? Books are dropped off in the underground train network for commuters to pick up, read, and (hopefully) drop back off at a station for another reader to find.

In 2016, the initiative received global attention when British actress Emma Watson championed the cause and was seen dropping off books in the London tube on her social media, which is where Books on the Delhi Metro founder Shruti Sharma received her nudge to start the same in Delhi.

Sharma is among the growing tribe of readers across India who have invested their time and energies into rebuilding a community that cherishes and thrives in the magic of words as a creative escape—an otherwise declining culture, as has been evidenced by extensive reports and studies.

The dying culture of reading for pleasure

Reading as a “hobby” was among the more frequently cited kinds during our growing-up years, when asked how we spent our leisurely hours. The reality, however, is starkly different today. Literary reading, or reading for pleasure—as opposed to reading for work or with the purpose of solely obtaining knowledge—has been on the steady decline.

A study jointly conducted by the Pedagogical Institute of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University (PNU) and Pedagogical Faculty of Mukachevo State University (MSU) in Ukraine, from 2012 to 2016, is indicative of this larger trend at a global scale. Titled Modern Fiction as Factor of Students’ Reading Culture Development, the study shows how the “love of reading” index among the students of PNU sharply dipped from 82 per cent to 55 per cent through the study period, with an analogous change in the sphere of students’ leisure. “In 2012, in response to the question, ‘How do you spend your spare time?’, 70 per cent of the respondents claimed that they read fiction. In 2016, this index was reduced to 50 per cent; however, 35 per cent of the students stated that they ‘actively use social networks and communicate with their friends via the Internet’ (in 2012, this index was 20 per cent),” the study says.

These claims are further buttressed by articles such as ‘Reading in the Digital Era’ (August 2016) published by the Oxford Research Encyclopedias, in which the writer argues that while reading, at large, may not have gone missing in the beginning of the 21st century, the nature of the act has most certainly changed. “As displayed on tablets or cell phone screens, the objects of reading are often seen to lose any sense of integrity, that is, the kind of authority they may require to incite curiosity, prolonged attention, critical engagement, and aesthetic pleasure. Instead, screen reading is perceived to foster reading habits that value narcissistic self-management and uncommitted window-shopping over deep engagement, identification, and learning,” the writer says.

But some, like Mita Kapur—founder and CEO of Siyahi literary agency, and the literary director of the JCB Prize for Literature—may still love to read for the joy of it. Kapur reads compulsively for work, but more so for pleasure. While she suspects she might be in a minority when it comes to the latter, the former has witnessed an incline in the past decade. “It is evident from the increase in the number of people reading biographies or books to learn about our current socio-political climate,” says Kapur. “There are now more takers for non-fiction narratives because the purpose is to know, and not to escape into another world,” which she does every so often, including on work trips where she is known to carry as many as six books as her only form of entertainment.

The shuttering of bookstores and opening of book clubs

On the one hand, book shops have been shuttering at an alarming pace across India in the past decade, with the latest being Lucknow’s iconic British Book Depot exiting in April last year. Nearly a 100 book shops have closed during the period of 2013-2015, according to this report by Scroll. “With it, a part of our culture dies,” says Kapur. “I always gravitate towards bookstores when I am in new cities or old,” she adds. It’s also where you discover new writers and observe fellow readers browsing through the shelves.

Kapur, however, is far from cynical about the state of affairs. “When one door shuts, another opens,” she observes, as a reference to the reemergence of book clubs across the country. “I am in touch with book clubs, and at JCB, we have done events with some of them. I was so pleasantly surprised by the turnout at these book club events, which is sometimes in thousands,” says Kapur.

In a similar vein, literature festivals and offline events aim to engage writers and readers in a dialogue, with the larger motive of fostering a culture of inquisition through reading. A testament to this is how Kapur, when she recced Thimpu in 2009 to set up Bhutan’s Mountain Echoes literature festival, could only find one bookstore in the whole city. Today, there are four book shops just within Thimpu, and a book club in every school in the city. 

The burgeoning rise of book and reading clubs—both online and offline—can be especially beneficial to smaller towns. For the longest time, Tarana Husain Khan, a native of Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, taught at a school in Nainital. However, on getting disenchanted with the education system, she returned home in 2010 to become a full-time writer and food historian, who then started a book club in her hometown six years later. It was called the Rampur Book Club, the first ever in a city that does not even have a bookstore.

Mostly limited to the English-literate elite in town, the club, however, was instrumental in even introducing a dialogue on reading for pleasure—an absolute novelty for its residents. “There were around 10 of us, of which two were men and the rest were all women. We would meet every month or every month-and-a-half, and discuss some books the members were reading,” says Husain Khan. Currently, she lives in Sheffield, United Kingdom, and the book club has dissipated to become a circle of friends who share a common love for the written word.

However, at Cubbon Reads, a reading “community” based out of the landmark Cubbon Park in the heart of Bengaluru, the idea is quite the opposite. It’s a space to carry your book and read in silence with fellow readers, sans the pressure of discussing anything. The endeavour—a brainchild of Shruti Sah, a professional marketer and baker, and entrepreneur Harsh Snehanshu— only just turned one in January this year. Their tribe, however, continues to grow every day, with over 500 attendees at each session already.

“Cubbon Reads is a reading community that encourages reading for the sake of reading and attendees can bring books from any genre, language, author, or newspapers, even GRE prep material or mathematics homework. There is no mandate for greetings and no registration whatsoever,” says Sah. 

Functioning as a not-for-profit, as Snehanshu points out, means to ultimately drive towards the possible ceasing of their own existence, in the hope that the predicament they set out to address is resolved. Therefore, for the founder of Cubbon Reads, the goal will have been achieved “if every park in India and abroad is dotted with readers. And it has already started happening at Cubbon Park—we keep receiving tags on Instagram from readers who go and sit there to read even beyond the hours the community meets on Saturdays,” says Snehanshu.

Democratisation of reading

Reading, while conventionally thought of as an isolatory experience, comes with a communal side too. Much like poetry recitals or open mics, a community of readers congregating, ironically, may help in preserving and perpetuating traditions of oral storytelling, as is common in many South Asian cultures.

With efforts like Cubbon Reads and Books on the Delhi Metro, there’s also a democratisation that occurs in the domain of reading, an act that has been gatekept through devices of caste and class hegemony in India. They provide access in the literal sense, without the need to furnish any proof besides one’s curiosity and interest in the world. While on the one hand, Sharma has met a Delhi University professor who picked up one of their books from a metro station, she has also encountered enthusiasts who couldn’t read. “A Delhi Metro station cleaner was very excited to pick up a book for their children who could read, even though he couldn’t,” she says.

A part of this evolving landscape also aims to formally consolidate the act of reading as a means of gaining social currency, where Internet trends like “Booktok”—a hashtag on TikTok and Instagram—have united all forms of readers to garner a whopping 181.7 billion viewers as of September 2023.

“Instagram has made reading aspirational,” says writer Farah Bashir, author of Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir (2021). She wonders out loud if some of these conversations on books are for posturing when driven by and for social media. “Either way,” says Bashir, “it works for me—whether one reads to show off or is a ‘serious’ reader. At least reading is happening.”

Expanding the purview of “reading”

The rhetoric has now extended into the sphere of online dating as well—like a modern-day version of finding love in your neighbourhood library—with Sah and Snehanshu’s ‘Bookmark’, an app that matches people based on their reading habits.

“You swipe books, not looks,” says Sah about the app that launched in August 2023 on Android, and is now awaiting its iOS version. It currently has 2,000 installs. “We always craved a one-on-one version of Goodreads, where you could filter people around you based on the books and authors you like. Books provide a relevant context for a conversation, adding a layer of trust and safety to it,” she adds.

The evolution in reading, therefore, cannot be reduced to binaries of paperbacks and e-books. Today, words compete with anything that demands your attention on the Internet—images, cat Reels, true-crime podcasts, dating apps, what have you. As a result, the sanctity of safeguarding the act of literary reading in its purest form—as a pleasurable escape—has required a fair amount of doubling down in the face of such informational onslaught.

Thirty-two-year-old Sarvesh Talreja, a creative consultant in Mumbai, hit a reading slump for about five-to-seven years in the past decade, and wasn’t happy about it. Eventually, joining book clubs turned things around for him. “I had become a sloppy book reader and skewed too heavily towards long form articles and non-fiction. Book clubs became a way to read interesting things consistently and engage with people in a structured, enriching way,” says Talreja. He participates in two—one that meets offline once a month, and another being an audiobook club, which assembles every 10-12 weeks.

“The best part of being in book clubs is that there are many. I have seen the members of these clubs be candid, vulnerable, and honest with their thoughts, feelings, and life stories in a way that’s become precious to me,” says Talreja, adding that “it’s a safe haven for interpretation, intellectual stimulation, and allows for the possibilities of divergent perspectives in an accommodating and mature environment,” where he has allowed himself to explore literature that he otherwise wouldn’t have.

At its core, reading appears to be a simple act that’s caught up in the complex sociopolitics of its times. So the endeavour to uncomplicate it remains unrelenting—whether through communities, conversations, or the mere act of keeping a book on a bench in a park, hoping someone else would pick it up and find an escape in its pages.

Featured image: Instagram.com/jean_jullien

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