Tiny Navajo Reads

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

I received a free copy from Tor Books via Netgalley in exchange for a fair review. Release date April 7th, 2026.

I've heard excellent things about Reed's previous novel, The Fortunate Fall, so I was excited to get a chance to read her latest book. In What We Are Seeking, ship's doctor John Maraintha is unexpectedly assigned against his will to serve on an isolated new colony. Scythia has just discovered a possible new intelligent alien species, and John must navigate the tumultuous first contact while enduring both the colony's very different culture and permanent exile from his home planet.

I was immediately captivated by the strong, confident prose and the anthropological SF bent of the plot, which both reminded me strongly of Ursula Le Guin. Of course, Le Guin would do the same story in a exquisitely spare novella of a hundred-something pages, but that's Le Guin for you. There's a half-dozen odd cultures in What We Are Seeking, and Reed does an excellent job making them feel distinct. From John's fixation on poisons to the Ischnuran three-gender system, the ship-crew's overbearing paternalism, and the Zandahean post-Christ Christianity, cultural differences are the backbone of the story. And of course, it's hard to go wrong writing a first-contact story, the SF answer to the murder mystery. John and his fellow exile, the linguist Sudharma, slowly puzzle out the mystery of who the basket-men are and how their culture works amid the wildly different biology of Scythia. On Scythia, all plants metamorphosize into an animal, which in turn plants the seed of a tree or shrub.

Although What We Are Seeking is set among alien scenery, at its heart the story is about themes closer to home: sex and gender. John comes from a culture that finds marriage an abhorrent, unnatural tie, but his perspective is not entirely validated by the narrative. Yes, the Christian-based marriage as performed on Scythia is restrictive, but mostly due to the confines of patriarchy and heteronormativity. John's culture comes with its own lack of choice—the total separation between father and child, the taboo on reciprocal exchange in specifically sexual relationships, the way a man can't rent an apartment without everybody assuming he's a bottom. Sex is freer, but convention is just as binding.

While John is our only viewpoint character, my favorite character was by far Iren, who is in many ways more central to the fight to shape Scythia's budding culture than John himself. Iren is what we'd probably call asexual nonbinary, but their identity is discussed in terms of Ischnuran culture, where they're a jess, a gender non-conforming person who traditionally swears a vow of chastity. Iren is a lovely character, messy and nuanced and with complex feelings about the traditional celibacy. I do wish they weren't always filtered through John's point of view, though—John does not have a cultural understanding of any of this, and I feel we spend most of the time learning about Iren's experience through John asking insensitive questions. Iren carries a heavy narrative weight as effectively the only trans character who has to constantly explain their experiences, but on some levels that's a deliberate choice Reed has made. As the plot advances, it's slowly revealed that specific prejudices that kept jesses from being included as colonists, and Iren explicitly sees themself as the founder of what it will mean to be a jess on Scythia.

For public libraries, one of the ways we secure funding year to year is lending. Governments don’t want to fund more books if they’re not being used and the way we measure use is by issues. Regardless of whether you read it or not, whether you have it for a day or a month, if you issue it to your library card, we get the stats! It makes the library look good!

The second novella I picked up because it got nominated for a Hugo, and one I’m almost certain I never would have touched otherwise. Which makes it an excellent argument for this yearly ritual I put myself through, because it was a very well-done and entertaining read throughout. If one that I find leaves me without too much of particular interest to say about it.

The book is amusingly exactly what the title says it is – Cinderella, except she’s a house. Or, properly, except she dies (is poisoned) at the same time as her father, and then becomes a ghost haunting and to some extent becoming the family home her stepmother and sisters just inherited. Bound to the house, and feeling every bit of damage to it as if it was a wound to her living body, she is quickly tortured and coerced into becoming a perfect servant for her ‘family’, helpless and forced to attend to them for nearly their every waking hour. Even after she discovers a loophole to escape into the city’s public spaces, her existence is a miserable one; her only solaces a warm correspondence with a foreign scholar, a wary friendship with a faerie trickster in the nightly market, and surreptitious excursions to the royal ballet. And then – eligible prince, royal ball, faerie magic but only until midnight, peculiar glass slippers. You more or less know the story.

I have, more or less accidentally, been reading a lot of various fairy-tale retellings over the last little while. This is absolutely not a complaint – done poorly, the genre can either be absolutely insufferable or just painfully twee (or both!), but done well I have a deep and abiding affection for the voice, style and general range of aesthetics. Cinder House was close enough that I found it charming throughout, and that it made use of the novella length to tell the fable it wanted without feeling either padded or rushed. The setting and the mechanics of haunting and different kinds of magic are given as much detail as they need, and aside from the final confrontation (which felt a bit clumsy and rushed) the plot and pacing flowed nicely.

Despite the whole ghost and haunted house thing (and, in an odd fit of political realism, changing the romance to an informal polycule situation involving the prince and the diplomatically advantageous foreign princess he was always going to marry. Because c’mon, magic and ghosts are one thing but be serious), the most interesting changes to most tellings of the fable to me were in characterization. Partially this is because I am easily charmed by shamelessly untrustworthy faerie merchant characters, so the book’s take on the fairy godmother was a delight. But the way the book treats the Wicked Stepmother and -sisters is rather more significant.

The story gives more time and attention to the character of the Wicked Stepmother than possibly any telling I’ve seen, and makes her positively nuanced. Not good, but the text empathizes with her and keeps her a step removed from any of the really sadistic cruelty and abuse Ella is subjected to. The two stepsisters are slightly more developed than the usual one-note caricatures, at least enough to give them distinct identities and personalities, but neither gets anywhere near the development of their mother. A sort of narrative conservation of malice also meant that all the horror and wanton abuse that neither the Stepmother nor the older Stepsister would inflict was all given to the younger instead, who is thus reduced to basically a devil in human skin without a single positive trait displayed at any point throughout the novella.

The book puts more effort into its love story than the original fairy tale (in that it puts any at all), and manages to sell it quite well. Well, to me anyway – I’m hardly the target audience for romantasy, but at novella-length it’s quite palatable. Though the characters of prince and princess were hardly about to leap off the page. They both work, and neither’s painful to read or anything, but compared to Ella, the Stepmother and the Fairy Godmother they did feel closer to cardboard cutouts than living, breathing people.

if you've ever watched a movie with your film buff friend and chatted about it afterwards, that friend might have pulled hours more of conversation out of the same 90 minutes of screentime, and wondered how the fuck they did that - it's not raw intelligence, it's a skill that's been honed. And I learned a lot about film from talking to friends who knew about film, and reading critique by film scholars

literature works exactly the same. so if you want to get more out of your reading, there are things you can do to train that. Find a book or short story you think you've got a pretty good grasp on, preferably from a widely read & respected author like Ursula K Le Guin or Ray Bradbury (if you're new at this don't swing for the Toni Morrison or the Samuel Beckett yet unless you feel very comfortable with the complexity of the text - the point is to develop a complicated new skill on good foundations). Then go to JSTOR, create a free account, and look up criticism on the story you've chosen. Find something that looks readable to you and at least somewhat interesting. Read that article, and look at what that writer got out of the same story you've read that you didn't get. Do you see the critic's points? Did they teach you something about the text? Go reread that story and see if the criticism has changed how you read it. Are you seeing more? Are you thinking about the implications of a line that you hadn't noticed before? Does the story feel richer now?

you don't have to read more deeply if you don't want to (but i'd recommend it, i genuinely think it makes you a better person)

if you want to learn to read more deeply, the resources are out there. try to find critical literature (that is, academic writing that analyzes the text) on works your familiar with so you can get a sense for how to do that analysis too

learning to deep read literature can help you deep read many areas of your life

Read the book with violence and gore. Read the book with on-page sex scenes. Read the book with heavy topics like sexual assault, incest, death, torture. Read the book with traumatic pregnancies and painful divorces. Read the book with self-harm and suicide. Read the book with religious trauma and hate crimes and body horror.

WHY are we acting like teens never experience these things in their day-to-day lives??? Like they need to be sheltered from things that could literally be happening right now in their own household? What purpose does this serve, to insist teens avoid interacting with anything deemed "adult content"? I thought this was something we were actively pushing *against* on tumblr? What, we're supposedly against book banning but telling teens they have no business reading books about adults that deal with "mature" topics, and we don't see the fucking hypocrisy?

book you’ve reread the most times?

top 5 books of all time?

what is your favourite genre?

what sections of a bookstore do you browse?

where do you buy books?

what books have you read in the last month?

is there a series/book that got you into reading?

what is the first book you remember reading yourself?

when do you tend to read most?

do you have a guilty fav?

what non-fiction books do you like if any?

did you enjoy any compulsory high school readings?

do you have a goodreads?

do you ever mark/dog ear books you own?

recommend and review a book.

how many books have you read this year?

top 5 children’s books?

do you like historical books? which time period?

most disliked popular books?

House of Splinters

Author: Laura Purcell

First published: 2025

Rating: ★★★★☆

I wish I had reread The Silent Companions first; then I would have probably caught more references, but overall, this book does work well even as a standalone. I really enjoy Laura Purcell´s writing, and her ability to tap the potential of a haunted house is still in full swing. The story evolves at an ever-increasing pace, the beginning being languid, and then the narrative keeps picking up speed once we reach a halfway point. Not the scariest of scary books, but still good.

Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Place Where You Are Standing

Author: Jadwiga Pindelska-Lech, Pawel Sawicki

First published: 2013

Rating: N/A

A collection of historical photographs capturing two transports of the Hungarian Jews into Auschwitz, put together with pictures of the same captured places within the camp, selected with great precision. Even if the match is not completely accurate, they are more than haunting. I bought this short book during my recent (and third) school trip, which I had organised for my students, and will definitely use it while teaching in the future. I do not feel like it should be rated, though, and so I will not.

The Goldfinch

Author: Donna Tartt

First published: 2013

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Like.... sure, this was fine. I was interested enough to finish it, but I did not particularly care about anyone in the story besides the dog. I get people who say this is good, but to me, it is far from the peak of literature. I guess I hoped for much more art stuff and got a lot more of under(and of)age drug abuse instead.

Hungerstone

Author: Kat Dunn

First published: 2025

Rating: ★★★☆☆

I thought this was pretty well written, and the gothic atmosphere certainly pervaded the whole narrative deliciously. The use of Carmilla also felt quite clever (a vampire as an impulse for a personal revolt is a new one to me), and I was not opposed to the ending at all. There were moments when the story felt repetitive regarding the recollections of the past, but this is still an interesting offering.

Notes on Grief

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

First published: 2021

Rating: ★★★★★

It doesn´t matter that you didn´t know Adichie´s father or that this account of her grief upon his passing is extremely personal to her. There are tones we all can hear and feel. Grief is wonderfully universal. Wonderfully, because it is, in the end, what makes us human.

The Last Murder at the End of the World

Author: Stuart Turton

First published: 2024

Rating: ★★★☆☆

A murderous fog had covered the entire world except for a small island. What remains is fewer than 200 people. One day, one of the leaders is found dead, and the barriers that had kept the fog at bay are down. And nobody remembers anything. A fantastic premise for a dystopian book, and I must say that the first half gave me the uneasy feelings of claustrophobia and existential dread (which is great; that is what books should do: make you feel as if you are a part of that story). It was all very cleverly constructed, and the ending I felt was satisfactory as well. Unfortunately, the investigation part itself felt much less urgent than I would have expected and at times, I felt all of the conclusions were being reached out of little more than the imagination of the main character rather than solid evidence. Still, I felt entertained throughout. One of those books that makes me wish we could give half stars on Goodreads, because it wasn´t exactly a four-star, but it was better than a three-star.

The Elsewhere Express

Author: Samantha Sotto Yambao

First published: 2026

Rating: ★★★★☆

Upon starting the book, I was afraid it would fall into the same pitfall as the author´s debut, the Water Moon - all enticing images, wordplay and vibes, but hardly any character development or plot. Fortunately, The Elsewhere Express, though definitely decorated with the enticing images and vibes, does take the reader on an interesting exploration of guilt, hope, denial and sacrifice, where characters are anything but one-dimensional. There is an aftertaste of saccharine sweetness; you do need to simply accept that time has no meaning, and it can make your head spin with the images and information you keep being fed on every page, but at the same time, I kept thinking, "I need to read this again sometime", which can surely only count as a positive.

The Fountains of Silence

Author: Ruta Sepetys

First published: 2019

Rating: ★★★☆☆

I wish I had read this when I was about 15. Ruta Sepetys, as is her habit, jumps into a turbulent time of events and serves it to young readers through the eyes of teenagers in short chapter servings. It reads easily and well, it brings attention to historical events that may not be overly familiar to a regular person, and just when you are ready to say this was really good, you are offered a somewhat half-baked anticlimax. I did like it, but wished for more.

Rules of the Heart

Author: Janice Hadlow

First published: 2026

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

I can hardly believe this is by the same author as the utterly delightful The Other Bennet Sister. I could perhaps forgive the fact that the most interesting part of the main character´s life (for she was a real person) is skipped over in favour of her later years' doomed affair; I could perhaps cope with a strangely cold and impersonal tone of the narrative, and I would not even protest that the story is about a woman who never held onto any resolution because she was a slave to her passions. What I could not get over, though, was how repetitive the situations were and, most importantly, that instead of an intimate and interesting portrait we get a truly pathetic worship at the altar of the most abject self-pity. I don´t know what the real Harriet was like, but the book Harriet I could not stand. Then again, I could hardly stand anyone appearing in these pages.

H is for Hawk

Author: Helen Macdonald

First published: 2014

Rating: ★★★★★