Crosscut · 18 min
Why We Read
A college professor urging students to finish difficult novels and a century of critics dismissing cheap paperbacks reveal an old fight over whether reading should be hard work or pure escape.
College Professors Face an Emerging Challenge: We Know Students Are No Longer Reading Entire Books × The History of the Beach Read, From 19th-Century 'Moral Debasement' to BookTok
Published 2026-08-04
0:00 / 17:50 · Narrator Sulafat/Charon/Vindemiatrix
In this episode
The Conversation
College Professors Face an Emerging Challenge: We Know Students Are No Longer Reading Entire Books
by Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College
The connection
A quiet argument over why people read lives in the space between a heavy college syllabus and a sandy beach towel. In a recent essay, a professor warns that students are losing the stamina to finish difficult texts, arguing that reading should be a mental workout that demands discipline. But put that warning next to a new history of the beach read from Smithsonian Magazine, and something interesting emerges. For over a century, critics have panicked whenever readers pick up light, entertaining paperbacks simply to relax. Looking at these two perspectives together reveals an old friction between treating a book as rigorous intellectual labor and treating it as pure escape.
What jumps out reading Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College, is the image of students standing in his office asking for skimming strategies. He sees a generation losing the stamina for intellectual labor, and it feels like a distinctly modern crisis of attention. But turning to the second piece, an unbylined history of the beach read, that modern crisis starts to look like a very old argument. The second piece travels back to the 1870s, where Brooklyn preachers were already warning vacationers not to pack cheap paperbacks in their trunks, calling light summer novels a danger to the immortal soul. Read alongside this history, Sarat’s frustration takes on a different shape. The two pieces look at entirely different centuries, but putting them together reveals a stubborn friction that has never really gone away. It is the quiet, ongoing fight over what a book is actually supposed to do—whether reading is a rigorous cognitive workout meant to build the mind, or an easy escape meant to give it a rest.
A heavy hardcover on a library desk and a dog-eared paperback on a beach towel ask completely different things of the person holding them. What lingers here is an old, stubborn anxiety over how people spend their time with printed pages. There is always a critic worrying that the wrong kind of reading is happening. The question left behind is this: when someone finally finds a quiet hour to open a book, does it actually matter if they want a mental workout, or just a place to rest?