Go read a book

Ben Sasse’s dying wish is that you would read a book. At least that is one of the exhortations that emerges from his recent interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution. Sasse, the former U.S. senator and university president, has been diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer and has perhaps only months to live. Because of his looming death, his recent interviews feel more like a last will and testament than your typical conversations with a former politician. Rather than retreating into self-pity, Sasse is doing what his Christian faith has always called him to do: To serve others with his voice and influence.

Among the many piercing moments in Sasse’s interview with Robinson, these lines on the importance of reading stood out to me:

Literally, we don’t read anymore. Like, we have the data. The vast majority of Americans won’t come anywhere near reading a book in the year 2026. And so the shortening of our attention spans to digital clips and shorts—it doesn’t work for a deliberative republic that is anti-majoritarian that says, ‘I believe in freedom of religion, press, assembly, protest, or redress of grievances, because these things are about souls and souls are more important than things that can just be governed by power.’ And so I’ll stop with this, but if we succeed, it will be because we learned how to be deliberative despite having these awesome [digital tools]. ...These digital tools can be awesome, but they can also be a hellscape.

For Sasse, the digital revolution (which includes the looming AI revolution that he addresses later in the interview) threatens not just to remake the social, economic, and political order. It also threatens to remake our very humanity. Can a populace that lacks the attention span to read a book really be trusted to preserve the principles of freedom that make our collective life possible? If we reduce our humanity to technological advance, economic utility, and political power, we might end up gaining the world and losing our souls. To be sure, Sasse isn’t a Luddite. He acknowledges that digital tools can be “awesome.” He’s launching his own podcast this month. But Sasse is right to warn us of the more hellish possibilities that digital technologies introduce.

No one will be surprised to hear Sasse, a history PhD from Yale and a former college president, raise the alarm against the functional illiteracy of our society. This kind of jeremiad against attention-destroying social media is well-worn to the point of being hackneyed. An academic encouraging people to read books isn’t exactly news-worthy. But the point is either valid, or it isn’t, no matter how often it is repeated or by whom. A recent YouGov poll indicated that four in ten Americans did not read a book last year (and the 60% who did includes those who listened to an audiobook). The world is divided into those who think the extinction of a literate populace is a big deal and those who think ChatGPT or Claude will work just fine as a substitute.

What exactly do we lose when we lose the ability to read books? We might be tempted to make some pragmatic arguments in defense of reading at this point. We could, for example, point to the marketability and profitability of soft skills dependent on reading. We could make an appeal to competitive economic advantage. We could make an argument about the hierarchical structure of cognitive skills. We could point to the negative example of those who eschew reading (like the notorious reprobate Andrew Tate, who recently said that reading books is for “people with slow brains,” not high performers like him!) In certain contexts, I have made all these kinds of arguments. But my worry is that if we turn reading into a merely instrumental good, we concede too much to the utilitarian spirit of the age.

Instead, I would suggest that the kind of moral formation that happens when we spend long hours with a good book is intrinsically valuable. It is not a means to some other end. It is an end in itself. That is what Sasse meant when he reminded us that “souls are more important than things that can just be governed by power.” The discoveries of truth and self that happen when we read books simply cannot be replicated by the information downloads of an LLM. In short, books matter, because beauty matters. And nothing can replace beauty. In the words of Stepan Trofimovich, the aging scholar in Dostoevsky’s Demons, “Mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world!”