John Batista was in Grade 10 when he read “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda,” a YA novel by Becky Albertalli that explores themes of queer love.
Though he wasn’t a big reader at the time, Batista connected deeply with the book.
“It’s not that it was this literary masterpiece, but it was the first piece of queer media that I intentionally sought out and engaged with,” said Batista. “It sent me down this rabbit hole of reading.”
Now 22, Batista splits his time between studying English at York University and an IT job. His love of books hasn’t abated, he said, but it’s become nearly impossible to find the time — and energy — to read for fun.
“Reading requires sustained effort and I think people in my generation are just too busy,” he explained. “Between school and work, it’s hard to find an hour to engage in something that feels like it requires more effort than watching TV or movies.”
Reading, he added, isn’t seen as something you can do to relax: “I have a long queue of books just piling up.”
Batista’s experience is in many ways representative of a generation that grew up with the internet and social media, which experts say have contributed to a steady decrease in the attention spans. A Statistics Canada study from last year found that 42 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 spent at least 20 hours a week on general internet use. The same age group used their smartphones at least once every hour, while nearly half reported using it every 15 minutes.
And though young people are still interested in books — a recent survey found 37 per cent of Canadians aged 18 and 29 read between six and 11 books last year — most are spending their leisure time watching TV or movies, playing video games, or browsing social media and the internet.
Jason Boyd, an English professor at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), has seen this trend materialize in real time. “It’s very challenging for students nowadays to find the mental space free of distractions from social media to sit down and take the time to give that kind of attention that you need to read through a work of fiction,” said Boyd. “Even if they want to read, their phone is buzzing with notifications every few minutes, and that makes it really hard to focus.”
Adding fuel to the fire is that fact that generative AI tools like ChatGPT have made it even easier for high school and university students to skip readings or book assignments, depriving them of the chance to develop the mental habits required for engaging with literary fiction.
Recent studies show that 60 per cent of Canadian students attending university, college or high school say they use generative AI for their school work.
“These tools are at their fingertips and that has made them an easy go-to for students who are feeling overwhelmed, or disinclined to engage with the course or the literature,” Boyd said.
As a result, young people today are struggling to carve out time to read fiction — and especially literary fiction.
“A lot of my students haven’t read a book in five or six years,” said Angela Misri, a novelist and journalism professor at TMU.
Misri said this shift signals a societal problem.
“We’re storytellers,” said Misri. “If we’re unable to focus on a story for more than 30 seconds, we’re going to become a very impatient society, where people are not able to understand the perspectives of others with any nuance.”
Finding a way in
Concerns over student reading habits with the advent of generative AI have reached a fever pitch in recent months.
“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” an American professor recently said in a viral essay that detailed the ubiquity of AI being used to cheat on campuses. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”
But not all educators are ready to panic — at least not yet.
Arthur Redding, who has been teaching American literature at York University for 20 years, believes that students must simply be convinced of the inherent benefits of reading — of nourishing their capacity to withdraw, reflect and contemplate, far from a computer or smartphone screen.
“What I try to do — and there are always students who respond to this — is show them that reading is one of the few places in your life where you can generate pleasure and joy and satisfaction,” he said.
Natalie Neill, an author and professor of English at York University, who specializes in 19th-century Romantic literature, called young people “seekers”: “They’re hungry to learn and they want to fill the gaps in their experience. If you can present reading as a way to make new discoveries, that’s really exciting for them.”
Neill said that educators must be willing to meet young people where they are at. For example, rather than assigning an entire novel, she often provides her first year students with smaller chunks of texts — say, 50 pages — in order to encourage focused reading.
Another essential way to engage students in literary fiction is choosing the right books.
Neill pointed to “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson. “There’s so many themes to analyze, you can sink your teeth into it, but it’s also just a really wonderful doppelganger story that can teach students about the Victorian period.”
Redding called Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” the “easiest book” he’s ever taught.
Not only is the story central to our cultural imagination, he explained, it’s also the novel that invented science fiction, and the first novel about artificial intelligence.
“It’s antiquated and it’s got all this great stuff about the sublime and about romanticism. It’s an epistolary novel and there are large sections of the book, nothing happens, right? And yet, students always eat it up.”
But for Redding, the most powerful way to engender a love of literature is to emphasize its inherent value — as a source of pleasure, an engine of empathy and a means to better understand oneself.
“Reading sets me outside of my own limited world,” he said. “And in that experience I become less judgmental, I become more open to the possibility of human difference.
“But to recall James Baldwin (in ‘The Fire Next Time’), reading is not simply about maximizing your capacity to love and encounter another person, and see another person as human, it’s about learning to love and encounter yourself, and to see yourself as fully human and full of dignity.”
Looking forward
Misri, the novelist and professor at TMU, also remains optimistic.
“It’s not like young people have lost the ability to read. It’s not like we’ve evolved or something,” she joked. She believes that educators ought to focus on the idea of introducing agency: “We need to ask young people: if you had a library in front of you with all the books and stories available, what would you read and how would you read it?”
Part of that involves expanding what is traditionally understood as the canon of English literature — a collection of books that infamously skews white and male. “Why are students still reading (S.E. Hinton’s) ‘The Outsiders’?” she asked. “I read that when I was in high school.”
It’s an effort that is already underway in Ontario, where some high schools are ditching Shakespeare for Indigenous authors like Tanya Talaga, Duke Redbird and Lee Maracle.
At the university level, professors are mixing classic novels with contemporary work from racial and gender diverse authors to cast a wider net with which to connect with younger people: authors like Percival Everett, whose award-winning 2024 novel “James” reimagines “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” or Ocean Vuong, an influential Vietnamese-American author whose debut novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” explores themes of queerness and immigrant identity.
It also means digging into the remarkably diverse world of Canadian literature.
Jacob Alvarado is a 24-year-old poet based in Toronto. Like many of his peers, he grew up reading fiction, but lost interest as a teen. It wasn’t until he began studying creative writing at Sheridan College that he rediscovered his love of books.
“Things clicked when I discovered this rich tapestry of amazing authors we have coming out of this country,” he said.
Since the pandemic, Alvarado has been engaging with authors at book events taking place across the city and finding human connection at indie bookstores.
“I can definitely understand why people are sometimes pessimistic and yeah, maybe the literary novel isn’t at the very centre of culture like it might have been once upon a time,” he said. “But there are just too many strong pockets of young authors and future publishers who are out there doing great work.”
