Is Gen Z Really Too Dumb to Read Books?

The other day I wrote a piece about the NHS and cousin marriage for this site. It included a quote from Wuthering Heights, so my attention was drawn to a piece in the Telegraph by Liam Kelly about Gen Z being too dumb to read Wuthering Heights. Apparently, the appearance of the latest movie adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic, which originally appeared 10 years into the reign of Victoria (1837-1901), has led to a boom in sales:

The hotly anticipated film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has led to a surge in sales of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. Bookshops shifted more than five times as many copies last month (10,670) as in January last year (1,875), according to publisher Penguin.

Many of the books have been bought by young people eager to understand the story of Cathy and Heathcliff before Emerald Fennell’s big-screen version hits cinemas on Friday. But if stories circulating online are to be believed, many of these newly bought novels are being left largely unread.

Social media sites, including TikTok, are starting to feature guides to the novel, but:

These struggles are not confined to social media. A colleague reports that at a press screening for the film earlier this week, two women discussed their thoughts on the book. One, who was reading it for the first time, said her “brain rot” – a Gen Z term for chronic short attention span – had left her unable to grasp much of the plot or language.

Gone are the days when literature students could move from discussing Pride and Prejudice one week to Crime and Punishment the next. A viral piece in American online magazine the Atlantic in October 2024 featured professors who said students were struggling to read full novels or even poetry. One reported that only extracts from Homer’s Odyssey are now set, supplemented with “music, articles and Ted Talks”, because even elite students are unable to grasp the full text or its themes.

Now, this started me thinking about whether we really are staring at an existential crisis. I was a history teacher for nine years. Some of my students studied Wuthering Heights for their A-level English Literature. Since I took an interest in their other subjects because I enjoyed encouraging them to see links across the curriculum, I decided it was about time I read Wuthering Heights. So, I did. Or at least I tried to.

I nearly died of boredom.

And no, I didn’t finish it, though God knows I tried. Hard going barely describes the experience of reading it, which was like trying to crawl up a cliff with lead weights attached to my ankles while my eyelids metamorphosed into concrete shutters. It reminded me of Samuel Johnson’s comment about the novelist Samuel Richardson (Clarissa and Pamela), “Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.”

I should perhaps add at this point that I have written over 30 books (admittedly all non-fiction), so I could hardly be accused of being a brain-dead zombie. I might point out that I can claim legitimately to be an expert in aspects of 17th-century English too, so it’s not as if archaisms are beyond me. I also have some ability in Latin and Greek which means the etymology of many more complex terms is not impenetrable to me either.

Despite being decades older than the students and growing up in the 1960s when there were only two TV channels to watch on crummy 405-line black and white TVs, I could no more pay attention to the impenetrable Wuthering Heights text than they could.

In the end I realised I didn’t care about any of the characters in Wuthering Heights or what they were up to. One must remember many books like this one were written to be read aloud episodically in front of a roaring fire during a vile and filthy 19th century winter in the absence of anything else to do for entertainment except die of consumption.

Nonetheless, the claim being made, especially by colleges and universities, is that students do not know how to read any more, and that this has happened in the last two decades. Moreover, students can pass their courses without reading the novels. By using study guides and extracts they can tick all the boxes and save themselves any further effort.

What doesn’t seem to have occurred to the wailing tutors as they watch the debris of a former golden age floating past their eyes is that the novels have been reduced by the schools, universities and colleges to mere teaching resources, a means to an end to get that A-level or degree. A family gathered round the fire in 1850 to listen to Wuthering Heights being read out by one of their number, or a teenage girl hiding under the blankets in her freezing bedroom while surreptitiously reading about Heathcliff, did so purely for entertainment and titillation, not because they were supposed to churn out an essay on it and turn up to a dreary seminar. Since they were accustomed to long-winded sermons in a windswept and frozen church every Sunday, Wuthering Heights probably seemed like blissful light relief.

This means surely then that it’s also academic courses which have paved the way for an AI takeover, because the way these works of literature are now being taught is a gift to the way AI functions. This was happening long before AI even became a real phenomenon. I left teaching 10 years ago and I can assure you many of the students had long since given up on trying to wade through the novels – they just used study notes. Unlike their counterparts 150 years ago they had other A-levels to do, university applications to file and careers to think about. They didn’t have all night to be engrossed in an 1840s novel.

In the end, surely it’s also as much a matter of taste as the spacetime continuum in which we live. I enjoyed reading Charles Dickens’s books far more than any Brontë efforts, especially Great Expectations (1861) and David Copperfield (1850), though decades on I can’t really tell whether that had more to do with movie and TV adaptations, especially David Lean’s versions of Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). And I found in George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch (1871) an allegory of all human hopes and disappointment, though frankly I enjoyed the BBC version (1994) even more.

Looking back now more than half a century on though, my mind was really exploded as a boy by H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). In the space of reading a few pages my universe expanded into four dimensions and led me into a total fascination with the concept of time that has ruled my life ever since. It played an enormous part in my love of history and indirectly therefore the books I have written.

Likewise, Robert A. Heinlein’s Time For The Stars (1956), a tale of early interstellar travel in search of new solar systems to colonise, I found compelling, enlightening and moving. The only way of communicating with Earth was to use telepathic twins, one being left at home to grow old while the other travelled into space, staying young thanks to the effects of relativity while travelling at a speed that approached, but which could not exceed, the speed of light.

Neither of these books played the slightest part in the school curriculum, fortunately. I read them for no other purpose than pleasure because they galvanised, transfixed and absorbed me. Indeed, they were an escape from the drudgery of school which I always regarded as an irritating intrusion into my valuable time. If they’d been part of an A-level that would probably have killed them dead.

I suppose then that the question is whether students can’t read books at all or whether they haven’t really been directed at, or found, the ones that light their fires and read them just for fun. After all, many of them must belong to that generation who threw themselves into reading the Harry Potter books, widely attributed with having brought vast numbers of boys into reading in the first place. I have four sons. They all saturated themselves with those novels, tearing into every new one as it appeared. School was instantly knocked into second place and that did them good.

The headteacher of the school I worked at once said she was only interested in students emerging from a lesson knowing what their latest grade was and what their next target was. No wonder students’ brains are atrophying, despite increasing numbers of them wandering around with meaningless first-class degrees.

Perhaps then part of the problem is the world of education and its arid plains which is such an easy target for AI. We are veering towards a time when AI is obliterating the need to read, at least in any detail, and perhaps a time when it won’t even be necessary to speak for oneself either. And by then, as one of my sons pointed out, there might not even be anything left worth saying any more.

One might wonder then whether there is even a deliberate purpose behind discouraging reading, or if it’s merely an unintended consequence. Anyone who has read Ray Bradbury’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451 (1953) will remember its allegorical message about the effects of mass media and censorship of free speech on reading.

What am I reading now? I’ve just picked up a copy of Max Hastings’s Chastise (1999): his account of Bomber Command’s celebrated dams raid of May 1943. Of course, I know the story. Or thought I did and I can’t put it down. Knocks the spots off any novel, because who could possibly have made that story up? Beats Wuthering Heights hands down anyway.

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with numerous books to his credit on Egyptian and Roman history, and the works of the 17-century diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus 2025). His next will be Brief Lives of the Ancient World. Rulers, Rebels and Robbers (Yale 2026).