There is a particular quality of silence that descends when you are properly inside a book. Not the silence of absence, but something more active, a closing-off of the noise of the world, a narrowing of attention to the page.
Today is Ireland Reads Day, and the backdrop against which it takes place is worrying. A Children’s Books Ireland report has found plummeting rates of reading enjoyment among Irish children and teenagers. Only 9 per cent of Irish adults possess the ability to evaluate long, complex texts, a figure three points below the OECD average.
The stakes are high. UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has shown that deep reading, defined as sustained immersion in a text, builds the cognitive circuits required for critical analysis, empathy and perspective-taking in ways that skimming, scrolling and short-form video simply cannot. Research also shows it reduces the rate of cognitive decline by 32 per cent in older adults. The habits cultivated by serious reading, such as tolerating ambiguity, holding competing ideas in mind and deferring judgment, are precisely what is required of citizens in a democracy under pressure from those who prefer that we do none of these things.
Deep reading is not confined to the novel. A reader absorbed in a work of history or biography, in the compression of a short story, the argument of a long-form essay or a serious piece of journalism, in the concentrated attention that a poem demands, is exercising the same circuits and reaping the same rewards.
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But the scientific case should never crowd out the simpler argument. Reading is one of life’s great pleasures, the pleasure of company, of transport, of recognition of the perfectly turned sentence. We know what it is to lose an hour because a novel has claimed us entirely, to feel as bereft at a book’s end as one might at the loss of a friend.
Ireland’s libraries are open today, stocked and staffed. The barriers to entry are low; the rewards can be immeasurable. The silence is waiting.
