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Last month, Rose Horowitch wrote the article “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” which sparked a lot of debate. Professors told Horowitch that their students felt overwhelmed at the thought of finishing a single novel, much less 20, so they’ve begun to drastically shrink their assignments. They blamed cell phones, standardized tests, and extracurriculars, and they mostly agreed that the shift began in high school. Young people don’t read entire books in college because they rarely or never read them in high school. Horowitch, not long out of college herself, hypothesized that these young people might be perfectly capable of reading books, but maybe they never learned the value of reading a book versus other ways you could spend your time.
In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we make the case for reading books, one memory at a time. We talk to Horowitch about what she heard from professors, and we hear from several Atlantic writers about the books they read in high school that stuck with them, and how their views of these books and the characters in them changed over time.
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