Reading should be hard

In a world that shuns critical thinking, inquiry, and perspective-shifting, training your reading is a non-negotiable skill.

Sirus Bouchat

Sirus Bouchat

— 8 min read
Reading should be hard
Photo by Patrick Tomasso / Unsplash

Literacy is the crumbling, unfortified cornerstone critical to survival in modern society. It is, and has been, under pressure from all sides: failed "innovations" in teaching reading, erosion of attention and coordinated support for learning, and the parasocial conferral of authority to internet sources as traditional media and journalism decline.

Even with the cards stacked against us, though, retaining and sharpening literacy skills—not just the ability to read, but to read and think critically, to interrogate and engage with what we read, to use reading as a pathway to learning and understanding—is necessary training for our political present and future.

The fantasy of escaping challenge

Higher Ed posters on social media last week were hanging their heads about the latest AI revelation: an agent called Einstein that logs into learning management systems (e.g., Canvas, Blackboard, Chalk, whatever they call them nowadays) and complete students' homework assignments automagically.

404 Media interviewed Einstein's designer and others in the higher ed space who think about the role AI has to play in learning. The whole article is worth reading, but the upshot of the diverging opinions is a difference in perspective about what "learning" really is and what education is really for. If you have school-age children or spend any amount of time watching school teachers on TikTok, you'll likely be familiar with the concern that kids' attention spans are waning, they're losing important reading and writing skills, and are being shipped off to the next levels of our "education" system ill-equipped to succeed there or in the job market.

I briefly weighed in on Bluesky about this because I think even some of the voices from the education sphere have lost the plot:

School isn't education; homework isn't education. We haven't had an educational infrastructure that values and supports critical thinking, curious inquiry, and intellectual engagement as their primary functions in a long time (perhaps ever). BUT/AND:

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— Sirus Bouchat (@bouchat.bsky.social) February 25, 2026 at 9:44 AM

TLDR; doing busywork and jumping through the hoops we call "school" in this country isn't necessarily associated with knowledge or skill acquisition, so I am not interested in advocating for the return of good ol' busywork to combat the rise of AI slop. BUT! I also don't think it's reasonable, sustainable, or wise to only pursue strategies that decrease the discomfort we experience with challenge.

It makes perfect human sense to seek ease and to appeal to technologies that smooth out the friction in our day-to-day experiences, but it is also true that we grow through challenge. It certainly is "easier" to avoid skinning our knees and crashing, but sometimes that's the cost of learning to ride a bike. AI is just one pathway that many are relying on to create a sense of ease.

Even Anthropic's own research indicates that AI-assisted coding not only doesn't have a significant positive impact on coding quality or efficiency, it actively degrades coders' understanding and learning about what they're doing. I'm not going to jump into the fray about whether AI makes you "stupider," because I feel confident that most of the research there so far is incomplete and predicated on reductive assumptions about intelligence. But what I also feel confident in is, critical thinking and language facility are skills. And you don't retain skills that you don't regularly use.

Meanwhile, the online literary establishment is revisiting this article from late last year that notes large declines in nonfiction book sales and interest across subgenres relative to fiction. Whether that's a result of declining interest, instagram-ification of authorship, or shifts toward other forms of media like podcasts and short-form video is unclear. Caroline Sanderson, the associate editor of The Bookseller, concludes the article with a reflection:

Regardless of sales, I hold passionately to the importance of long-form nonfiction in helping us understand the world. ... We need it. Sales fluctuations are the weather; it’s the climate we need to worry about.

The ecosystem of reading as a pathway to learning and understanding, then, is facing serious disruption. Structural shortcomings rarely succumb to individual action, but in this case, you can actually put in personal work to resist the erosion of your critical thinking and literacy skills. And the value of those skills don't only accrue to you: they buoy everyone you hold in community.

But how?

Let reading be hard

This is the most polemical claim in this entire essay, but hear me out: reading should be hard. If it's not challenging you in some way—either because the reading itself is dense and the vocabulary is new, or because the ideas are enlivening and unfamiliar, or both—it's not supporting or sustaining skills in literacy, critical thinking, or perspective-taking.

"But reading is how I relax and entertain myself," is a common rejoinder I encounter. And that's fine, but these aims are not mutually exclusive. The goal is not (as much as my Protestant upbringing sometimes whispers in my ear) to punish yourself with maximally challenging things all the time at the expense of all enjoyment. What I'm advocating is, notice if and when you shy away from something that you could enjoy, could benefit from, could be engaged with only because it seems hard.

Maybe a book sounded interesting and worthwhile, but you're put off by a slightly clunky writing style or a vocabulary a bit out of reach. Why not take the extra time to parse the language, drag out a dictionary, write notes and questions in the margin? Even if reading is for entertainment and relaxation, there need not be urgency for gratification; sometimes the sweetest payoff is the one that was a little costlier to acquire. We also find this with kids learning to read for the first time: a little challenge makes reading a puzzle, makes it engaging.

But even more than that, I'm advocating for you to allow yourself to be challenged. To give yourself permission to struggle a little. Because it means you're doing something new, and because it opens up your capacity for more—including more enjoyment, entertainment, and relaxation, but also more insights, ideas, and fresh takes.

Find your edge, and read there

Even if you're committed to letting reading challenge you, it doesn't need to feel like torture. Being honest with yourself about your capacity (your literacy level, but also your attention span and time budget) is a first step. Maybe you won't get to read 80 books a year, but as far as I know there's no gold star for sheer volume of reading in life.

From there, the key is to locate the edge of your literacy and read at it. I don't mean "rush to your nearest library and dive in on War & Peace" so much as, seeking out writing styles or genres that make your brain itch just a little. Finding subjects or topics or people you find engaging helps ease the interest gap. Challenging yourself to read critically doesn't have to be an exercise in picking up the driest and most boring books around, but it does mean presenting yourself with writing (or topics) that are less familiar.

Reading well is not just a function of taking in the literal words, it's also a function of allowing the reading to help you formulate questions, and to interrogate the reading itself. If something doesn't raise any questions for you, it probably isn't your edge.

And those questions don't have to be kind, either 😉 Sometimes the question is "why on earth would someone write this, or write it in this way?" "What even is the point of this?" Nevertheless: finding the edge of your comfort, and challenging yourself to work through it, is the pathway to building and sustaining skills in critical reasoning.

Use variety to hold interest and build curiosity

To be clear, I am not at all making the case that you should read works of theory or philosophy or nonfiction to the exclusion of everything else. What I am saying is, reading should challenge you intellectually (or emotionally, or psychologically) if you're hoping to grow from it.

Francis Spufford recently wrote a piece about transitioning to fantasy writing from literary fiction, and why we need fantasy. It's a snappy read full of interesting tidbits, but this point feels especially relevant here:

I read and write fantasy because it’s the literature that sees the recurrent unearthliness in human experience. That knows we’re hopelessly metaphorical creatures, who find meaning by tying together patterns of resemblance that might as well be spells. That knows there are some struggles where the stakes really are overwhelming, and good and evil in something like their pure forms really do pivot on human choices. Fantasy understands that to undertake the risks of love is to venture beyond safety, into landscapes strange to you, on perilous and wonderful journeys.

Reading across genres and authorships and experiences should be a given, not something I need to argue for or against. My point here is to say, regardless of the genre or type of reading you're doing, it pays to be aware of the work it does in your life.

Fiction and fantasy, like drier works of philosophy or science, can invite you to inhabit alternate realities or try on different ways of being. They can be an approachable way to allow your psyche to explore what kind of person you want to be and what kind of world you want to live in.

But—that only happens when you select readings that allow yourself to explore, and when you stay with them long enough to sink deeply into exploration.

Reading for the revolution

You don't have to be a person who challenges yourself with reading, or a person who challenges yourself at all. But if you're a person who holds values and ideals at odds with the way the world works now, and the direction it's going, it's worth asking what kinds of skills and qualities might be needed to build something different.

For me personally, the skills and qualities that are universally valuable for anything you could want to do include: critical thinking, self-reflection, perspective-shifting, and curiosity. Those are the kinds of skills that can be built and refined with reading when you let yourself lean into challenge. Those are the kind of skills that accrue benefits beyond a single individual—they help you relate to others, collaborate, understand, learn, refine, and experiment.

It's why I think reading should be hard. Reading can be interesting, comforting, relaxing, and fun. But it can also be more than that. And it's the challenge that can make reading revolutionary.

Links'n'Things

A few odds'n'ends from the last two weeks. If you're feeling subsumed in news about/around Iran, I both recommend coming up for a breath to remember all the other things happening in the world, and recommend developing a media consumption strategy that can help you dodge some propaganda bullets. More on that soon.

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