Zen and the art of reading

The World Population Review published data about reading habits by country that recently got some traction. Among other things, it reported the “time spent reading” in terms of the number of hours a year spent reading and converted that number into a “number of books read” per year. The data was collected between 2017 and 2022.

The US scores highest with 357 hours / 17 books per year, followed closely by India with 352 hours / 16 books, and the UK in third position with 343 hours / 15 books. Pakistan, with 60 hours / 2.6 books, is reported in the last of nine categories. Such rankings make for great headlines, but you must remain skeptical of the credibility of their data sources, methodology, and the country rankings they produce.

Every few years there are similar studies about reading habits, some more credible than others. However, one thing that remains consistent is that Pakistan is either far down the list or not even included.

Statista Market Insights put Pakistan’s total book sales at a paltry $60 million. For reference, India’s book sales are reported as $5.5 billion – approximately 90 times as much as ours. It also lines up with other reports that put the value of book sales in India at about 5.0 per cent of the global total, comparable to its 17 per cent of the global population.

With 3.0 per cent of the global population, Pakistan’s book sales make up only about 0.05 per cent of the global total. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) report titled ‘The Global Publishing Industry 2022’, out of all books deposited at recognised repositories in 2022, only 1,911 are from Pakistan. To put this number in perspective, the same number is 264,000 for the US, 401,000 for Germany, and 3,082 for Sri Lanka (a country with a smaller population but in our region).

The decline of reading as a habit is not a domestic phenomenon though. Reading habits have been on the decline globally. The Atlantic carried an extensive report recently (Rose Horowitch, ‘The elite college students who can’t read’, The Atlantic, October 2024) on this trend. It cites Nicholas Dames from Columbia University, who for more than two decades has been teaching the widely known year-long ‘Literature Humanities’ course of a type commonly referred to as a ‘great books course’. These courses usually cover collections of books foundational to Western culture and civilisation. At Columbia, students enrolled in this course are expected to read 24 books over two semesters. However, in recent years, students have been increasingly challenged by the volume of readings.

Dames is one of 33 faculty members the authors spoke to, most of which had similar observations. Out of the data points those conversations brought out was how in one place a teacher of high school Advanced Placement English Literature now covers only six to seven books in a year, down from 14 in the past. The other, a professor of literature at UC Berkeley, who used to assign as many as 200 pages a week as reading but, over the years, had to cut it down to half as many. This is the state of change of literary education in some of the world’s best universities.

I spoke to a handful of Pakistani professors, all of whom spent years teaching in science and engineering departments in Pakistan and the Middle East region. The magnitudes were different, but the trend they observed was the same. Once upon a time, most university courses centred around a textbook, and it was implied that students would have to read along in order to do well at the end of the year/semester.

Now, expectations are that all learning materials will be contained in the slide deck professors use in their lectures – call it the PowerPoint curse. In many places, course-assigned textbooks exist only on paper to fulfill documentation requirements for accreditations. In some institutions, the situation has regressed to the extent where exam questions that are not from or close variants of what was shown in lecture slides are considered unreasonable.

There are now universities operating in the region that lack libraries entirely – a situation unthinkable only a generation ago. Outside universities, libraries accessible to the public have been disappearing. In the ‘90s Islamabad had the British Council Library and the American Center Library, both of which closed since then. Today, the city’s population has multiplied but the number of significant and accessible public libraries stands at near zero. The National Library is in the city’s Red Zone, making it impractical for most.

There are a few community libraries in six sectors (one operating out of a shed-like building). Some of them are smaller than the personal book collections people have in their homes. The Aiwan-e-Quaid Library in F-9 Park is about the size of a middle or high-school library and is easily accessible. None of them qualify as adequate for a city the size of Islamabad, not to speak of a country’s capital. Bookshops have followed a similar trajectory, with one significant bookstore remaining (a handful if we expand the definition of ‘significant’).

According to the UNDP’s Human Development Report, 94 out of 100 young Pakistanis do not have access to a library. This difference clearly shows when you speak to a young person who has the privilege of library access or can access books otherwise and is in the habit of reading regularly and widely versus one who does not read at all, either due to lack of opportunity or by choice.

There is a difference in the nature and quality of conversations to be had with young people who read (anything) regularly and those who do not. It shows in their vocabulary, expression, and originality of thought. Unfortunately, ‘I am not a reader’ has become a perfectly acceptable response. Reading for pleasure has been relegated to a niche pursuit.

According to a prominent local publisher, there are no official numbers for the number of books published in Pakistan every year. The book-selling business is facing significant headwinds. Importers of foreign books have to contend with the low value of the Pakistani rupee vs foreign currencies.

Locally published books are also affected by this because paper and ink are also imported and the cost of power is linked to the exchange rate, making even locally published books more expensive. Higher education is already starved of public funding which leaves even less than before to allocate for the purchase of new books for their libraries’ collections.

I would like to note that not all reading is alike. Plenty of people spend their days scrolling through Twitter and other social media feeds – ‘reading’. However, reading short-form content like social media posts and blogs does not bestow the same benefits as reading a book (not to speak of the much higher likelihood of finding disinformation on the former). The latter requires the ability to follow lengthy and nuanced arguments and story arcs (depending on the nature of the text), provoking the reader to do some deeper thinking and requiring them to make connections.

Occasionally, someone asks me what they can do to become better writers. My usual response is to start writing to get better at it, but reading plays an equally big part because it triggers new ideas, perspectives, and connections and stimulates intellectual curiosity and critical thinking that make up the foundations of a vibrant society.

The writer (she/her) has a PhD in Education.