ChaiWithPriya The battle between the arts and my phone

“What are you reading right now?” is an inevitable question when I meet with some of my closest friends on a regular basis.

All of us will pull out our phones, Kindles or books from our handbag and exchange titles and let the others read the blurbs on the back of the book to keep each other in the loop.

This is often followed with requests to borrow, someone noting down the title of the book or looking it up on Goodreads.

This has pretty much been our friendship for nearly 25 years, where birthday gifts are often requests for more books we’d like to read, with the promise of: “I’ll let you borrow it when I’m done.”

I am also part of a book club where we meet online once a month and discuss a book we have carefully selected.

This book club started during the first lockdown in 2020 and has continued ever since. Last month we read our 60thbook, and it’s been an adventure.

We have travelled through the backwaters of Kerala, rooted for an octopus stuck in an aquarium against his will, driven a snowy village in Ireland, explored the darkened streets of Barcelona during Franco’s regime and sought comfort in a library in Japan.

Much like a reflection of where these books have taken us, the core members of this book club log in once a month from Gibraltar, Canada, Spain, India and the UK.

What brings us together is this joy in reading, a sense of community, our South Asian heritage and what has developed into a great friendship.

On the one hand there’s what is being described as a reading crisis, but on the other hand reading is becoming more popular with the rise of BookTok, content creators who discuss books on TikTok.

It has also seen a rise in the number of book clubs across the world, where people are seeking community and finding a way to share their thoughts with other readers.

I was surprised to see how many book clubs existed on the Rock during GBC’s coverage on the subject late last year.

There seemed to be a book club for every genre and each stemmed from a love for reading.

And what surprised me was that a hobby that is quite isolating in its nature is bringing people together not just here in Gibraltar but everywhere as well.

As someone who has always had her nose in a book, imagine my surprise when I learnt that if I lived in America, I would be an “endangered species”.

“If you read a book in 2025—just one book—you belong to an endangered species. Like honeybees and red wolves, the population of American readers, Lector americanus, has been declining for decades,” an article in The Atlantic published recently read.

“The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, from 2022, found that less than half of Americans had read a single book in the previous 12 months; only 38 percent had read a novel or short story.”

“A recent study from the University of Florida and University College London found that the number of Americans who engage in daily reading for pleasure fell 3 percent each year from 2003 to 2023.”

Th article goes on to say that with a steep decline in reading rates among students, with many reportedly struggling to read a book from cover to cover, educators and policy makers have been agonising over this trend for decades but haven’t managed to change it over the years.

The way we, as a society, consume media has changed so much, with our attention split between what we are reading or watching, and our mobile phones.

Much like my never-ending TBR (to-be-read) list, there are an endless supply of books to read and get through in this lifetime, but it is a struggle when I choose to endlessly scroll through social media instead.

This battle of the arts and social media has changed the way the arts are being produced as well.

Books published in the past 20 years or so are so much easier to read in comparison to literary classics.

During my book club meetings I often argue that newer books written for the masses treat us readers like we are dumb, but the reality is it is fighting for relevance against what we consume via our phones.

The sentence structure is shorter, the chapters are easier to get through, and every chapter has a hook written into it so that the reader continues, and we are no longer given the opportunity to reach our own conclusion.

Similarly TV shows and movies are being written so that we don’t lend them our full attention, all the work that goes into a TV show over a number of years results in us binge-watching the entire series over a few hours while we scroll on our phones.

TV actor and activist, Jameela Jamil, recently raised this point in an interview which finally made the penny drop for me.

While we criticise younger generations for always being on their phones all the time, it is time that we lead the way.

I would like to live in a society where we read for the pure pleasure of reading, we watch television shows and movies and appreciate the time and effort that goes into producing them, and the arts are no longer consumed as something we can just tick off a box once we pick up our phones again.