Reading and Its Enemies: Should We Still Read Books in the Twenty-First Century?

For two thousand years, the book has had enemies.Emperors burned libraries. Inquisitors silenced heretics. Philosophers, from Plato onward, doubted that reading could ever replace living thought. In The Book and Its Enemies, Ramin Saadat traces this long and often violent history: the chronicle of libraries destroyed from ancient Nineveh to Mosul, the machinery of censorship and self-censorship, and the seventeen arguments history's greatest thinkers have raised against reading itself.But the book's oldest enemies are not its most dangerous ones. Today, in the twenty-first century, we face something subtler: aliteracy, the condition of being fully able to read, and simply choosing not to. Drawing on neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and a lifetime spent among books, Saadat asks why an age of unprecedented access to information has produced a public more confidently ignorant than ever, and why the algorithms shaping our attention profit directly from that ignorance.This is a book about fire and about silence, about tyrants and about scrolling thumbs, and about why, in a world built to make reading unnecessary, picking up a book has quietly become an act of resistance.Part history, part neuroscience, part impassioned defence of a threatened habit, The Book and Its Enemies is for anyone who has ever wondered whether we still need to read at all.