Why this book club exists
There's a literacy crisis unfolding across Australia and the Western world, and it starts young. About one in three Australian school students are not mastering the reading skills they need1, and plenty of the adults around them stopped reading the day they left school, or haven't picked up anything challenging since.
Mortimer Adler made the point decades ago in How to Read a Book. Most people leave school able to read at only the most basic level and never learn to read analytically, which means following an argument, testing it and working out what a text actually says. That skill has to be earned and then practised, like a muscle, and a muscle you stop using wastes away.
You can see the result in almost any online debate. So many people struggle to take in information and build an argument in reply, so they reach for how something makes them feel instead. When you can read a text closely and know exactly what it says, as opposed to what you're inferring it says, you gain a level of control over your emotions that very little else can give you.
People can keep worrying about the literacy crisis, or they can take ownership of it. You can save every clever post to a folder you'll never open again and tell yourself you'll come back to it, and another year goes past and nothing has changed. I can't do the reading for you and I can't do the work for you, but I can give you every tool I have and set you up to start compounding those one-percenters.
None of this came naturally to me, and I need that to be clear. I still struggle with a wavering focus and I still struggle with spelling. I force myself to read books outside my wheelhouse, and right now that means Plato, Aristotle and Hannah Arendt, which are not easy reads and were never meant to be.
1. Grattan Institute, The Reading Guarantee: How to give every child the best chance of success, 2024.
