When Reading Stops Being Work, We All Lose

By Andy — 2026-08-21 — Literary News

I watched someone defend using AI to read their books the way you'd watch a friend explain their new diet of exclusively meal-replacement shakes. Polite nod. Quiet dread.

Nicholas Johnston, who publishes Axios, wrote this week about how AI has become his "reading buddy," helping him "make sense of wordy, old prose." He finds dense books hard. He's busy. So he feeds chapters into a chatbot and lets it explain what happened. Problem solved. Reader problem, anyway.

Except he's not reading. He's consuming a summary written by a machine that hallucinated a character's name in another book he tried this on. But never mind that. What grinds at me is how this crystallises something I've watched happen everywhere: the conviction that difficulty in reading is a flaw we should engineer away, not a feature we should sit with.

The fear of being confused has metastasised. It's showing up in how children are taught to read—less wrestling with meaning, more scrolling through snippets. It's showing up in book criticism, which keeps shrinking into more "user-friendly" formats: listicles instead of essays, summaries instead of argument. And now it's here, in this honest little confession from a publisher about needing a crutch to get through a 19th-century novel.

What Johnston missed is this: the struggle *is* the point.

I spent months on George Eliot's *Middlemarch* as an undergraduate. Pages where nothing seemed to happen. Sentences that made my brain fold in on itself. I remember thinking I'd rather be anywhere else—literally anywhere, including Thirsty Thursday at the campus dive bar.

But the act of sitting with that ambiguity, of underlining passages that made no sense, of coming back and having them suddenly click: that's where the growth lives. That's where you stop being a consumer of plot and start being someone who can think. Who can read something truly difficult in the world and not reach for a summary.

The Wired journalist Megan Greenwell reported recently that children aren't actually struggling to decode words. Inside the "Mississippi Miracle," it's all about comprehension. They can parse the sentences. They can't extract meaning. And you know why? Because meaning-making requires the very thing we're teaching them to avoid: friction. Discomfort. The need to actually think.

I picked up Missouri Williams's new novel *The Vivisectors* last month. It's a dark, difficult novel published in 2026. Parts of it are inscrutable. Parts made me want to throw it across the room. I felt lost constantly. But I also found myself underlining sentences constantly—passages where Williams was doing something I'd never seen before, something that required me to lean in.

I let myself sit with the ambiguity.

That's not a flex. That's just what reading is, or was. And the moment we decide that books should be easy, that they should yield their meaning without effort, we've decided that reading itself has no value beyond extracting facts. We've decided that thinking is optional.

Johnston isn't wrong that modern life is fragmented, that we read in bursts. He's wrong about what that means we should do about it. The answer isn't to outsource comprehension to a machine. The answer is to read fewer books, or to read differently. Or yes, sometimes, to admit a book isn't for you and move on. But not this—not this hollow, outsourced version of engagement that sounds like respect for literature while being its exact opposite.

The cost of making everything frictionless is that we lose the thing that actually transforms people into readers. Thinkers, even. We get convenient instead.