My wife and I discovered audiobooks a few years ago and are hooked. We have listened to all of the Strike novels by Robert Galbraith. We tried to get the children interested in The Hobbit but failed; they fell asleep, while I became engrossed by Bilbo’s adventures, as if I was ten all over again. Harry Potter has proved more of a hit for them, and Frankenstein for me and my wife. But our greatest discovery has been Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, which I am now halfway through. We are already determined to turn to The Three Musketeers before our summer holiday is over.
That we are listening to Dumas and not reading him already feels like some kind of moral failure – another indication of our modern literacy crisis. Yet even listening to Monte Cristo leaves you with the impression that standards really have fallen. The richness of the language; the complexity of the plot; the demands made of the reader – all seem utterly out of reach today, in which many novels read like scripts for a Netflix drama.
Yet, when I mentioned in passing to a young colleague that I was reading Monte Cristo, he replied with casual disdain: “Oh, that novel everyone is now reading.” He then proceeded to show me the TikTok videos and Reddit threads devoted to the book that have sprung up. An account called “Litslop” declared it “Gen Z’s new favourite book”. Reading Dumas has, I am told, become a meme.
I admit that I was slightly crestfallen at this revelation. There I was, assuming I had stumbled upon something great. And then I discovered that I am merely being swept along on another wave of fashion without realising it. Rather like when choosing a name for your child, you think you are being original but you soon realise you have, in fact, had the same “original” idea as everyone else.
But what of my belief that literary standards have fallen? Perhaps even here I am reflecting the fashion of the day – or just being another grumpy old man. My bookish Gen Z colleague insists that novels have actually got better over the years: techniques have improved, and readers are less forgiving of 200-page plot detours. I think this may well be a little too clever by half.
It is a common refrain among my friends that our concentration levels seem to be falling. It is certainly true that while I can easily handle another 40 hours of Dumas on Audible, the concept of 500 pages seems far more daunting. On page 15, my old friend Matt Chorley theorises that such hard-to-measure cultural changes have real-world political consequences. In his view, the loss of shared national experiences has led to a greater focus on our politics, which has not necessarily been healthy. Similarly, perhaps eroding levels of concentration have led to a form of national ADHD, now playing out in our hyperactive politics.
It all seems a far cry from the kind of technological utopia once imagined. In later life, Harold Macmillan addressed the Conservative Philosophy Group and speculated about the glorious future to come, in which the machines would take on a large portion of work and the great question of the age would be what to do with all our spare time. In Macmillan’s imagination, “the aptitude of the old upper class for leisure” would reinvigorate the Tory party, rediscovering its purpose: “[To] train the lower orders for the terrifying challenge of idleness.”
In a world in which fewer and fewer of us feel we have enough time or concentration to read a novel, let alone bask in idleness, such thoughts now seem absurdly quaint. We can no longer maintain our concentration through an entire film, apparently. I was told recently that TV networks now make series designed for people who are scrolling on their screens at the same time, with constant repetitions of the plot and recaps of characters.
Perhaps this is the reason Gen Z – and older folk like me – are reacting to The Count of Monte Cristo with awe: we are not used to such sweep and ambition. Nothing much lasts any more, not even our governments. I recently mentioned my Dumas love affair to my mother-in-law, who replied, without missing a beat: “Dumbass.” Pardon me, I replied? “You know, from The Shawshank Redemption, when the prisoner is handed Dumas and reads it as ‘dumbass’.” For 20 years I have been watchingthe film without understanding the reference to Monte Cristo, its obvious inspiration. I am indeed a dumbass. Are we all becoming a little more so?
[Further reading: An anti-guidebook to Andy Burnham’s Britain]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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