Is The Novel an Endangered Species?

Alissa Grosso

They say that students don’t read books anymore. “They” in this case being college professors and teachers on social media sites. So make of this anecdotal evidence what you will. Books aren’t entirely extinct, but educators complain that they’ve been forced to scale back the number of pages they assign students to read in a week. Students complain that 100 to 150 pages is too much to read in a single week.

Has the internet and the digital screens we’ve become so addicted to destroyed our ability to read anything longer than a tweet? Has TLDR (too long didn’t read) become our new motto?

Reading these complaints I was reminded of my own college years. I was an English major. So, I read a LOT of books. I recall one year taking a 6-week summer course on the Victorian novel. Victorians did not write short novels. We read David Copperfield, Middlemarch and a third equally weighty tome (which I have somehow blotted from my memory) during those 6 weeks. According to the social media posts today’s students would never be able to do this or maybe like me and my classmates they would have grumbled but ultimately knuckled down and done the reading. Probably, like some of my classmates, there would be some who resorted to buying the Cliff’s Notes version.

I went to Rutgers. For those not from around these parts, Rutgers is the state university of New Jersey, our version of Penn State or the University of Maine or what have you. There are some smaller state colleges in New Jersey as well, but Rutgers being the granddaddy has three campuses. The main campus is located in New Brunswick in a liminal space known as Central New Jersey. Then there’s a satellite campus in the northern part of the state in Newark where I went and another in the southern part of the state in Camden.

I commuted to school and lived closest to the Newark campus. Close though was still a 45 minute drive without traffic. Those who have spent any time driving Route 80 in Jersey know that “without traffic” is a bit of a pipe dream. It didn’t help that at this time we had a somewhat random HOV lane that ran from Rockaway to Parsippany and seemed to serve only to increase the rush hour traffic jams.

One thing I learned early on is that it was impossible to get to Newark between about 8:15 to 8:20 in the morning for an 8:30 class. You could get there well before 8:15 or after 8:30 but traffic patterns simply would not allow you to enter the city anywhere near that magical 8:20 time. I learned early on to avoid 8:30 classes if at all possible.

The Newark campus of Rutgers was located in the middle of the college section of town. Essex County Community College was just down the road, UMDNJ was next door and NJIT was across the street. NJIT is my father’s alma mater, though when he went there it was known as Newark College of Engineering. At Rutgers we had an open enrollment policy with NJIT. I could have elected to walk across the street and take engineering classes if I so chose and their students could come over our way and take any of our courses.

Certain English classes did seem to really attract future engineers. I can say with absolute certainty that a 6-week summer course on the Victorian novel was not one of them. However the Science Fiction, Technology and Society course I took was predictably packed with NJIT students. Perhaps less predictably so was a Romantic Poetry class I took. In this case “Romantic” refers to the Romantic period of literature, think Wordsworth and Coleridge, not love poems.

Are engineering students really that into Wordsworth? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say no. It’s more a case of what engineers are not into, which is reading long novels. This is a generalization, of course. Some engineers do read books. The ones that signed up for that Romantic Poetry class though were one hundred percent thinking something along the lines of poems are short, I can read a poem, I can get my required English credits and won’t have to read some big, long novel.

Science and technology curriculum has been pushed a lot in pre-college education. Humanities have taken a bit of backseat. Maybe that as much as our addiction to digital screens has led to a generation of students who are averse to reading.

Is it a phase? Perhaps we will come to our collective senses and realize that reading novels is just as important from an educational standpoint as learning how to write computer code. Also, I suspect some of it is exaggeration. There have always been students that balked at the thought of reading an entire novel, in my day we called them engineering students.

— Alissa

---

Weekly Inspiration

What I’m Reading: The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

What I’m Watching: Conan O’Brien Must Go

What I’m Listening to: “Bobby’s Girl” - Tracey Ullman

---

Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com

Find out more about my digital art at alissacarin.com

---

---

My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.