When a Book Reads Me

On reading for pleasure, the brain, and the art of being changed

We have received bad news about reading.

The latest PISA 2025 results show a significant decline in the reading skills of Norwegian 15-year-olds. Norway now performs below the OECD average in reading, mathematics and science. In reading, the score has fallen by 24 points since 2022 and by no less than 60 points since 2015. The proportion of students performing below what the OECD defines as a basic level of proficiency has risen sharply.

This is serious. The ability to understand, evaluate and reflect on texts is a prerequisite for learning and for finding one’s way in a society where ever more information competes for our attention.

But perhaps the way we talk about the reading crisis also deserves attention. We speak of reading skills, competence, levels and scores. We ask how successfully a student can extract information from a text.

But what if we reverse the question?

What can the text draw out of the reader?

Reading because we want to

Almost simultaneously with the publication of the PISA results, Psychological Medicine published a review article by Barbara J. Sahakian, Vicki Perrin and Christelle Langley on reading and its associations with brain health, cognition, well-being and mental health.

Its starting point is strikingly simple: reading for pleasure.

The researchers review studies covering different stages of life. The picture is not one in which a single activity miraculously solves a range of problems, and association does not automatically imply causation. Even so, the pattern is interesting. Reading for pleasure is associated with, among other things, cognitive functioning, psychological well-being and brain health.

In an earlier study in which Sahakian and Langley participated, data from more than 10,000 young people were examined. Reading for pleasure from an early age was associated with better cognitive performance and mental health later in adolescence. The researchers also found differences in brain structure.

What interests me most, however, is not that reading may be good for the brain. It is that the research begins with pleasure.

A child does not necessarily read because someone has formulated a learning objective. The child reads because they want to know what happens on the next page.

I open a book believing that I am going to read it.

Sometimes, when I am fortunate, the book begins to read me.

What can the brain tell us?

Neuroscience can tell us astonishingly much about what happens when a human being reads. Brain imaging can show which areas and networks are involved when we process language, follow a story, remember what we have read or try to understand a difficult text.

But this knowledge also has a limit.

I can read Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, and a researcher can, in principle, investigate what happens in my brain while I am reading. The measurements can describe with increasing precision the neural processes taking place.

But they cannot thereby tell us what Kierkegaard’s text means to me.

Brain imaging can describe the neural processes involved in reading, but it cannot thereby describe the meaning of the reading. This is not a deficiency of neuroscience; it is a different question.

And it is precisely with this question that hermeneutics begins.

When the text asks the question

I recently wrote about Gadamer, prejudices and horizons in connection with how easily we can misunderstand what we encounter. Here, another aspect of his hermeneutics interests me.

For Gadamer, understanding is closely connected with conversation and with the question. A genuine conversation is not a situation in which I know the answer in advance. If I have already decided where the conversation must end, then in an important sense it has ended before it has begun.

The same can be true of a text.

We tend to think that we are the ones asking questions of the book: What does the author mean? Is the argument sound? What can I learn?

Sometimes the opposite happens.

The text begins to question me.

A sentence stops me. An argument unsettles something I have taken for granted. A novel allows me to see a person I had previously failed to understand. The text is no longer merely an object from which I extract information. It has become a partner in conversation.

And a genuine conversation partner can contradict me.

The difficult book

Here an interesting problem arises with the expression reading for pleasure. Some of the most important books I have read have not always been pleasant.

Kierkegaard can be uncomfortable. Heidegger can be difficult and slow. A novel can lead us into experiences we would rather have kept at a distance. A philosophical text can force us to relinquish something we have long regarded as self-evident.

Yet there is a kind of pleasure in this that is different from entertainment: the pleasure of discovering that the world is larger than my own conception of it.

Pleasure may lead me to open the book. But I cannot decide in advance what the book will do to me.

When reading becomes a means

This is why I become somewhat uneasy when the reading crisis is discussed almost exclusively as a problem of performance.

When results decline, we must of course ask how reading instruction can be improved. Children must learn to decode, understand and evaluate texts, and schools need to know whether their teaching works.

But there is a paradox. If reading becomes primarily a means of becoming better at reading, we may simultaneously weaken something that makes people continue to read when no one is checking on them.

Pleasure, curiosity and immersion are difficult to produce through a learning objective.

The PISA results therefore make another question increasingly urgent. Of course we must ask how young people can learn to read better. But we should also ask how a child discovers that a book is worth opening even when there will be no test afterwards.

Research on reading for pleasure reminds us that this is not merely a pleasant supplement to the real business of reading instruction. The desire to read may itself be part of what enables reading to continue throughout life.

Being alone with another human being

There is something strange about a book.

I can sit alone in a room and at the same time be in conversation with someone who died hundreds or thousands of years ago. Augustine can speak to me. Kierkegaard can ask me a question. Dostoevsky can lead me into the darkness of another human being. Gadamer can make me discover that the question I asked the text may not have been the right one.

At the same time, the book demands something that has become a scarce resource: sustained attention.

It does not lure me onwards after a few seconds because an algorithm has calculated that my attention is beginning to drift. It does not alter the next page in order to keep me engaged. If I am to continue, I must remain.

This is not an argument that the printed book is good and the screen bad. I read texts on screens myself. The question is rather what form of attention different ways of reading invite us to cultivate.

Long-form reading requires us to remain with something long enough to allow it to contradict us.

What do we lose if we stop reading?

PISA measures reading proficiency. Neuroscience can investigate associations between reading, cognition and the brain. Both give us important knowledge.

But neither can by itself answer the question that is becoming increasingly urgent: What does a society lose if people gradually lose the ability or the desire to read long and demanding texts?

We may lose vocabulary, knowledge and concentration. But perhaps we can also lose something more difficult to measure:

the ability to remain within another person’s thought long enough for our own thinking to have time to change.

That is a hermeneutic capacity. But it is also a democratic one. A democracy needs people who can encounter arguments with which they do not already agree, stay with them long enough to understand them, and sometimes discover that their own initial judgement was inadequate.

Perhaps this is the deeper significance of Norway’s poor reading results. They do not merely tell us something about schools. They raise a question about the kind of attention we are training ourselves to practise, and therefore also about the kind of society we are creating.

The new research tells us that reading may be good for the brain. That is an excellent reason to read.

But it is not the most important one.

I read because there are thoughts I have not yet thought, people I have not yet met, and questions I have not yet learned to ask.

I open a book believing that I am going to read it.

Sometimes, when I am fortunate, the book begins to read me.

References

Gadamer, H.-G. (2013). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.; rev. 2nd ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. (Original work published 1960)

OECD. (2026). PISA 2025 results (Volume I): Learning and equity in education. OECD Publishing.

Sahakian, B. J., Perrin, V., & Langley, C. (2026). Reading and associations with brain health, cognition, wellbeing and mental health. Psychological Medicine, 56, e262. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291726105625

Sun, Y.-J., Sahakian, B. J., Langley, C., Yang, A., Jiang, Y., Kang, J., Zhao, X., Li, C., Cheng, W., & Feng, J. (2024). Early-initiated childhood reading for pleasure: Associations with better cognitive performance, mental well-being and brain structure in young adolescence. Psychological Medicine, 54(2), 359–373. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291723001381

Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training. (2026). PISA 2025: Norwegian students’ competence in science, reading and mathematics [Norwegian-language report].