We can read hard things -- if we put away the phones and try

People are reading (or, at least, buying) The Odyssey, thanks to Christopher Nolan's blockbuster movie. They're arguing about whether the many-sided Odysseus should be seen as a heroic adventurer, a sword-shocked vet, a crafty killer or a dozen other interpretations. Emily Wilson's modern translation has sold one million copies, and three other translations are on the top 10 list.

Young Americans can learn to read complex, challenging books, writes Natalie Wexler. Those who do will have an advantage over AI's cognitive cripples.

Rose Horowitch's “end of reading" story in The Atlantic suggests short-form videos are returning us to

"the kind of oral culture that produced Homeric epic poems," Wexler writes. "Those who absorb information through listening rather than reading respond best to epithets, repetition, and descriptions of violence, and they’re not bothered by self-contradiction because they can’t remember what the speaker said before."

The future may belong to the readers and thinkers, Wexler suggests. "AI firms are hiring philosophy majors, paying them big bucks to ponder questions of consciousness."

“The people who are reading hard books and are still writing have built these brain circuits, and they’re comfortable with cognitive strain,” computer science professor Cal Newport told the New York Times. “These are the people with real value if everyone else has fried their brains.”

Students need to be taught to read and understand whole books, not just excerpts, Wexler argues.

"Literacy curricula that incorporate whole books — and build the knowledge that actually fuels reading comprehension—are gaining ground."

Justin McDaniels, a religious studies professor at Penn, teaches an intensive reading course called “Existential Despair." Once a week, students hand over their phones at 5 pm, read the assigned book, and then discuss it. Class ends at midnight. Of 400 who applied -- business, engineering and nursing students, not just humanities majors -- only 41 got in.

Students read 17 books in one semester, reports Dave Zeitlin in The Pennsylvania Gazette. "I really hadn’t sat down and read a book for four years,” said Ryan Ghose, a marketing major. It's been a "life-changing experience."

I think I first read The Iliad and The Odyssey -- surely excerpts -- in Junior Great Books when I was in middle school. There were bits of the latter in a book I owned, The World's Great Myths and Legends. (As a monotheist, I was shocked by the Greek, Roman and Norse gods. They were just powerful and often badly behaved people!) We read Edith Hamilton's Mythology in seventh grade for school. Then more Iliad and Odyssey in 12th-grade Great Books, using Richard Lattimore's translation.

I disliked Achilles, the big booby. Sulking in your tent when your country is at war! But Odysseus was sneaky. I liked him.