THE ATLANTIC recently had an article about the literacy crisis in this country, further documenting how people are becoming postliterate, which, for me, is a dystopian nightmare I couldn't have imagined.

As a lifelong book lover and reader, and someone who's devoted most of his life to writing fiction, it was pretty dreadful reading.

I'm not going to repost what's already been written, but it's pretty dire. The scariest part for me was how it talked about how people's brains are ultimately rewiring themselves into a postliterate mode of operating, which is so thunderingly anti-intellectual that it terrifies me.

It never would have occurred to me that people would just stop reading. And, of course, there'll always be readers, but they're a minority of people consuming the majority of fiction. Most people just don't bother reading.

Indie writing's full of enough hurdles and barriers already, but the idea of most people just being indifferent to reading is soul-crushing.

Not that it'll stop me from continuing to write, but lordy, it's a downer.