Credit : Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim's X
KUALA LUMPUR, October 28 – Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim has raised concern over the decline of reading culture in the digital age, warning that society may be growing richer in information but poorer in wisdom, after spending part of his day with British writer James Marriott’s new book, The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society.
In a post on X this evening, accompanied by a photograph of himself reading the book at his desk and a short video, Anwar said he had “stolen some time” at midday to study the work, which he described as raising “a big and pressing question about the decline of the culture of reading and study, the shallowness of thinking and the future of civilisation in the current digital era and tide”.
The Prime Minister drew on two moments from 19th-century history to make his point. He recalled that the death of the great French writer Victor Hugo in 1885 saw some two million people flood the streets of Paris to pay their last respects, while tens of thousands accompanied the funeral procession of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky in Saint Petersburg in 1881.
Those scenes, he said, indirectly proved that society at the time held literature, culture, the tradition of knowledge and thought in high esteem. “Neither of them came from among kings or war commanders who had won wars, but were figures and scholars whose thinking had seeped deep into the soul and heart of society,” Anwar wrote.
He noted that Marriott also reminds readers that the threat to civilisation is not merely a matter of losing access to knowledge, of which there is now an abundance, but the fading of love and patience for reading, reflecting and thinking critically and deeply.
“We may be increasingly rich in information, yet poor and destitute in wisdom. Therefore, the question is not merely whether people still read, but whether people still want to think,” the Prime Minister said in the post, which he tagged #YakinMADANI.
A book that has sparked debate
Marriott’s The New Dark Ages was published by The Bodley Head on September 3, 2026, and runs to 208 pages. Its publisher, Penguin, describes it as an instant Sunday Times bestseller and “an impassioned attack on the trivial and meaningless culture of the screen and a defence of the written word”.
The book argues that the number of people reading is in free fall across the world, that literacy is declining or stagnating in most developed countries, and that addictive digital entertainment has colonised people’s free time. Marriott contends that reading and writing are essential for innovation, creativity and critical thinking, and that the culture of print underpins modern democracies, which require citizens to grapple with ideas at length and in depth.
According to The Irish Times, the book grew out of Marriott’s viral Substack essay, “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society”, published in September 2025. Reviewers have been divided. The Irish Times called it “a lucid, well-written antidote for the distracted public”, while The Guardian described it as “a grandiose but superficial defence of reading”. The Critic called it a “slim but compelling analysis”.
The Prime Minister’s reflections come as educators and parents in many countries debate the effect of screens and short-form digital content on how young people read, a conversation that Marriott’s book has pushed back into the spotlight in recent weeks. For Anwar, the real test in an age of endless scrolling is not whether people can find information, but whether they still have the patience to read and think deeply about it.
Source: Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim on X
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