A classic bildungsroman follows the growth and development of a young person, who typically matures from a dreamer into a rational being. Jane Austen was a master of the genre: In her posthumously published novel Northanger Abbey, she satirizes the overly imaginative Catherine Morland, a voracious reader who perceives her life as a Gothic story. Catherine finds intrigue and plot everywhere she looks: A cabinet in her room might hold morbid secrets; a laundry bill might be a clue to a dark scheme. Her salacious imagination gets her into trouble, but like a good heroine, she eventually sees things as they really are. She becomes an adult, a person of reason, and learns to live in the real world.

The Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, is also a bildungsroman, following the education of a young man. But in contrast with Northanger Abbey, The Empusium charts the opposite trajectory: What if a person could instead be taught to see the world as an unreasonable place, dominated by the supernatural or mystical? Pulling from folktales, mythology, art, and literature, Tokarczuk’s novel spins a story that feels eerily familiar and yet totally new. The book challenges the supremacy of the “rational” that has held sway since the Enlightenment, painting a picture of a world that is illogical, fantastical, and often simply unexplainable.

The Empusium, which has been translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, opens at a train station, where “the view is obscured by clouds of steam from the locomotive that trails along the platform. To see everything we must look beneath them, let ourselves be momentarily blinded by the gray haze, until the vision that emerges after this trial run is sharp, incisive, and all-seeing.” Like a camera panning across a set, the collective first-person narration slowly scans across the train platform, where a left shoe appears, then a right one: a new arrival. This is “our” protagonist, to adopt the novel’s language, a young Mieczysław Wojnicz, who has arrived at Görbersdorf, a sanatorium in the Prussian province of Silesia, now part of Poland. Wojnicz is here, as many other gentlemen would have been in September 1913, to pursue a rest cure for tuberculosis.

The novel’s opening signals that Tokarczuk is returning to hallowed literary ground: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, on its 100th anniversary. The older novel follows a young man’s lengthy stay at Davos, a Swiss sanatorium. Like Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, Wojnicz has studied to be an engineer, and like Castorp, he mostly passes the time in the sanatorium by listening to debates among other, older guests. But unlike Castorp, who lived at Davos for seven years, Wojnicz finds himself a spot at a discounted inn, the Guesthouse for Gentlemen in Görbersdorf, while waiting for a vacancy at the main resort, the Kurhaus.

[Read: The tyranny of English]

In The Magic Mountain, Castorp learns a great deal from his fellow guests. The resort acts as a microcosm of the intellectual climate in Europe before World War I: Over the course of the novel, the guests represent and dissect ideas put forth by Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and Freud, among other thinkers. In contrast, Wojnicz has a front seat to what reads hilariously as a cut-rate, drunken version down the street. The debates in the guesthouse never soar to the intellectual heights reached in Mann’s book, or even come to a definitive conclusion, instead petering out as the local liquor takes hold. By parodying Mann’s discourse, The Empusium seems designed to take The Magic Mountain down a peg or two.

Though Wojnicz is a keen observer of the social dynamics that unfurl around him, he prefers to listen to the debates and rarely weighs in. He is naive, “an odd creature, so completely unaware, so innocent.” He spends his long afternoon rest cures reflecting on his past: his childhood after his mother’s early death, his strict education in Lwów and then Dresden, his torment by a father determined to toughen a sensitive son. Wojnicz is clearly at Görbersdorf at the insistence of his father, who believes that it will make him into more of a man. “To be a man,” Wojnicz reflects sadly, “means learning to ignore whatever causes trouble. That’s the whole mystery.”

Yet as the novel progresses, Wojnicz is unable to disregard disturbing events. The guesthouse proprietor’s wife hangs herself the day after his arrival, and sensitive Wojnicz is alarmed that no one, including her husband, Willi Opitz, appears to care. Wojnicz registers other oddities as September turns into October, then November. The attic emits cooing noises at night. The town’s residents claim that witches live in the forest. The liquor that the guesthouse gentlemen imbibe at night, Schwärmerei (German for “excessive sentiment”), seems to have hallucinogenic properties. On a hike in the woods, Wojnicz is horrified to come across earthen sculptures called Tuntschi—objects that, according to his companions, are used as sex toys by the local coal burners. The nearby cemetery is full of tombstones for young men who recently died; the previous year, a young man had been found ripped apart in the forest. Is all this mere coincidence, as Dr. Semperweiss, a psychoanalyst who works at the main sanatorium, suggests? Or is there something sinister, maybe even supernatural, in the woods beyond Görbersdorf?

The answer to these questions might be a matter of perspective. Wojnicz’s only friend in the guesthouse, a young landscape painter named Thilo von Hahn, encourages him to pay attention to these odd events. On his own, Wojnicz doesn’t notice anything interesting about the tombstones; it’s not until Thilo presses him to look more closely that Wojnicz realizes that a young man seems to die each November. Together they look at Thilo’s prized possession, a painting by the Flemish artist Herri met de Bles called Landscape With the Offering of Isaac. The canvas looks normal to Wojnicz until he moves in closer: “Once the viewer’s attention was well and truly put to sleep, a new sight loomed out of the picture, the old contours arranged themselves into something completely different that had not seemed to be there before.” Wojnicz is horrified by what emerges—something “alive,” a grotesque face or body. Thilo then tells Wojnicz that once a year in Görbersdorf, the land “takes its sacrifice and kills a man.” Wojnicz thinks that his friend might be delusional from fever, but the eerie sense of being “watched by the local landscape” persists. Everything visible might be mirrored by a shadowy world.

[Read: A novel in which nightmares are all too real]

Yet for all the creepiness of Görbersdorf, one of the most disturbing parts of The Empusium is Tokarczuk’s depiction of the everyday misogyny of the time. No matter the topic at hand, each debate among the men at the guesthouse seems to come back to the problem of women. Do they have souls? Are they merely minor men? What social purpose do they serve? “We cannot regard the act of a woman as entirely conscious,” one character opines. “Female psychology has proved that a woman is at once a subject and object, and so her choices can only be partly conscious.” Not long after the death of his wife, Willi Opitz concludes that “motherhood is the one and only thing that justifies the existence of this troublesome sex.” In a note at the end of the novel, Tokarczuk explains that these conversations are paraphrased from more than 30 male authors, ranging from Ovid to Saint Augustine, Henry Fielding to William Butler Yeats. Underneath their discussions about democracy, rationalism, and religion lies one consensus: Women are subordinate and subhuman. If the narrative of the 20th century is one of male greatness and genius, a pantheon of figures such as Nietzsche and Freud, Tokarczuk insists that this history obscures a world of shameful sexism.

Female inferiority is perhaps the only topic on which the gentlemen of the guesthouse can agree. In one scene, a character proffers that the “surest sign” of brilliant literature “is that women do not like it.” Puffing on a cigar, he contends that women writers “often yield to the attraction of all manner of oddities: ghosts, dreams and nightmares, but also coincidences and other chance circumstances, with which they try to conceal their lack of talent in sustaining a consistent plot.” It’s easy to picture Tokarczuk writing this line with a kind of satirical glee, perhaps because her own work has consistently incorporated supernatural elements, through characters such as the Jewish mystic Jacob Frank in The Books of Jacob and the devoted astrologer Janina Duszejko in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Her oeuvre is marked by a dedication to the strange and the unbelievable.

For Tokarczuk, telling odd and sometimes incredible stories seems to be a political choice, a way of challenging the official histories that get passed down. She wants her reader to recognize that the history of modern, rational thought that has been so prized since the Enlightenment—the kind of thinking memorialized in The Magic Mountain—is simply one side of the story. Tokarczuk’s work points to an alternative world where humans may not be the only actors and reason is not the end of knowledge, an alternative history that finds its roots in the kinds of stories that go unrecorded.

The Empusium is a masterful novel, with a breadth of possible readings. I won’t spoil the twists and turns of its deft story—“sustaining a consistent plot” is just one of Tokarczuk’s many gifts—but I will say that the novel defied my expectations, turning me into Wojnicz confronted with the de Bles landscape. It’s fitting, then, that The Empusium’s title comes from a creature from Greek mythology: Empusa, a shape-shifting female who feeds on young men. Just when you think you have this novel in your sight, it shimmers into something else entirely.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

[Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading]

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

[Read: The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood]

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven.

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

[Xochitl Gonzalez: The schools that are no longer teaching kids to read books]

Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.

The Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim the reading list for the current school year. (It had been growing in recent years, even while students struggled with the reading, as new books by nonwhite authors were added.) Like Delbanco, some see advantages to teaching fewer books. Even the best-prepared students have probably been skimming some of their Lit Hum assignments for years. Joseph Howley, the program’s chair, said he’d rather students miss out on some of the classics—Crime and Punishment is now off the list—but read the remaining texts in greater depth. And, crucially, the change will give professors more time to teach students how they expect them to read.

But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

Over and over, the professors I spoke with painted a grim picture of young people’s reading habits. (The historian Adrian Johns was one dissenter, but allowed, “My experience is a bit unusual because the University of Chicago is, like, the last bastion of people who do read things.”) For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.

I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.