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I must say I agree with Taki’s recent assertion on these pages that nobody reads anymore: It certainly explains my own books’ dismal sales figures. Further confirmation of this lamentable observation arrived in the shape of a March survey finding 40 percent of people in the U.K. had not read a single book during 2024. And the other 60 percent had just read Harry Potter, which is worse.

According to the poll, a mere 13 percent of citizens finished more than twenty books in the previous calendar year, this supposedly rendering them as “hard-core readers,” even though this is hardly a rate of toughened ink-consumption to compare to that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Why might this decline in mass readership have occurred? Books just aren’t “accessible” enough to today’s potential readers, we are constantly told: The initialism “TL;DR,” or “Too Long; Didn’t Read,” is often applied by millennials even to particularly extended pieces of graffiti etched upon toilet cubicle walls, so much have contemporary attention spans atrophied in our insidious era of smartphones and social media. But might remedial attempts to make novels, poetry, and nonfiction more accessible actually be part of the whole problem here?

The Unread and the Black
One key barrier to books being accessible often identified by do-gooders relates to ethnicity: Reputedly, many minority groups in the Anglosphere just don’t find our literature all that appealing to them, possibly because it rarely happens to be printed in Swahili, Spanish, or Urdu. White philanthropists tried setting the presses rolling to pump out whole shelves’ worth of racially rejigged rewrites for the popular market, like Diary of a Wimpy Yid, Fifty Shades of Melanin, or Brown Father Investigates, but some casual readers took retitling A Man Called Noon as A Man Called Coon in the wrong way.

As such, the solution preferred by the U.K. government to get non-whites reading was to fund an organization bearing the ironic name of the Good Literary Agency (GLA), which demonstrably wasn’t. The GLA launched in 2017 and parasitically hoovered up £1.3m of taxpayer largesse from unwilling cash pigs like me over the next seven years, before suddenly announcing it was being forced to close down forever at the end of March.

State funding came at second hand, via the quango Arts Council England, which called the GLA a “pioneering force for change,” as it vowed to “blow open the pipeline” for ethnic minority writers by “platforming under-represented voices” in a world that in actual fact was already full to bursting with vastly overpromoted books by talentless non-whites anyway (I discussed one particularly egregious example previously here).

The whole point of the GLA was to open doors for minorities by denying literary representation to majoritarian authors (i.e., me) and trying to sell on the culturally valuable works of Eritreans, Pakistanis, queers, crips, loonies, hobos, “abuse and trauma survivors,” etc., to publishers for profit instead. Then, Arts Council mandarins presumed, by seeing themselves “represented” in the names of authors just like them on front-cover jackets, minorities would be encouraged to put away their phones, knives, and needles for a brief moment and huddle down in their tents and caravans with a ripping good yarn about life amongst legless transgender crack addicts in North Yemen or something instead.

Quite apart from this meaning the Arts Council apparently thought non-white readers were all so bigoted as to choose what books they consumed primarily based upon their authors’ race (that’s just Oprah Winfrey), I also have to question how disabled, homeless, or raped people would even know published authors were also able to be classified as being such, just by immediately looking at their names. Maybe another minority group being targeted by the GLA was clairvoyants?

If the Good Literary Agency truly wanted to begin “platforming under-represented voices” in the publishing industry today, they should have tried signing up some people who can actually write.

Charge of the Shite Brigade
GLA cofounder Nikesh Shukla was previously known for editing a 2016 essay collection called The Good Immigrant, whose subject matter I can only presume did not include himself.

In 2021, the demonstrably shunned-by-high-white-society Shukla turned down the honor of a prestigious MBE award from HM the Queen on account of the fact the letters “MBE” stand for “Member of the British Empire.” However, “I cannot think of anything I want less than to be a member of that Empire,” he said, despite continuing to live and work in the hated Imperial capital rather than in India where his ancestors came from for some strange reason. Instead, Shukla got up on his Empire-funded soapbox to piously declaim: “Time will eventually consume those people who are proud of Britain’s bloody, colonial history. I am happy to watch them crumble and fall.”

I was very happy to watch your Shitty Litty Agency crumble and fall this year, too, Shukla—especially given the fact it meant more of my tax money might now go toward funding useful things like nurses, teachers, schools, and hospitals. Shukla says he is a big fan of a poetry collection called Fuck/Empire. I’m a big fan of one called Fuck/Off, Then.

It is extremely telling that the Good Literary Agency was pulped once and for all after, so it says, “feeling the effects of [publishers’] investment in authors becoming more and more stretched and squeezed each year we’ve been operating,” as this would tend to indicate its authors, once signed up and spewed out onto bookstore shelves, were not actually terribly popular or profitable in the main—at least, not enough to cover the agency’s running costs. In a valedictory statement, the GLA did claim to have generated millions of pounds for its 200 or so lucky Eskimo-Arab nonbinary authxrs and authxresses, but not all publishers are so lucky as their wonderfully diverse authors are.

Previous investigations have discovered that an industry-wide wave of young, BLM-worshipping staff members at publishing companies signing up random minoritarian authors on absurdly overgenerous contracts in the wake of the 2020 death of George Floyd cost the industry massive sums of shekels due to pathetically poor sales. One particularly bad instance was a “queer, feminist Western” called Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens. Despite Cravens getting a $500,000 advance, it sold only around 3,500 copies, nowhere near enough to make the firm its silver dollars back; googling its title, the No. 1 U.K. result was for Lucky Red Chinese Takeaway in Leeds! Maybe sales would have been better if they’d called it Gay Out West? Ride ’em, cowboy—no, wait, not like that…

Goodnight Uncle Tom
This whole idea inevitably extends to hooking readers on woke identitarian trash young, hence another U.K. agency specializing in kids’ books, Ash Literary, advertised online to receive a desired manuscript of the next Goodnight Mister Tom (a popular U.K. children’s novel about a child evacuee escaping from Blitz-era London to the safety of the English countryside) like so: “We are not interested in stories about white able-bodied WW2 evacuees but would welcome that [same] story from a disabled, LGBTQ+ or BIPOC [Black or Indigenous Person of Color] perspective.”

So if, for example, you pen a semi-pornographic children’s novel about a 12-year-old West Indian lad who gets his arms and legs blown off by a Nazi V-2 and then is shipped off to rural Wiltshire, where the old man who “kindly” takes him under his roof turns out to be a 55-year-old Afghan pederast who takes advantage of the black boy’s immobility to molest him in his spine-supporting bed harness each night, then that’s the kind of thing that would get you taken on—NOT racist heteronormative filth about healthy, able-bodied white kids enjoying jolly japes in the Lake District with catapults and sailing boats far away from Hitler’s bombs!

Or would it? Not necessarily, because, Ash Literary adds, every bit as confused by the difference between autobiographies and fiction as Misha Defonseca once was, “If your book is about an identity that is not yours, we will not be a good fit. This includes books based on the experiences of family members or friends.”

So, if you are not currently a gay, black, 12-year-old limbless WWII refugee yourself, don’t even think about sending in such a piece of blatant cultural appropriation. How was Ash Literary expecting to receive submissions for this specified 1940–45 scenario, precisely? Via time machine? (Actually, the firm only accepts manuscripts through an online portal named “QueryManager,” surely a misprint for “QueeryManager.”)

AI-sop’s Fable
It gets worse. In apparent violation of antidiscrimination law, numerous U.S. literary journals are now charging white people to submit stories or poems, whilst letting non-whites do so for free. Another way of putting this would be “forcing whites to pay for non-whites to get something for nothing” (see also the welfare benefits system).

Unsurprisingly within such an environment, there are now cases on record of disappointed white people posing as Chinese when submitting their work, thinking this the only plausible way to get it accepted; there’s a piece about this in The New Yorker by a journalist called Hua Hsu, whose real name, I suspect, is actually Brian O’Leary. Ironically, another exposé in Compact magazine recently revealed that The New Yorker itself has not printed a single piece of fiction by any white male born in America after 1984; no wonder Mr. O’Leary felt the need to go to such lengths to get himself published there.

Yet the whole trend is every bit as pointless as Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the hill in Albert Camus. You don’t need to artificially discriminate against whites to get good books by other ethnicities in print. There are plenty of genuinely all-time classic old texts out there written by Jews, like American Pastoral by Philip Roth, by Hispanics, like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, by Muslims, like the Koran by Allah, and by blacks, like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Candace Owens.

Most sane and literate people choose their reading matter based upon quality of plot and prose, not the skin color, number of limbs, or obscure and niche sexual preferences of the author. And those who do are idiots: Even artificial intelligence says so.

In January, Fable, some pointless online thing where people log the books they have read all year and then publicly share their list with others to show off about how great and clever they are, used AI to issue users with an end-of-year “wrap” of all the titles they had showily consumed during 2024, intending to lend them helpful suggestions for further reading material. Amusingly, though, it went rogue, like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but much more sensible, and told several more racially obsessed Fable readers to put down their Ibram X. Kendi and Toni Morrison for five minutes and “Don’t forget to surface for the occasional white author, okay?”

Taki’s recent lament was that, by putting proper scribblers out of work and so acting to “kill good writing,” AI might herald the end of the entire publishing industry. It sounds to me like it may be its savior.