It is the UK’s National Year of Reading. Specifically, this government-led scheme is about “reading for pleasure” and “the joy of reading”. This is not a matter of whimsy. Research has linked reading for pleasure in childhood to a host of positive educational and socioeconomic outcomes. But now – 14 years after the Department for Education, in a more innocent time, commissioned a chunky report on the matter – reading books for pleasure is an activity in crisis. The culprit usually blamed for this falling-off is the smartphone and its many short-term distractions; the mere presence of a smartphone in the room, recent research suggests, has an impact on our ability to concentrate. People are losing the mental means of getting lost in literature, it seems.

There are lots of things that seem to be slightly off-kilter here. If reading really was such an immense pleasure, wouldn’t people be doing it anyway? Isn’t there something of a contradiction between the idea of reading “for pleasure” and the notion that engaging in this activity brings a ton of extrinsic benefits (all that extra “attainment”)? There’s something else, too: surely it’s not only the reading itself that’s important, but what you choose to read, and what you do with the experience of having read it. The current moment’s anxiety around smartphones seems to have ironed out all the doubts and provisos that earlier ages – sometimes sensibly – placed around reading. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the work of Byron – with all its “hopeless agony” – is not advised as sensible reading matter for a melancholy man, and the reading of novels has to be defended in her novel Northanger Abbey; Homer is excluded from Plato’s Republic in part because the poems include morally questionable scenes of gods behaving badly. I’m the last person to want to ban Homer. But self-evidently, there are some books that may harm you, even if you take pleasure in reading them – just as spending all day online may harm you.

“Reading” is, after all, not a virtue in itself. Reading is simply an action that makes use of an evolving set of technologies – fundamentally, the alphabet, or whichever writing system it is that your culture happens to have acquired, but also the codex, paper, the printing press, the digital screen. Writing stuff down and having people capable of reading it is incredibly useful for disseminating information. And when a text is set down – visible, visual, rereadable, comparable with other texts – it opens up a wealth of remarkable intellectual, artistic, social and political opportunities. And yet I can imagine long-ago sticklers for tradition, around the time some bright spark was using new tech to consign the Homeric epics to papyrus, bemoaning the fact that the alphabet was destroying a creative culture of orality, memory and improvisation.

OK, I like to read. And it may even be true that thanks to the relentless presence of the National Year of Reading on the BBC, I have made an effort in 2026 to push aside the phone and switch off the TV in favour of reading. And yes, “for pleasure”, I guess, if that means outside of educational or workplace requirements. I am fortunate that this is part of a lifelong habit. I know that I cannot overstate my luck in having grown up in a family of readers, close to an excellent local library (Newcastle-under-Lyme library, smaller now, but still wonderful, as I discovered on a recent visit). But the current unimpeachable status of “reading” reminds me of the uncritical awe now commonly sprinkled around the idea of “storytelling”. In a 2014 essay titled This Narrated Life, author Maria Tumarkin wrote: “I am not against stories. I am, in fact, very much for stories – a big fan, that’s what I am – but these days when I hear someone talk about the universal power of storytelling I do feel like reaching for my gun.” Her point was that the wrapping of experience into neatly packaged “stories” often serves violently to flatten the jagged and resisting matter of human life; that not all thinking can be done through “storytelling”; and that “storytelling” is an inadequate, feeble description of what artists do, and of “what gets passed on between humans, in the act of communication”.

There’s something similar going on with the way that reading and other cultural activities seen as under threat are positioned as “joyful”. A headline to a recent piece by James Murphy, chief executive of the Royal Philharmonic Society, extolled the “joy” of classical music. The article discussed the way it “uplifts or consoles”. There is nothing untrue about this. Classical music can be joyful, and I have been uplifted and consoled by listening to, or playing, music. And yet, to me, it is a very partial description of the emotional consequences of engaging in that odd catch-all category of art-making that stretches from Guillaume de Machaut and Gustav Mahler to Cassandra Miller. In an amateur orchestra recently, I was lucky enough to play violin in Brahms’s Symphony No 3. Did it bring me joy? It’s a piece weighted by melancholy and nostalgia, cut through with moments of light. It brought me a sore neck (though that’s another story) and several days of being haunted incessantly by intense phrases from inside its shade-filled, wintry depths. Music may bring joy and often does. It may also bring dissociation, confusion, anger or waves of painful memory. Some of the most foundational relationships with art I have had have had nothing to do with “enjoyment”. I remember watching Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes on TV as a child. It is a perverse and strange, visually remarkable tale of the compulsive relationships artists can have with each other and with their art. I didn’t “enjoy” it. It was far too weird and compelling for that.

The same is true of reading. Classicist Mary Beard, this year’s chair of Booker prize judges, recently pointed out on X that nonfiction does not have much of a look-in, seemingly, in the way the National Year of Reading is being discussed. Absorbing a serious work of historical or scientific thought does not, perhaps, fit the obvious profile of “enjoyment”. The last book I read “for pleasure” was in fact a novel, The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. I can hardly recommend it too highly. I was gripped by it and obsessed with it for the two days that it took hold of me. But to say I “enjoyed” it would be absurd. Every 10 minutes or so, I would put it down and declare that I could not bear it any more, and then compulsively pick it up again. (It was written quickly in 1938 by a young Jewish author, and is set in post-Kristallnacht Berlin.) In being plunged into the world that that author described with such electric vigour, pleasure was beside the point. We can ask and expect more of reading than mere enjoyment.

• Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer