PESHAWAR: The participants of a weekly literary gathering showed concerns over rapidly fading culture of reading books among youth, citing different factors behind the negative trend.

They said that even teachers had lost the habit of reading and never turned to library for research purposes. The weekly event was arranged by Halqa-i- Arbab Zauq in its office in University Town where poets and writers turned up. They discussed various aspects of a short story authored by a young writer titled ‘Fateha’.

The weekly event was chaired by Prof Syed Zubair Shah, a noted Urdu fiction writer, who opened the debate by saying that it was true that reading habit declined among youth owing to overuse of social media but KP youth still read printed books though libraries were not that frequented by visitors.

The short story written by a young fictionist Bilal Yousafzai revolved around the fast fading culture of reading books among youth and the characters in the plot originally walked up to friend’s house to condole the demise of his father ended up in his old home library staked with books gathering dust where every bookshelf looking for a reader.

Seeing the deplorable condition of the library, with all the books lying on the shelf with wide eyes (open pages) looking up for readers, they suddenly began reciting Fateha for the death of a golden book culture around especially among youth.

Prof Kabir said that condition of reading books was not that bad among KP youth as most publishers and printers during their book fairs events in and around the city had noted encouraging trend as most university graduates and even general book lovers bought books on variety of titles.

Nazeer Sagar said that young writer’s concern about the issue was not totally misplaced, adding that print edition was going out of fashion because literati and scholars brought out their publications in portable document form (pdf). Bookstores were being shut down every day while online bibliophiles were increasing with the passage of time, he said.

Nadeem Khan said that he had written a research article on the issue some time ago arguing that most booksellers didn’t know the reading stuff, the local readers wanted to buy, also poor law and order in KP forced local booksellers to close down their book stores in the city.

Abid Jadoon, Mohammad Tariq Khattak and Rafiq Khan also spoke at the event.

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2025