I read David Denby’s stuffy New Yorker lament Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore? on my phone yesterday, glued to a screen just like the typical American teenagers he throws shade at in his opening paragraph. “Looking at them, you can envy their happiness,” Denby writes. “You can also find yourself wishing them immersed in a different kind of happiness – in a superb book or a series of books, in the reading obsession itself! You should probably keep on wishing.”

What follows is a wordy, predictable groaner: the kids these days, Denby writes, are unable to connect to each other outside digital technologies and uninterested in reading the classics. Oh, teens do read, he acknowledges, with a half-hearted nod to science fiction and fantasy favorites, graphic novels, and young adult literature. But they don’t read in a serious way – they ignore Shakespeare, Twain and Salinger. Denby lists a half-dozen other omissions too, only two of them women, it might be observed, and none of them people of color.

As someone who spends much of her time thinking about this problem, in Denby’s piece I smell a lack of research and engagement with his purported subject. Sure, according to researchers, teens are reading less than they have in the past – but adults are, too. And Denby’s myopic view of “reading seriously” is a frustrating one: it should be obvious that holding a phone rather than a battered copy of Vonnegut doesn’t mean you lack the “reading obsession”. Obsessions are more powerful things than he thinks: a few hours staring at a phone does not necessarily spell out the death of imaginative writing.

Take, for example, the behemoth of a reading platform that is Wattpad. Built a decade ago as a mobile reading app – that’s right, fetch the smelling salts, an explicitly phone-based lure for reading – Wattpad eventually expanded to allow its users to write and share stories. It now boasts a sprawling, complicated network of millions of texts, connected by readers and commenters, fiction made social. Of its 40 million monthly users, the majority are teenagers, and all but a small fraction of them read and write on mobile alone.

In a 2014 piece for the Observer, 17-year-old Hazal Kirci chronicled her discovery of and transformation via the platform: becoming an avid reader there made her an avid writer, which led her towards traditionally published works (Denby-approved classics) while her sisters finally embraced reading. “Right now, I’m on The Great Gatsby,” she reported.

Across other social networks, traditionally published works are celebrated just as fervently as the amateur hits on Wattpad. Tumblr’s bookish corners are vibrant and joyful celebrations of reading. Tumblr book fandom often resembles the rest of Tumblr fandom: books are dissected and analyzed as often as they’re fan-cast with animated gifs. Of last year’s top 10 most reblogged books across the network, which has tens of millions of active users, Pride and Prejudice came in at number nine. In fact, anyone who follows book Tumblr knows it’s completely unsurprising to see a 200-year-old book alongside modern fantasy favorites.

But nowhere is it more apparent that plenty of teens love reading than at the various conventions I’ve attended over the past few years, from BookCon in New York to the Young Adult Lit Con in London to GeekyCon in Orlando, Florida. Like their analogous online spaces, these gatherings are built on a devotion to reading and they’re places where I saw books viewed with reverence and authors treated like rock stars. The crowds skewed so young at these gatherings that they left me, a person still within the millennial age bracket, feeling ancient. But seeing a vast sea of young, mostly female, readers bubbling with excitement over a writer was extraordinary to watch.

The truth is that despite the ample evidence that teens read – passionately – none of this seems quite what Denby is after. He bemoans the fact that kids are unenthusiastic about the texts they’re assigned for class, but his long list of writers reflects stale, even stifling culture we’ve built around reading over the decades, in and outside the classroom.

More of the western canon isn’t the solution: the best conversations about books fold in a vast variety of perspectives. Teens read broadly and read deeply, and they read without bias. They clamor for diverse authors, they cross genres without batting an eye, and they’re as likely to read a story on Wattpad as they are one of the Brontë sisters. This open-mindedness marked my teenage years as well: I read great swaths of Denby-approved literature alongside millions of words of Harry Potter fanfiction. (I’m still doing this more than a decade later, and, full disclosure, I freelance for the New Yorker too.) Both camps sharpened my critical tools, and both gave me all the pleasure that reading affords.

Perhaps they don’t need me or any other adult to say it, but the kids are all right. Their language might be different, their ways of consuming words might be different, but don’t doubt for a second that they aren’t reading as they stare at those screens – and that they aren’t loving every word of it.