“What about listening to audiobooks?” I asked.
My relative is not alone. A majority of Americans, more than 62%, reported that they hadn’t read one novel or short story in the past year, according to the National Endowment for the Arts’ most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. This was the largest number of Americans to eschew literature in three decades of the comprehensive study.
The plummet in reading has been so consistent that Sunil Iyengar, who directs research and analysis at the NEA, said: “Without concerted actions [...] to stem the declines in reading, there is little point in running historical surveys on the topic.”
On its face, reading is a form of stress-reducing enjoyment that is exceptionally convenient and, thanks to public libraries, even free. A good story can transport us to another place, time, culture, or world from the cozy comfort of our couch, beach chair, or bed. Between a book’s covers is a unique kind of participatory adventure that is excellent exercise for our brains. When we read or listen to literature, we animate a writer’s language and bring their characters to life in our imaginations. We act the parts. We follow and connect plot lines. We build back our alarmingly atrophying ability to sustain attention. We strengthen our memory. We bolster our mental health as we encounter characters and stories that reflect and companion us, offering, amid what has been called an epidemic of loneliness, the reassurance that we are not alone.
Perhaps most importantly, especially now, reading or listening to literature is also good for our hearts. It’s the emotional complement to the facts we gather from journalism. We need both kinds of information to understand the context in which we live and to fully participate in our communities and civic life.
The big question then is this: if books are bridge-builders and reading literature is such a force of good for our health and communities, and by extension the country, why have so many of us turned our backs on books? Most contributing causes are well-known at this point: the hours we give over to scrolling on social media; the little time we have for personal enjoyment due to economic pressures; changes to school-based curricula that have swapped full-length books for shorter, excerpted texts; and campaigns to cast reading in a negative light and limit access to books.
But each of us also has a critical role to undertake in securing literature’s place in culture. Stemming the precipitous decline in reading is not a next-generation issue. It’s ours today. And the stakes are as high as preventing one of our most effective technologies for holding and engaging with human intelligence from being shelved as a topic of the past.
It can help to encourage small steps. Current non-readers might consider one of the free or low-cost services that share a poem every day or one short story a month, or newsletters that share excerpts from new translated works.
Together, we can keep literature a cherished living tradition. Lest we forget: we write the future.
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