At a recent family gathering, a close relative told me he couldn’t remember the last time he read a book.
“What about listening to audiobooks?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said nonchalantly. He wasn’t offering a confession tinged with embarrassment or shame, nor was he boasting. He was simply shrugging off books as if they were a food he didn’t like or a place he was content to never visit.
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.
Other studies report similar disquieting results, including a recent CBS News/YouGov survey, which indicates that Americans have traded reading books for social media and gaming, and one by the University of Florida and University College London, which shows only 16% of Americans are reading daily for pleasure, a 40% decline over 20 years.
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.”
When a researcher is on the verge of giving up a study because its data is becoming statistically insignificant, you have a crisis. And to be clear, the crisis is what the diminishing numbers of readers means. That is: most Americans lack the life-enriching benefits reading literature provides.
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.
Reading culture abounds with bona fide social opportunities, too: book clubs and discussion groups, silent reading parties, city-wide book festivals, author talks at literary arts centers, and indie bookstores hosting book-signing events.
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.
Learning each other’s stories—what we’ve faced, our aspirations and accomplishments—helps us be more compassionate, which, in turn, fosters our sense of connectedness and enables us to solve problems. Being alive, after all, is simultaneously a personal and collective act. Our individual survival depends on our ability to work and thrive together.
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.
The challenges facing literature and reading are daunting. But there is some good news: namely that there are many champions of curiosity and craft advocating for the necessity of books in our lives, from writers and publishers to English teachers, librarians, and literary arts workers at nonprofits that build audiences for books, ensuring that a wide spectrum of voices and ideas have a place in print, and promoting the importance of reading. And, of course, Oprah, Dolly Parton, Dua Lipa, and other well-known book lovers and influencers are using their platforms to activate new readers from among their millions of followers.
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.
We know one way to start: by putting phones down and making some time to read every day instead. Other simple positive actions include attending events with writers at local bookstores, getting involved with and supporting the local library or literary arts center, and sharing the joy of reading with the people in our lives.
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.
It can help to set a goal like reading or listening to one novel or work of nonfiction per season. For ideas of what to read, the best books list at Bookshop.org or online reviews give a sense of books in the zeitgeist. Indie booksellers and librarians can also give helpful referrals.
Together, we can keep literature a cherished living tradition. Lest we forget: we write the future.
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