[Infowarrior] - Americans close the book on recreational reading

[Richard Forno]

Americans close the book on recreational reading

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-11-18-reading-decline_N.htm

WASHINGTON ‹ Despite rising education levels, a decade of Harry Potter and
the near-ubiquity of big-chain bookstores, Americans of every age are
reading less and less for pleasure these days, according to an analysis
being released today by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The decline, the study warns, could have grim consequences as people tune
out books, tune in popular culture and become less socially and civically
engaged.

"We've got a public culture which is almost entirely commercial- and
novelty-driven," says NEA chairman Dana Gioia. "I think it's letting the
nation down."

The study gathers decades of data on Americans' reading habits and finds
that, at every age group, we're reading less.

Most of the data have appeared in private, government and university
surveys, but today's report is the first to combine them into a single
portrait. It suggests that the demands of school, work and family ‹ and the
ascendancy of other forms of entertainment ‹ have marginalized recreational
reading for millions of Americans.

Among the findings:

€Only 38% of adults in 2006 said they had spent time reading a book for
pleasure the previous day.

€65% of college freshmen in 2005 said they read little or nothing for
pleasure.

€30% of 13-year-olds in 2004 said they read for fun "almost every day," down
from 35% in 1984.

Gioia, a poet, calls the decline "probably the single most important social
issue in the United States today."

The findings, he says, should be a wake-up call to educators to change the
way they teach literature at every level. "There used to be the assumption
that if someone went to college, they would become a lifelong reader ‹ and
the numbers bore it out. What we're seeing right now is that we're no longer
producing readers. We're producing B.A.s and M.A.s and Ph.D.s."

Gioia also wants mainstream media to wake up to how they can promote good
books in unlikely ways. He notes that when a character in the 1994 film Four
Weddings and a Funeral recited a few lines of W.H. Auden's poem Funeral
Blues, the poet briefly became a best seller.

"I guarantee that if we could expand the coverage in the media, you'd
immediately see people responding," he says. "People are looking for things
to do that aren't dumb. I don't think that Americans are dumber than before,
but I do believe our public culture is."