Time to come clean-- you prpbably have to take a headache pill every time you come here for a meal too, no?
I only hope it's worth it.
Here's an interesting "glass half full" take on the recent NEA study on reading:
WONDER LAND
Love of Reading's
A Labor Lost
For Many Now
But who knew half the nation was still reading?
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
You may have read recently that reading is dying. Or at least the reading of what the National Endowment for the Arts calls "literature." Literature as defined by the Endowment includes novels, short stories, poetry and plays. Chiseling data from the statistical mountain of the 2002 Census, the Endowment discovered in its sample of 17,000 adults that the percentage of self-identified grown-ups in the U.S. who read "literature" fell to 46.7% from 56.9% in 1982.
On entering the first few pages of impending cultural darkness in the Endowment's 47-page data mine, titled "Reading at Risk," one encounters the following phrases:
"Literature reading is fading as a meaningful activity"; "an imminent cultural crisis"; "a cultural legacy is disappearing"; "the declining importance of literature to our populace"; "a culture at risk." Finally, at this rate, "literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in a half a century."
But there is good news. Though apparently getting there fast, we haven't yet arrived at the dystopia (bad-place) of anti-reading imagined in "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury in 1953. (Mr. Bradbury has recently denounced Michael Moore for expropriating his title without asking.)
In the America imagined in "Fahrenheit 451," people mindlessly watch TV on screens the size of walls (that big to avoid interacting with other people). They listen to music from Seashell Radio, which is embedded in their ears. People don't think for themselves. The part of Mr. Bradbury's book that hasn't come true yet is that firemen are deployed to burn all personal libraries of literature. Anyone discovered reading can be chased down by an amazing monster called the Mechanical Hound. In 1966, Francois Truffaut made "Fahrenheit 451" into a good movie that is often shown on Turner Classic Movies, which is where I normally kill the time that I should spend reading literature. (By the way, TCM is airing "Fahrenheit 451" this Sunday at 10 p.m.)
For anyone who actually reads "Reading at Risk," there are many neat factoids and data points to define the still-reading public.
A "light" reader reads one to five books a year of any sort, including books that fall outside the definition of literature, for instance, "My Life" by Bill Clinton (which at 1,005 pages would count as four books). "Frequent" readers consume 12 to 49 books, and "avid" readers (4% of the sample) more than 50 a year.
Contrary to all instinct, you can't blame this mess on TV. Literary readers average 2.7 hours of TV daily, compared with 3.1 hours for the numbskulls reading either "Diana" or nothing at all. The nation's heaviest readers, perhaps having fled mass culture like the refugees in Mr. Bradbury's novel, live in the Mountain States (from Montana-Wyoming through Nevada to New Mexico). Some 55% of women read literature, but, confirming the stereotype in beer commercials, only 38% of men do--and both groups are way down the past 20 years.
It's also worth noting that while the Endowment explicitly says mysteries are literature, its definition doesn't include biography or history. Thus, taking a month to read Ron Chernow's magnificent biography of Alexander Hamilton doesn't count. Surely it should.
It is of course hard not to share the Endowment's concern. Who can dispute that reading of the world's most wonderful writing is taught less and barely encouraged now? Anyone can create a long list of valid reasons for the decline, and most would fall under the general heading of Charles Sykes' (widely read) 1995 book, "Dumbing Down Our Kids." But while the Endowment sees the culture's reservoirs of literary life draining away, it is possible to look at what reading remains in our fractured times and to be impressed by it.
For example, if one were to ask most of my conservative friends to name the percentage of Americans who read fiction, poetry or plays, they'd likely have guessed 25% at most, not the actual 46.7%. And the portion of people who attended a sports event in 2002 (not counting their own kids' games) was only 35%.
Extrapolating its data to actual readers, the Endowment finds the number of people reading or listening to poetry in 2002 was 30 million. Thirty million! What are they reading? If only 20,000 of them read John Donne, Wallace Stevens or Yeats just for the pleasure of their company, the nation's mental health is more certain than we imagined. Seven million read plays. That seven million Americans would read a play for pleasure is astonishing.
Still, these nice numbers are lower than before (1982), and probably have been falling since the invention of the silent movie (actually, the captions in silent movies are often more literate than the spoken dialogue in many contemporary movies). Intriguingly, in almost all categories the study shows a modest decline from 1982 to 1992 but a sharp drop the past 10 years. Literature's killer could hardly be more obvious: It's the Internet and all the other space invaders from the electronics galaxy.
Web-surfing, a one-way ticket to attention-deficit disorder, is hardly compatible with reading "The Scarlet Letter" line by line. Apple Computer was headed for the cliff until it invented the iPod. Why read when you can spend the year downloading your 5,000 favorite songs? That said, the Web also has allowed the nation's used and rare-book sellers to assemble an efficient network that offers virtually any book imaginable, a boon to ardent readers. E-mail's ease has both sent rich people to prison and revived the lost art of correspondence between friends.
We live in a weird world these days, and no doubt literature, like much else that is good, has taken a hit. For instance, the Endowment made no distinction between literature of the past and now, much of it written by people with off-putting sensibilities. Writers themselves have driven off many readers, who, literally, have more good things than ever to do with their time.
Dana Gioia, the NEA's chairman and a poet, is surely right that serious reading nurtures contemplation, complex communication and insight. But if the brotherhood of readers here is now down to 96 million people, there's still time to defeat the Mechanical Hound.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
Copyright © 2000 Dow Jones Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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