What Johnny Won't Read

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
July 11, 2004
STRANGER THAN FICTION 
What Johnny Won't Read
By CHARLES McGRATH
 
ON Thursday, the National Endowment for the Arts
released what it called a "bleak assessment" of the
state of reading in America. According to the
endowment's survey, compiled from 2002 Census Bureau
data, reading in general has gone down over the last
20 years, and reading of literature in particular. For
the first time in our history, less than half the
adult population reads fiction, poetry or plays.

Moreover, the pace of decline is accelerating,
especially among 18- to 24-year-olds. Twenty years
ago, this group was the most likely to pick up a book,
and now they're the least - with the exception of
those 65 and older, some of whom presumably find
reading unrewarding for ophthalmological reasons
rather than cultural ones. 

None of this is very good news, especially the part
about younger readers - or nonreaders. But none of it
seems terribly surprising, either. Instead of combing
through the census, the N.E.A. researchers could have
reached many of the same conclusions simply by talking
to a couple of observant booksellers. They would have
learned, for example, that book sales have been flat
for the last several years, or at least haven't kept
pace with the growth in the population. They would
have learned that women buy more books than men. And
they would have learned - or been able to guess - that
the more money you have, the more likely you are to
spend some of it on books. Reading, it turns out, is
like travel and wine-drinking: it correlates closely
with income and education.

>From talking to people in bookstores, the researchers
would also have learned that nonfiction claims a hefty
and attention-getting share of the market, and that
might have saved them from a perplexing methodological
error. The "Reading at Risk" survey defines literature
as "any type of fiction, poetry and plays'' that
''respondents felt should be included and not just
what literary critics might consider literature." 

Mysteries fit the bill, for example, and so do
romances, fantasies, science fiction, thrillers,
westerns and presumably pornography. 

It's not clear whether this inclusiveness stems from
political correctness - from a wish not to
"privilege," as they say in the seminar room, one
genre over another - or merely from a reluctance to
venture into the treacherous business of making value
judgments. But the result is a definition of
literature that appears both extremely elastic and, by
eliminating nonfiction entirely, confoundingly narrow.


By those standards, "Horny Peeping Librarian"
(Greenleaf Classics, 1984) would qualify as literary
reading, but Brian Greene's "Fabric of the Cosmos" and
Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, two
very well-written recent books, would not. Neither -
if you happen to think those particular works are too
popular and lightweight - would Plato's "Republic,"
say, or Gibbons's "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire." 

The notion that imaginative writing is somehow
superior to factual writing is one that used to
flourish in certain English departments, especially
those in thrall to the so-called New Criticism, but
these days it seems a dubious distinction. Good,
artful writing, writing with voice and style, turns up
in lots of places: in memoirs, in travel books, in
books about history and science, and sometimes even in
books about politics and policy. 

For the moment, anyway, this last category is
unusually well represented on best-seller lists. Books
like Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack" and Richard A.
Clarke's "Against All Enemies" are shaping the
national debate and the way Americans think about our
presence in Iraq. They may not be literary, exactly,
but they're timely and important, and you'd think the
national endowment would give us a point or two for
sitting down and spending some time with them. 

The endowment's larger point - that book reading in
general is down, though not as much as what it
considers purely literary reading - seems inarguable.
But it doesn't necessarily follow that reading itself
is in quite the dire shape that the survey suggests.
After all, it doesn't consider magazines, it doesn't
consider newspapers and it doesn't consider the
Internet, except to imply that it steals time people
used to spend with books. But when people surf the Web
what they are doing, for the most part, is reading. To
judge from the number of hits on sites like Google,
they are gobbling up written information in
ever-growing numbers. 

The survey operates on the unspoken premise that books
are our culture's premier system of information
storage, and the preferred medium for imaginative
storytelling. No one would want to challenge that, but
a nagging, heretical question nevertheless suggests
itself. If people suddenly stopped going to the
movies, for example, would we conclude that there must
be something wrong with the moviegoing public or might
we wonder whether movies themselves had declined? 

Would people read more books, in other words, if there
were more good books, or, rather, if all the good
books weren't quite so hard to find among the many bad
ones?

Not that books are likely to improve any time soon.
The really scary news in "Reading at Risk" is tucked
away on page 22. While the number of people reading
literature has gone down, the number of people trying
to write it has actually gone up. We seem to be slowly
turning into a nation of "creative writers," more
interested in what we have to say ourselves than in
reading or thinking about what anyone else has to say.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/weekinreview/11mcgr.html


		
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