The Truth About Reading: SLJ Celebrates 50 Years

When the National Endowment for the Arts released its "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America" this past summer, marshaling statistics gathered over a 10-year period, the report confirmed what many educators, librarians, and booksellers have long suspected: that our energies are increasingly focused elsewhere, and that the shift away from the printed page is happening at an alarming rate. Since 1982, the percentage of the U.S. population reading literature has dropped more than 10 percent, from 56.9 to 46.7 percent; literary reading by educational category has dropped sharply at every level; and, most distressingly, between 1982 and 2002 literary reading among young adults has fallen 17 percent in the 18–24 age group.

As always, the numbers can be questioned, footnoted, finagled, and otherwise belabored, but what's the point? We all know the basic truth. Habits are changing; books and what we might call "book culture" matter less than they once did to more people. The three big questions—easy to put, hard to answer—are: What has happened, what does this portend, and what, if anything, can be done?

What has happened? Here there is an obvious, but I think simplistic, answer, and a somewhat broader, more inclusive explanation. The first—and this was what we heard on most fronts as soon as the report was released—can be stated in one word: computers. A combination of new technology, new habits, and untold hours once available for books given over to screen activities, such as surfing, gaming, e-mail, and instant messaging, have made reading less prevalent. And the precipitous drop in the 18–24 age group would seem to confirm the surmise.

But this misses the mark in several ways. For one thing, it suggests that the reading loss is mainly a reflection of people using their time for different things. For another, it isolates the computer as the single culprit technology and may even encourage parents and educators to think that if computer usage could be controlled and time reallocated, the problem could be solved.

I'm skeptical. In my view, available time is only part of the picture. The more decisive issue is the lack of interest and willingness on the part of would-be readers, and this is directly connected to a growing sense of the difficulty (the old-fashionedness) of the act. I mean, a great many people are finding it much less natural—and harder—to engage books as they are meant to be engaged, with full concentration, sequentially, slowly. The feeling of the act of reading has changed because the context of our lives has changed—because our basic cognitive reflexes are being altered at a boggling rate.

Our computer reliance is certainly a big part of this, making its users over, and not even all that gradually, into its own image. We all know how it works on us. Sitting at the screen we feel ourselves speeded up, fragmented, pulled toward the visual; we enact rapid shifts, give commands, expect instant responses. Overwhelmed by the prospect of sheer abundance—data, information, links—we train ourselves to move sketchily, browsing, bookmarking, highlighting for later perusal. Our process is different in almost every way from what we do when we read books.

But the computer is only the most salient development among many. It is only when the others are taken into account that the true nature of the situation becomes clear—which is that we now inhabit a complexly interconnected digital environment. And it is this, more than the immediate and specific influences of a screen technology, that is pushing aside our old ways of doing—and understanding. I would point to, among other things, cellphones and pagers, which through ubiquity and use have completely changed our communications environment, as well as DVDs, game stations, iPods, digital cameras…. And while these don't all—yet—necessarily radiate from, or toward, the computer, I would argue that they are all kindred, felt to be part of the same contemporary stream; taken together they are our new tools, our Zeitgeist. And they merge together as influence ever more persuasively as they are pushed at us by our entertainment and advertising media, which have as their mandate the proselytizing of the latest, the most current.

What I'm saying is that all of us are in the pulsing midst of a high-speed, multilayered, response-active, enticing, distracting, essential-feeling, inescapable cultural now. Stimulated, enfolded, embraced, coaxed to response, we find our expectations changing. We engage the world largely through our use of these tools, and in the process we come to see and experience the world differently. To feel the nature—the power—of this transformation, we have only to sit down in a quiet place with a challenging book. How we then do, or don't, engage the old familiar reading act will give us a sense of just how deeply we are conditioned by the new influence. Do we twitch, squirm, jump unaccountably from the sense track in front of us? Do we have a harder time holding the words and making a coherent "picture"?

Older people, those schooled by the book, may have less difficulty switching over; the path of their reflexes is more deeply incised and established conditionings still hold. But pull someone young (I have in my home laboratory a 10- and a 15-year-old specimen) from their usual habitat, disengage them from their headphones and the sensurround of computer, TV, and text messaging, and the gulf between worlds—the then of straight reading and the now of…now—becomes readily apparent. The focus that reading requires is, without a doubt, stranger, harder, and likely less rewarding than it was for their counterparts in 1982.

What does this portend? As with all emergent situations—situations without obvious precedent—we can only guess at effects and outcomes. But the guesses need not be wild ones. If we can determine what it is that reading offers, then we can theorize about what the decline might entail.

But I should pause to particularize. I am talking here not about reading for information, for facts, but rather the kind of literary reading that NEA's survey measured: the reading of artistic works—novels, poetry, plays, and reflective prose that has been written with a care for the language. Immersion in this kind of writing fosters, above all else, linguistic awareness and imagination, and we should linger for a moment on each.

When I contemplate the substantial decline of literary reading, I can't help but envision a culture increasingly impoverished in its means of expression, lacking not just the verbal nuances, the appreciation of meanings and shades of meanings, but also the syntactical lexicon, the internalized sense of what structures best serve different needs in conversation as well as writing. Our thinking, our evaluation of the world—psychologically, morally—depends enormously on our ability to grasp and present concepts, and for this a developed sense of language is essential. A culture that has grown linguistically slack is susceptible to every sort of rhetoric and demagoguery.

Frightening as this is to think about, the prospect of a large-scale loss of creative imagination, especially in the young, is more frightening still. For imagination is the seedbed of inwardness, of subjective depth. Reading quickens and enriches this faculty, and interaction with seductively packaged, prescripted, pre-imagined entertainments preempts it. It's that simple. Our media and software barons now inject their glittering goods directly into the space that was once the preserve of the developing self. They conquer through ease, with the speed of presentation and variety of effects easily supplanting the more taxing business of creating worlds for oneself from the puzzle of written signs.

What, if anything, can be done? Here, in spite of the humanist tenor of everything I've said, I want to set myself apart from the reading boosters and the betterment gurus. Indeed, when I read the first responses to the NEA report in the press and elsewhere, my heart sank. For what I heard on every front were the reading-as-vitamin arguments. Books broaden horizons; books put us in touch with the great traditions…. Of course they do. No question. But what I found myself hankering for, more than anything, was some hint of the other part of the story, some assertion that reading was also dangerous, risky to complacencies, subversive, transgressive; that its main power was the power to unsettle. And, that reading was the gateway to deeper subjectivity, our last preserve of freedom, to bright imaginings of independence.

I don't believe that literary reading should be argued for. Like all proven pleasures—good conversation, food and drink, sex—it's its own best argument. The only thing we can do is to create occasions of exposure—meaningful, charged immersions. I agreed with those who held that J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels were the best news in a long time, my gut sense being that when a child gets the high of turning pages as fast as he can to follow a good story—a story that he is screening vividly in his mind as he reads—a great good thing has happened. He will want to repeat the experience. How could he not? And this is where it all begins.

But two things were disconcerting about this craze. One was that there was so little reinforcement of those short-lived raptures, that the Potter books were somehow seen as an isolated phenomenon, and that so many readers professed themselves willing to just wait until the next installment before resuming their reading. The books were seen as an exception, a headline development in the entertainment market. For this—and here was the second thing—I blame the profit-besotted entertainment industry, which moved into the breach overnight with product—movies, games, tie-ins…. The result was that Harry Potter came to be seen as sui generis, rather than the latest instance of thrilling literary transport.

What the Potter phenomenon did show was the latent power of a good story—how words on the page can release the force of imagination. Moreover, that imagination has not yet been entirely co-opted by electronic media. This hardly answers the question of what can be done, I realize, but it tells us that we should not assume that nothing will avail. So long as we trust that books do not need to be argued for so much as simply read.