A realistic look at reading in the 21st century

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The act of reading has been in the news lately. In November, this quaint pastime was addressed in an extensive report from the National Endowment for the Arts titled "To Read or Not to Read." Mostly, it's "Not to Read." In 100 pages dense with statistics and graphs, the report finds that nearly every kind of reading -- including on the Internet -- at nearly every level -- even college graduates -- is in decline.This is bad news for our country, according to the NEA. Readers are more likely to vote and less likely to go to prison. They make more money and, therefore, contribute more to the tax base. They're even healthier because they're more likely to engage in sports and exercise.But we are no longer a nation of readers, the report concludes, in a tone that incorporates considerable gloom and foreboding.On the other hand, maybe we never were, suggests Ursula K. Le Guin in an article in the February edition of Harper's titled "Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading." Reading as a voluntary activity associated with leisure is a relatively modern invention, she says. For most of human history, people read very little or nothing at all -- indeed, most of them couldn't read. Reading was associated with power over the illiterate, rather than with pleasure or self-improvement.Gradually, literacy filtered down to the masses and exploded with the invention of print, an event that transformed the world. But even during what Le Guin calls the "century of the book" -- 1850 to 1950 -- she suggests that it's easy to overstate the amount of voluntary "literary" reading that actually took place among those hardworking people. A minority read because they wanted to, just as now.Le Guin concludes that the "moralizing tone" of the NEA report -- We must read more! -- is unwarranted. Besides, the report focuses on an ideal, contemplative, solitary reader, failing to consider the ways in which reading has evolved in modern life, says Matthew Kirschenbaum in the Dec. 7 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. An English professor, Kirschenbaum argues that modern reading requires a "re-imagining" that takes into account the interactivity entailed in "reading" on the Internet and in the blogosphere. Reading persists, he argues, but in a form that may not be immediately recognizable to the authors of the NEA report.As an English teacher myself, I appreciate attempts to put the best possible light on the dismal reports of the "death of reading." But as someone who was born near the end of Le Guin's "century of the book," I'm attracted to the traditional definition of reading, one that involves an extended, serious engagement with a writer whose work has reached me after surviving the vetting process that publishing houses provide.It's hard to be optimistic about that kind of reading. We still praise it highly, in the same moral register that we employ for condemning television. We encourage it in the young, like eating vegetables, but if the NEA is even half-right, we don't practice it much ourselves.In fact, our culture is arranged to deprive us of the two prerequisites of traditional reading, time and freedom from distraction. Readers during Le Guin's "century of the book" had plenty to compete with whatever attention they devoted to reading, but they had nothing that compares with the distractions that derive from the invention that brought Le Guin's "century" to a close: television.Television, and its image-heavy derivatives, devours time. The NEA reports, for example, that 17- to 24-year-olds spend seven to 10 minutes per day reading, while watching about 2-1/2 hours of TV per day. But it's TV's ubiquity -- in every home, in restaurants, child-care centers, bank lobbies -- that crowds out the contemplative space for the kind of reading the NEA advocates. Even in the doctor's waiting room, where once one could catch up with magazines he never reads otherwise, reading has to compete with the melodrama of TV soap operas.And when reading competes with the passive pleasures of hundreds of television channels, video on demand, DVDs in the mail, movies, sports, MySpace and Web surfing, it will lose. Let's face it: Against those persuasive attractions, any book whose chief goal isn't merely amusement doesn't have much of a chance.(John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. E-mail him at jcrisp(at)delmar.ed.)