![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jul. 8th, 2004 09:47 amAmerican reading rates declining rapidly
I'm not surprised, and yet saddened. (Though I couldn't tell you whether Shylock is anti-Semitic, at least I recognize the reference, and I could probably argue a similar question out of Othello.)
But... yeah. For those of you that can't read the NYTimes.com pages (signup is free, by the way, and if you want they'll deliver the main news stories to your inbox):
-slightly more than half of adult Americans read during free time (56.6%, down from 60.9% in 1992)
-fewer read "literature" (not defined; 46.7%, down from 54% in 1992 and 56.9% in 1982)
The survey found that men (37.6 percent) were doing less literary reading than women (55.1 percent); that Hispanics (26.5 percent) were doing less than African-Americans (37.1 percent) and whites (51.4 percent); but that all categories were declining. The steepest declines of any demographic group are among the youngest adults. In 1982, 59.8 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds read literature; by 2002 that figure had dropped to 42.8 percent. In the 25-to-34 age group, the percentage of literary readers dropped to 47.7 from 62.1 over the same period.
Meanwhile, the type of book that registered a major increase was religious texts (40% more than last year). Most everything else has flat-lined.
Fast fact from the article: people who read perform more charity work (43%) than non-readers (17%) (though that might just be a correlation and not a direct cause/effect relationship).
---
So, to encourage book reading, I will now suggest Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, a collection of short stories that so far I quite enjoy. I remember reading The Veldt in high school; some other Turnerites may also remember it.
Also, one of these days I will get me to a library. One of these days when I'm not dragging myself by the hair just to get home.
I'm not surprised, and yet saddened. (Though I couldn't tell you whether Shylock is anti-Semitic, at least I recognize the reference, and I could probably argue a similar question out of Othello.)
But... yeah. For those of you that can't read the NYTimes.com pages (signup is free, by the way, and if you want they'll deliver the main news stories to your inbox):
-slightly more than half of adult Americans read during free time (56.6%, down from 60.9% in 1992)
-fewer read "literature" (not defined; 46.7%, down from 54% in 1992 and 56.9% in 1982)
The survey found that men (37.6 percent) were doing less literary reading than women (55.1 percent); that Hispanics (26.5 percent) were doing less than African-Americans (37.1 percent) and whites (51.4 percent); but that all categories were declining. The steepest declines of any demographic group are among the youngest adults. In 1982, 59.8 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds read literature; by 2002 that figure had dropped to 42.8 percent. In the 25-to-34 age group, the percentage of literary readers dropped to 47.7 from 62.1 over the same period.
Meanwhile, the type of book that registered a major increase was religious texts (40% more than last year). Most everything else has flat-lined.
Fast fact from the article: people who read perform more charity work (43%) than non-readers (17%) (though that might just be a correlation and not a direct cause/effect relationship).
---
So, to encourage book reading, I will now suggest Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, a collection of short stories that so far I quite enjoy. I remember reading The Veldt in high school; some other Turnerites may also remember it.
Also, one of these days I will get me to a library. One of these days when I'm not dragging myself by the hair just to get home.
