Reading books forces us to concentrate for longer periods of time than we do while sprinting from site to site online. Certain books demand the employment of certain analytical skills and close reading. But in our age of jittery distraction are readers becoming “an endangered species?”
In the February 2021 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, Professor Mark Brennan declares, “My students look at me in amazement when I tell them I read 8 to 10 hours per day. I look at them in amazement when they tell me they play video games 16 hours straight.” Brennan then went on to wonder if his book reading habits qualify him for “endangered species” status.
Two weeks after I read these words, my sister, her husband, and my friend John came to celebrate my birthday with me. All of us are over 60 years old.
During the several days that they were here, I offered them a DVD player and some movies I own for their amusement, but they rebuffed me each time, saying they preferred to read the books they’d brought with them or something from my personal library. For three to five hours every day of their visit, they sat with a book in hand, absorbed and whisked away by the story. When I passed through the room while they were reading, I realized once again that few sights move me more deeply than a human being engrossed in a book.
But are readers like these becoming “an endangered species?”
Maybe not endangered, but the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has reported our reading habits are waning.
As of 2017, Americans spent an average of almost 17 minutes per day reading for personal interest (as compared to almost three hours watching television and 28 minutes playing games and using computers for leisure). The average is down about five minutes since 2003.
Younger Americans (ages 15 to 44) spent, on average, less than 10 minutes per day reading for personal interest.
The article points out that college graduates read more than those with a high school diploma, but even then, only 55 percent of those with advanced degrees had read a novel or a short story in the past year, while about half had read some historical work.
Meanwhile, a majority of American students in the fourth and eighth grades failed to demonstrate reading proficiency at their grade level. In studying tests conducted between 2017 and 2019, the National Endowment for the Arts found that reading scores had once again fallen. With so many of our schools shut down by the pandemic in the last year, we can expect those scores to dip even further.
The Academy report also points out that this decline in books and reading, along with competition from online outfits like Amazon and from electronic books, has brought about a closure of brick-and-mortar bookstores. Between 1992 and 2016, the number of these stores had fallen by about half. With the pandemic having shuttered small businesses across the nation for so long, we can speculate that even fewer bookstores exist today.
Despite these grim findings, many Americans remain readers. Most of my relatives usually have a book going, and visiting sites like goodreads.com shows that millions of people are still interested in books, some of whom track their reading and finish dozens of books every year. In my local library I see lots of children, many of them homeschoolers, leave the building with bags and backpacks stuffed with novels, histories, and biographies.
Whether we read e-books or prefer hard copies, tackling a novel, biography, or other books bestows enormous benefits in our age of jittery distraction. Reading certain books forces us to concentrate for longer periods of time than we do while sprinting from site to site online. Books like Dostoevsky’s Devils or Lance Morrow’s God and Mammon, both of which I’m in the midst of reading currently, demand the employment of certain analytical skills and close reading that I don’t practice when skimming through online articles.
In the article mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Professor Brennan mentions his frequent visits to the university library, where the students poke at their electronic devices and ignore the books around them.
Our library serves as a giant study hall, with stacks of musty books squeezing out valuable study space. I joke with my students in class, ‘I could remove all the books from the shelves and burn them on the library steps. No one would notice. Then we could replace the stacks with more study spaces!’ They laugh. Then they ask me why the school doesn’t do that. I cry.
Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, once wrote, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
When we make readers of our children, when we ourselves read books, we help keep our culture and our civilization alive.
And here’s more good news: We might even have some fun along the way.
Republished with gracious permission from Intellectual Takeout (March 2021).
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The featured image is “Interior with a young woman reading” (circa 1912) by Michael Peter Ancher, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
great insights
Brain physiology almost dictates screen addiction. (Personal experience confirms this.). A cursory understand of the visual cortex and the release of the right cocktail of hormones sets off the habitual nature of returning to nothing, but doing so repetitively.
Some great books have been written on the topic, but who reads books when they can get an endorphin release combined with an adrenaline rush from “liking” a fakebook post?
The problem was studied as far back as the Pavlovian-like observations about AOL’s “you’ve got mail” in the early ‘90’s. Heck, the impact was on full display in that movie about the bookstore shutting down, and the ending where it was, in the happy ending of Hollywood, set up like a museum in the larger mega-Pre-Amazon-bookstore. Ahhhhh, love triumphed all, and if the sequel had been written to that cute little movie, she’d now be alone again but happier pecking out her Amazon reviews without a memory of the joys of her corner bookstore and smiling childrens’ faces.
It takes discipline to end the habit of constantly picking up the phone when it goes ding, but the rewards of deep emotional interaction, and a brain lighted up with imagination. I don’t have an answer for most people when it comes to how we can return ourselves away from the illusions created in our minds by the virtual world. I shall keep working toward finding that tipping point that calls us back to the meaning and depth of living in the real world!
Wishing joy to all who find value in what Jeff brought to us with this essay. I’m off to plant myself in front of my computer for a “hard day’s work”. <>
Thank you for this essay. As a young adult in the early 1970s, I never read. My Uncle Pete was concerned about this and gave me an “assignment.” James Michener’s HAWAII. The only reason I continued past the volcanic eruptions in the Pacific was my deep regard and love of my uncle. I was forever changed and am forever grateful. My daughters have master’s degrees. I give them books as gifts and suggest books all the time. They just don’t read, unless something on the internet. It makes me sad that they are missing so much. I wish Uncle Pete were here to straighten this out.
Like Meg (above) I read very little when I was young. Most of it concerned diving into the daily sports pages to find out what the local sports team did or homework assignments which meant a quick visit to the library. While working in Manhattan during the 60’s and 70’s I came in contact with the dozens of used book stores of Book Row on 4th Ave. I would stop on the way home for a quick brose or spent many a lunch hour in their musty smelling Americana and Bio sections. When my family asked about gifts I would tell them to give me money for my birthday present so that I could go on one of my hunting trips at Strands on 10th Street. My wife still groans when we pass a used book store knowing I will want to make a stop. Unfortunately those stores I grew up with are mostly all gone now. High rents drove them out one by one. But I’ll never regret the time I spent in them for a moment.
“I read my eyes out and can’t read half enough. The more one reads the more one sees we have to read .”
John Adams letter to Abigail Adams 28th December 1794
After the “cancel culture” bans every book that is worth reading, not only will we readers be an endangered species but might just go insane.
I have a homeschooled nine year old grandson who reads two hours or more daily. His library has over 100 books in it. My Amazon account and our visit to a used book store show it. He has read everyone of those and some twice. He will read a 200 page book in a day and a half with great comprehension. I can’t wait until he gets old enough to read and understand some of the 1500+ books from my personal library.
I grew up in the 1950’s and was fortunate that my mother taught me and my siblings to read before we entered kindergarten and we had a huge, well stocked library at the end of our street. We were all prolific readers and I still am and fortunate again to have a superb public library system close to my home and now, with the Internet, able to access millions of free books. Reading is my greatest pleasure and it is sad that so many children today are not encouraged to put away the video games and their phones and pick up a book to read.
Read aloud to your children. The brain is forced to engage and provide one’s own visuals, imagination. And it is a bonding time. Mothers did this to read to children at bedtime. But now there are no mothers. So a married couple can read to each other. In older times it was normal to read aloud to yourself; no silent reading. That helps the alliterate. And ditch the e-books: they do not give a tactile sense to reading. Plus, writing your thoughts after reading causes you to think, which begins the cycle again of reading, writing, speaking, thinking. It is how God made us. Without it we are animals.
Over the years, I have donated several thousand books to a local library for their book sales which they have 4-6 times a year. They were always well-attended. Last year, I unable to donbate books to some local high schools. I was informed that they only wanted “digital.” If anything is systemic in our culture, it is the intentional and dumbing down of our nation by the “progressive” public schools. They started a century ago; it will take more than a generation to repair this; and, if no effort is made, we are doomed.