Washington — The National Endowment for the Arts wants to share some rare good news about reading in the United States. From 2002 to 2008, the percentage of adult Americans who read literature (defined as fiction, poetry, and plays) grew from 46.7 percent to 50.2 percent. That jump departs from an overall downward trend dating to 1982, when the agency began its periodic surveys of adult Americans’ public participation in the arts.
The good news arrives in the endowment’s latest report, “Reading on the Rise,” released today. The report, based on a survey, identifies what the agency’s chairman, Dana Gioia, called “a decisive and unambiguous increase” in literary reading. The rise was spread across demographic groups and was sharpest (more than 20 percent) among Hispanic Americans.
Young adults, long an object of worry for reading advocates, came off well in the survey. The 18-to-24-year-old cohort showed what Mr. Gioia called “a particularly inspiring transformation from a 20-percent decline in 2002 to a 21-percent increase in 2008 — a startling level of change.”
Just a year ago, in its report “To Read or Not to Read,” the agency described an “alarming” decline in literary reading among Americans. That built off the gloomy findings of the endowment’s 2004 report, “Reading at Risk.”
What explains the seeming “sudden reversal of long-term trends,” as Mr. Gioia put it in the new report’s preface? The chairman credited community-based efforts, including the agency’s own Big Read program. “Faced by a clear and undeniable problem, millions of parents, teachers, librarians, and civic leaders took action (inspired by thousands of journalists and scholars who publicized the issues at stake),” Mr. Gioia wrote.
Early coverage of and reaction to “Reading on the Rise” have been more skeptical. Some journalists detected bad news alongside the good. The Washington Post observed that “the percentage of American adults who report reading any book not required for work or school during the previous year is still declining. It fell from 56.6 percent in 2002 to 54.3 percent in 2008.”
At the Los Angeles Times blog Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kellogg asked questions that are bound to come up in many quarters: How do online reading and new media figure into all this? In the report’s preface, Mr. Gioia repeated concerns about the reading habits of a generation of young people raised on video games, laptops, and other electronic devices.
“I’m troubled by the idea that laptops are anti-literature,” Ms. Kellogg wrote in response. “Clearly, much of the time people are staring at their laptops, they’re reading. I thought perhaps the report would say that the next generation of young adults found their way to literature through all the reading they do with new media.”
Maybe next time. —Jennifer Howard
