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Somebody’s still reading

There have been a plethora of articles and op-ed pieces commenting on a recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts that concluded that the average American is reading less than they did 20 years ago. An article in The Boston Globe summarizes the reaction of the American publishing and academic communities, focusing on what many see as the study’s most disturbing conclusion: fewer than half of Americans older than 18 read novels, plays, poetry, or short stories. When asked by the Globe why anyone outside the book world should care about this stat, NEA chairman and poet Dana Gioia said: “Reading a novel puts you in the mind of another person. It develops your ability to imagine the world from another perspective.”

Jon Talton, in a column for The Arizona Republic, goes so far as to equate the reading of literature with the survival of democracy: “The electors of a self-governing society are cultivated by a liberal education, which means extensive reading. Reading is not passive; a reader engages with the author, wrestles with ideas, imagines new worlds. Reading teaches critical thinking.”

Charles McGrath, in an op-ed piece for The New York Times, takes a more skeptical view of the study, arguing that just because people are reading less “literature” they are not necessarily reading less: “(The study) doesn’t consider magazines, it doesn’t consider newspapers and it doesn’t consider the Internet, except to imply that it steals time people used to spend with books. But when people surf the Web what they are doing, for the most part, is reading. To judge from the number of hits on sites like Google, they are gobbling up written information in ever-growing numbers.”

Related links:
Read the Boston Globe article
Read Jon Talton’s column in The Arizona Republic
Read Charles McGrath’s op-ed piece in The New York Times

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