Book reading and literacy…
There are plenty of stats out there that show readership—do I dare say literacy?—is down. Many people don’t read a book after high school. Many don’t read one after college. While online material keeps increasing, Facebook posts and Twitter tweets are now read more than blog posts, and the latter, like this one, can’t be called literature by any stretch and Facebook and Twitter might as well be mutterings from prehistoric shamans. What’s going on?
As might be expected, I tend to communicate, especially online, with literate people. OK, maybe they suck at spelling, or they allow auto-correct to change things to something they never intended, but they can put thoughts together intelligently on the printed page and make sense of mine. And we tend to talk about books a lot—reading, writing, reviewing, marketing, whatever. All this activity tends to bias my perspective, so I had to base the opinions in that first paragraph on real stats (that happens with a lot of my posts, by the way, although many of them are op-ed and therefore my opinions). Those stats confirm that we’re becoming a nation of non-readers no matter the anecdotal experiences people tell me about.
Computer games, streaming video, mind-numbing jobs, a flawed educational system that makes students hate reading, music downloads, sporting events, liquor and drugs—you can probably add to this list other distractions that can all be summarized by saying that literacy is attacked on many fronts. Moreover, the substitutes are often passive pastimes, not active and certainly not creative. Even the reading genres have become trivialized—mysteries have become cozies, romantic adventures have become plotless bodice rippers, sci-fi has become fantastic and unscientific space opera, and serious historical and political tomes have become celeb books written by ghostwriters.
The number of books and authors is increasing in the digital age, but is quality decreasing? I don’t think so, but, because there are fewer readers, even good books and authors go unread. There has always been chaff that an erstwhile reader had to separate from the good wheat, of course. Before it was just created by traditional publishing; now it’s also created by indie authors and indie publishers. But does it matter? If there are so few real readers, people who read more than N books per year (you pick N) and read quality material, literacy in America and the rest of the world will suffer. That seems to be the path we’re going down.
Now reading demographics trends to older readers, not younger. While people lauded the Harry Potter series for getting young people to read again, that uptick hasn’t continued. One obvious reason is that Harry was fun while most of the books on school reading lists are boring, what teachers want kids to read and not material that’s fun for them to read. A person isn’t illiterate if s/he hasn’t read Oliver Twist or Hamlet—even if s/he reads cozies or Harlequin romances, s/he’s reading—but school teachers ram classics down their students’ throats all the time. The first priority is to teach that reading is entertaining and exciting fun—reading classics will come with time if they deserve to be read (many don’t because they have no relevancy for our modern times and certainly won’t guarantee literate behavior). English teachers will probably want to flog me for this, but I’m confident that I’ve read more books than they have, enjoyed them more, and certainly write better than they do!
Some parents are conscientious and read to their kids and then get them reading books on their own, showing them that reading is fun. Our schools tend to undo all that good work. Moreover, the more advanced the English class, the more boring they become. But society itself does a far better job of destroying the reading life. A young person with a book or Kindle in hand is considered a nerd or dork, not a cool dude or dudette. A person who reads instead of passively absorbing music or TV shows or playing computer games is considered antisocial and/or inferior. The entertainment industry champions that perception.
On the other hand, Amazon and Goodreads champion the perception that readership is increasing. The idea is that you should read X because everyone else is reading X! It’s natural that people in the book industry don’t like to admit that readership is decreasing, of course, but it’s doing so on many fronts. I already talked about age differences. Yet society is making it hard for older readers to continue reading. Public libraries are floundering, bookstores are closing, and I’ve rarely seen a retirement community where the books in the bookcase were recent editions. Women read more than men, so there’s a gender gap too, which is hard to understand when a woman generally holds down a job as well as keeping a home running well, minimizing the time she has available to read compared to a man. (No stats on that unfortunately—just anecdotal evidence.)
Maybe this is just the natural evolution of an industrial society moving into the post-industrial information age? But, if the latter, how can we ensure the quality of the information when there is no critical reading going on? Reading isn’t just about entertainment, it’s also about information. We can be entertained and get informed at the same time. Moreover, reading will make you stop and say, “That’s something to think about,” or, “I never thought about that in that way,” even if it’s fiction you’re reading.
Fiction reading in particular continues the grand tradition of oral storytelling. Will we still be human if no more stories are told and no one hears or reads them? We’ll certainly be less human. Reading tweets might be reading lies, but they it will not make us more human. Only spoken and written words will do that. Of course, those of us who read and love doing so aren’t a problem—we get it. I worry about those who don’t. Are they diminishing their humanity?
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In libris libertas!
