No one reads any more, part II

[rachelmanija]

Thanks to the_red_shoes, I read the gloomy NEA report on "Reading at Risk."

http://www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf

A few points:

This survey only compares rates of reading going back to the eighties. I will see if I can dig up anything from earlier than that.

They define "literary reading" as "novels, short stories, poetry, and plays," and lament its decline. This definition leaves out a significant category of reading material-- no, I do not mean manga, which is a whole 'nother topic-- I mean narrative nonfiction. I would turn up as one of those tragic markers of declining literacy in that survey, as my "literary reading" has indeed dropped noticeably in recent years. I've never read much poetry, used to read lots of plays but now read very few since I stopped being active in the theatre community, have always preferred long works to short stories, and most importantly, have been reading fewer novels because I've been reading more narrative nonfiction. This narrow definition of "literature" as "fiction" not only slights the literary quality and intellectual content of nonfiction, but also, I suspect, skews the poll results considerably.

(OK, yeah, so I'm a bit pissed off that this survey does not define my book as literature, and anyone who read it would not be counted as a reader of literature. In fact, going by this survey, the only things I've ever written that are available to the public and would count as literature are fanfic, because those are short stories. Although the survey is a bit dodgy as to whether anything read online can count or not-- the summary suggests that they don't, but the questions didn't specifically exclude short stories read online.)

Also, they note that readers do more charitable work and non-reading activities (such as sports) and participate more in the community (whatever that means.) They seem to feel that reading causes non-reading leisure activity, and if more people read, more people would volunteer. I suspect that there is something else which causes for both reading and community participation, and that's leisure time and a higher level of education. They note that Europeans read more than Americans, but Americans work more hours per week (that's my point, not something noted in the survey.) To give them credit, they did also ask about formal education and found that reading correlates highly with that, but I think leisure time to do anything, including read, is likely to be a big factor, and is one which the survey ignores.

Some interesting points-- though again, this is all regarding their very limited, in my opinion, definition of literature as "novels, poetry, plays, and short stories"-- is that readers of "literature" and non-readers of "literature" watch the same amount of TV.

They speculate that internet use (much of which consists of reading) and magazine and newspaper, er, reading resulted in people having less time to read the sort of "literature" defined as such by the poll. Woe!

Comments

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I will read the report for myself; for the nonce, I am especially confounded by the short shrift given to nonfiction. There are nonfiction books of great "literary" quality.

I know this is anecdotal and therefore not evidence, and especially I'm living in a fairly affluent, well-educated demographic community; but the new books nonfiction section is always quite busy and well-attended at the public library. I've known people who only read nonfiction for leisure.

[pameladean]

Ha. I am vividly reminded of a course called "Victorian Literature" that I took in graduate school. The professor had been over-optimistic when he put together the syllabus, and what happened was that WE NEVER EVEN GOT TO THE NOVELS because he figured a lot of English majors had read most of them anyway, and he wanted us to read the history and the essays and the autobiography and the scientific writing of the age.

Feh. Non-fiction not literature indeed. Silly clunches.

P.

[literaticat.livejournal.com]

If you took all the books that we sell in a week together and looked at the sales figures, the non-fiction outsells the fiction by about four times. You have to go down something like eight spaces on the list to get to the first work of fiction.

So yeah, I think the figures would be a lot different if they didn't look only at fiction, even without including newspapers and magazines and internet.

[canandagirl.livejournal.com]

From what I understand, there are a lot of people who read non-fiction, and won't really touch fiction (which I think is sad). I think the lack of time is a big factor, since we're suppose to work 10 hours a day, exercise 90 minutes a day, sleep 8 hours a day, sit in traffic for 2-4 hours a day...

I can see why Europeans read more than Americans. Having lived in Europe for a few years, I can attest to the fact that their t.v. stinks.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

They define "literary reading" as "novels, short stories, poetry, and plays," and lament its decline

Yeah, that was the big sticking point when it first came out -- wossname David Jones (IIRC) of the Golden Rule blog had a series of rather withering posts about it. I d'know why they knocked out nonfiction, because even leaving out things like celebrity memoirs and cookbooks and religious self-help and whatever else I see on the Times nonfic list most days, there's scholarly biographies and history books for the snootiness quotient. At the v least it should've been broken down into fic and non/fic -- and probably separated out into narrative-length fic/nonfic and poetry/drama, as I think the audience for the last two is a lot smaller and gets artificially plumped up if you put it in the same category as novels.

I suspect that there is something else which causes for both reading and community participation, and that's leisure time and a higher level of education

That's a good point.

I also think surveys like this have a built-in statistical skewing in that it's like the Nielsens -- people are less likely to report what they watch/read as what they think they should watch/read. It reminds me of the enormous shift when record stores started using purchase scans instead of foozleable data and suddenly Garth Brooks was No 1 and Dr Dre was No 2, or something like that. This is something you can't really prove or adjust for, but I think it happens a lot with this type of survey.

I think if you included "fiction on the internet" (yes, fanfic) or "nonfiction on the internet" (blogs, electronic newspapers, copies of journal articles) the figure would go up exponentially. Most people I know who read a lot of books also spend a lot of time reading on the net.