Good News: More Are Reading!

The National Endowment for the Arts issued a report today that indicates a decline in reading literature has been reversed. The NEA began collecting data on the reading habits of Americans in 1982, and since that date the proportion of people who reported reading at least one work of literature has declined steadily—until 2008.

The proportion of adults reading some type of literary work is still not as high as it was in 1982, but the decline has, for now, been halted. Best of all, the biggest increase in reading occurred among young adults between the ages of 18 and 24, the group that had previously shown the steepest declines.

There is a certain irony that the NEA demonstrates that Americans are reading more fiction, as it was only this past fall that the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the group that is responsible for the Nobel Prize in Literature, belittled American literature, saying our fiction was “too isolated, too insular” and, in short, too trendy. Can we connect the dots?

Has the official American “go it alone” foreign policy of the past eight years in fact had an impact on the reading habits of Americans? Have we turned inward because we have suffered international rebuffs? My own sense is that these dots cannot be connected—at least not yet. I am not convinced that the Swedish spokesman was correct and may even display an effete Eurocentrism that perhaps reflects politics more than literary value. Still, the indictment invites analysis and reflection.

As our nation turns the page on a sad chapter in our nation’s history next week with the inauguration of a new president, and as we begin to reconnect with the rest of the world, will we continue to read more? And will our literature reflect different ideals? And if the Swedish Academy then finds our literature less insular, will that conclusion reflect more on the academy or on our nation?