How many of you wish you read more often? Or rather, how many of you wish you could read more often, and take some time to relax with a good book? Yeah, me too. A lot of us wish we had more time to read. But we don’t. In fact, most of the country doesn’t. The National Endowment for the Arts has been conducting a survey called Reading At Risk, a study of reading habits in over 17,000 adults in the past 20 years.
You need to read
How many of you wish you read more often? Or rather, how many of you wish you could read more often, and take some time to relax with a good book?
Yeah, me too. A lot of us wish we had more time to read. But we don’t. In fact, most of the country doesn’t. The National Endowment for the Arts has been conducting a survey called Reading At Risk, a study of reading habits in over 17,000 adults in the past 20 years. They came up with the unsurprising result that the rate of literary reading is declining in the United States. Literary reading is defined as the reading of any novels, short stories, plays, or poetry.
What’s a little more alarming is that both sexes, as well as all age groups, races and even education levels, are reading less. What’s more, the rate of the decline is accelerating. Between 1982 and 1992, literary reading declined by 5 percent, and between 1992 and 2002, literary reading declined 14 percent. The highest rate of that decline by age group has been in young adults aged 18-24, whose literary reading declined 17 percent in the last 20 years.
As one would imagine, the study also surveyed adult participation in other leisure activities. In 2002, 95.7 percent of the sample group reported watching an average of at least one hour of television a day. In comparison, 46.7 percent reported doing any kind of literary reading.
We all know that watching movies or television is a largely passive act, more so than reading books. It’s difficult to read while eating dinner, exercising, or cleaning up the living room. In a world of stressful multitasking where all of our activities are integrated, it’s hard to devote even half an hour to sit down and read and shut the world out for a bit. Even when we do, it’s easy to feel antsy, anxious, or as if there’s something else we should be doing.
This just makes the actual act of reading even more useful and vital. Taking the time to read allows us to escape and decompress. By enveloping our minds and demanding our full attention, reading acts as a stress reliever, and a much more enriching time sinkhole than TV or YouTube videos.
A detailed list of benefits associated with reading could probably fill this entire page. It expands our vocabularies, makes us better writers, and allows us to process and handle more complex ideas, providing we read books that can mentally challenge us. It has the power to teach us about different cultures, different time periods, and different modes of thought. If you have trouble falling asleep at night, the National Sleep Foundation tells us that reading a book beforehand can help the process, and staring at a television or a computer screen can hurt it.
Most of you probably know a lot of this information, or at least are not surprised by it. Yet reading continues to be an elusive activity for many of us, whether it’s for lack of time, lack of good material to read, or just a mental overload of required reading we already do for classes.
But there’re still proactive steps we can take to combat the Non-Reading Monster. For one, take a book with you everywhere. Short chunks of time between classes, informal meals in the middle of the day, trips on the bus/MAX-all of these are great opportunities to read a few pages and take some stress out of the day. Keep a book by the bedside table, or wherever you keep the computer or TV, just so the alternative’s there.
Finding a decent book we want to read can seem hard at first, but all it really takes is a quick wander through a good bookstore, flipping through whatever catches your eye. If you don’t want to dedicate yourself to a novel, get a short-story collection. If nothing’s turning your crank, re-read the favorite books you read a long time ago. And if money’s tight, the public library’s only a free streetcar ride away from campus.
With a little initiative, it’s pretty easy to find something that engages you. And if you make the time, it feels a lot better to put a freshly finished book down than it is to close the laptop or turn the TV off. Books haven’t gone anywhere. They’re right where we left them, and it’s easier than we think to pick them up again.
