Smeared Type

Good news at last.  The National Endowment for the Arts has just announced that a 25-year decline in fiction reading appears to be reversing itself.  They are to release a report next week titled, “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy.”

The report has apparently discovered that, for the first time in over 25 years, the proportion of adults over 18 years old who have read at least one novel or short story in the previous year, has risen to over 50%.  This will be good news for the publishing industry as well as for authors and educators.

Publishers have for years been bemoaning the decline in sales and have struggled to maintain profitability.  Because of these pressures, publishers have often turned to celebrity “tell-alls,” scandalous personal memoirs, and an endless stream of “how to” books.

As television has continued to “dumb down,” perhaps the public is at last turning to alternatives in their culture lifestyle.  Television is of course the main culprit in providing an ever-declining quality of product, which is nothing more than censorship by ratings.

But in today’s world of text messaging, blackberries, email, and on-line sales of everything, the quiet reading of a book has to compete with the time constraints of today’s frantic lifestyle.

Four years ago, a report was released that showed that fewer than half of adult Americans read novels, short stories, play, or poetry.  Hopefully, the latest information is a genuine reversal of this trend, to which credit should be given to community based programs like “The Big Read”, Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, and the incredible success of the Harry Potter series.

However, the individual efforts of teachers, librarians, parents, and civic leaders in their efforts to get people to read more and to show their children by example the pleasures of reading, must
also take credit.

Hopefully, more of the public will recognize that in these harsh economic times, the best entertainment value is still a good book.

Ellis M. Goodman, author of Bear Any Burden: www.bearanyburden.com