Book Board Chat

Readers and Non-Readers

The steady reading drop since the nineteen-fifties correlates directly with the rise of television and visual media, but much of the damage has been done in the past two decades, well after TV had solidified its place in Americans’ lives. Despite small gains, a solid half of the country still rarely, if ever, picks up a book for pleasure. The U.S. population now breaks into two almost equally sized groups—readers and non-readers.

Popular opinion and education experts alike suggest that we need to turn non-readers into readers. But do we? In a 2008 piece in Harper’s called Staying Awake - Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading, Ursula K. Le Guin offered a compelling argument to the contrary. Historically, Le Guin writes, most people couldn’t read, and those who did never did so for pleasure. But by the nineteenth century, with the push for universal education, books began to hold widespread social currency; she calls 1850 to 1950 “the century of the book.” Our sense of decline can perhaps be chalked up to the fact that we’ve moved on from that singular period. Le Guin's title comes from an AP survey of Americans’ reading habits—or lack thereof—in which one respondent complained that books made him sleepy.

Le Guin wrote that self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems questionable. But I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

Le Guin's argument is compelling, if a bit self-congratulatory: the masses learned to love books, but only a few of us remain in love with them—the implication being that we are those few (we’re reading about reading, after all). The idea that there are two classes, one of readers, one of non-readers, and that the non-readers shouldn't be forced to read, is the premise of another article on the topic, which ran a few weeks ago in the British journal Fortnightly Review. It is called Death to the Reading Class by the historian Marshall Poe. He narrows the “class” from regular readers to “people who hold degrees from famous universities; people who write, edit, and publish texts for a living; people who teach, research, and otherwise do ‘intellectual’ work; people who make up a good portion of the cultural elite in the developed world.” It’s a little stark, dividing the world up at the outset, but Poe follows through in an interesting way, charting the history of reading with more detail (“Humans achieved their modern form about 180,000 years ago; for 175,000 of those years they never wrote or read anything”), and tackling it from an evolutionary angle:

Why don’t most people like to read? The answer is surprisingly simple: humans weren’t evolved to read. Note that we have no reading organs: our eyes and brains were made for watching, not for decoding tiny symbols on mulch sheets. To prepare our eyes and brains for reading, we must rewire them. This process takes years of hard work to accomplish, and some people never accomplish it at all. Moreover, even after you’ve learned to read, you probably won’t find reading to be very much fun.

Yadayadayada … the article continues
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/09/changing-reading-forever-again.html#ixzz1YrAi4hy9