Reading for pleasure plummets by 40% in the US
medicalxpress.com
medicalxpress.com
This part really got to me, reading to one's children is rare? That's so sad. My toddler loves reading with me.
We started with Detective Dinosaur and ended with either One Hundred Years of Solitude or Ender's Game. Don't remember which.
So of people with young children, it looks like the rate is about 9.5%.
But solo reading I think I've only gotten through Exhalation, Silmarillion and Rendezvous with Rama in the last year.
When reading progression is ready for more depth, The Dark Is Rising https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Is_Rising_Sequence or Earthsea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthsea are both excellent too.
All are series with approachable first books that can be enjoyed on their own (if they don't hit).
Spending as much time as it takes to read to your children every night is WAY more than these parents are willing to do. Children are lucky if they can eat more than one meal a day, sleep in a clean bed and have clean clothes to wear. Usually there are abused and neglected animals that will foul the household and bite the children. Money is spent on nicotine products, alcohol, fast food, and gambling. Any money spent on children is done so hesitantly.
This is why social services like daycare and public schools are so important. It is often the only chance many children will have to get the care and attention they need to survive until adulthood without huge mental and physical health issues.
I've been maintaining my own collection in the hope that I could give my own children (if I have any, which is looking increasingly less likely) the same experience.
I know you don’t necessarily need to finish every book, but if I don’t finish then I won’t be able to pick it up again later without forgetting the progress or re-reading the same sections again. Neither are desirable.
Further, reading on tablets, computers, or smartphones was not explicitly included in examples, making it unclear whether this behavior would have been classified as reading for personal interest or technology use.
Most(easily 90%) of my reading came in the form of serialized novels that are published chapter by chapter in various forums. They’ve all been swamped with AI content that’s good enough to not be immediately obvious but then becomes a waste of time after a few paragraphs.
And it’s just a firehose of this kind of content. I can’t tell if the actual human made content is down because people are tired of the competition or if there really is that much bot activity that the human activity is being watered down to single digit percentages
Further, reading on tablets, computers, or smartphones was not explicitly included in examples, making it unclear whether this behavior would have been classified as reading for personal interest or technology use.Quote: The study focused on two activities: reading for pleasure (reading a book, newspaper, magazine, reading on electronic devices and listening to audiobooks) and reading with children.
> ATUS asked participants to recall all their activities over 24 h, beginning at 4 a.m. on the day prior to the interview and ending at 4 a.m. on the day of the interview (Figure 1). Activities were coded using a standard lexicon, verified by two coders. We focused on two reading outcomes: (1) daily reading for pleasure, classified by ATUS as reading for personal interest (e.g., reading a magazine/book/newspaper, listening to audiobooks, reading on a Kindle or other e-reader; Table S1); and (2) daily reading with children (e.g., reading to or with household or non-household children, listening to child read, helping child read; Table S1).
Seems unintuitive to include audiobooks if they're interested in literacy though (literally their first motivation).
Many books are closer to edutainment than practical applicable advice. To a certain type of person these are easier to read (spend time on) than reading purely fiction. And even then it's easy to say you only read fiction that is totally giving you something more insightful than entertainment.
See also many YouTube/Instagram/TiKTok channels and most if not all Substack (et al) newsletters. Yes of course deep diving into <niche subject> at 2am is super critical to my life!
If you peruse "booktok," the books these people are bragging about reading are barely a step up from the supermarket romance novels that people used to make fun of. (Remember Fabio?)
Making a big deal about reading for the sake of reading is a sign and signifier of having virtuous consumption patterns.
That was in a discussion with my parents no less...who raised me in a household that had an unspoken "we'll pay for it if you finish the book" rule so book culture was definitely there.
Worst part is my book acquisition strategy has been on point. I have good books. Amazon daily sales are 95% crap...5% daily not crap monitored daily over years = library of respectable books.
idk...as I said horrified is the word that comes to mind. I genuinely don't get how this snuck up on me like that
It's pretty astounding what reading to kids every day can do for them regardless of the environment they grow up in.
Given the social media engagement numbers, for better or worse that would be enough to put us at peak reading. Is it fun ? nobody's setting on gun on people's head so it would still fit the article's définition IMHO.
This reminds me of articles lamenting people's attention span because they don't watch the endless spinoffs of Lord of the Ring, and play Zelda instead.
But even setting that aside, while YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are the mainstream, Threads and Bluesky came up as new platforms and are text first. They could have let the Twitter paradigm die but chose to heavily invest in that market instead, and it seems to be working, so at least the idea still has legs ?
Interestingly, with current LLM limitations I'd assume text in - text out usage will keep being the focus for a while as well.
I recently retired, one of my pastimes is reading. My wife has been a voracious reader already, so we’re getting some good quality reading time.
The best discovery: instead of going to Goodwill to find good books, I’ve been using our local library’s online services. ( Libby and Hoopla. ) These provide an endless supply of reading material, all stored neatly on my iPad and with adjustable fonts and background. This is a golden age of leisure reading!
Though I obviously didn't walk the entire plane, looking around from my seat / when walking to the restroom, everyone I saw was watching a movie.
On a plane that has a screen, I almost intentionally find something there to watch instead. I don't know why but for some reason I just have very little desire to read on planes when the screen is an option.
It was fun.