The survey didn’t specify what kind of book, what length or publication date, or genre. A short romance novel would have counted as much as a classic, a celebrity bio as much as a political tell-all. All that mattered was the habit, the act of opening a book and staying with it until the end, even if it took three weeks of seven-minute sessions before the task was done.
The habit is declining, no question, and the trend shows no signs of slowing. More than one-fifth of Americans (22 percent) hadn’t read any book in the preceding three years, and it doesn’t look like the share of non-readers will shrink in the coming years. The rates varied widely by age, which is why the future looks dim.
Simply put, the younger you are, the less book reading you do. Millennials and Gen Z-ers do about half as much of the activity as older Americans do, even though more of the latter attended (or now attend) college than the former. The higher educational achievement hasn’t translated into better intellectual dispositions. As boomers die off, U.S. society heads ever further into a non-bookish condition.
Now, when you bring this decline up in conversation or in print, many academics and intellectuals, often of a libertarian bent, shrug, and snort—not at the disappearance of books from the leisure lives of the young, but at the anxiety over it. “What’s the big deal?” they ask.
Youths are reading on screens all the time, processing more words than ever before. Let’s not fetishize the book, they say. There are other things to read, and besides, they’re all just texts, and anything that is legible qualifies, messages and emails as much as “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” To make too much of the loss of books is to be too 19th-century, or stuck in a pre-Digital Age time zone, or just plain old-fashioned or fuddy-duddy.
That’s the canny talk one hears, and there’s no answer to this blasé reply. It isn’t an argument, it’s an attitude, and the attitude is decadent. When you hear it, you should pay no attention to the content, only to the feeble conviction of the one making it. In what does he believe? Not much of anything, not strongly so. He goes with the flow, with cultural fashions, assuming that any rigid stand on prevailing types of personal habit and private taste only demonstrates, precisely, rigidity, an inability to change and evolve.
To them, social change is always a case of progress, of innovation. Open societies never go backward, only forward, and criticism of that forward progress merely marks a reactionary temper, not a salient protest. One must always be welcoming to the new, even to the radical.
On this score, however, on the significance of book reading, the test of value lies in the results. Let me say this to parents: Ignore the ones who show no concern. They’re wrong, and their influence is bad for your children. Their knowing, relaxed posture models the opposite of what you want to see your kids do, that is, curl up with a book, toss the phone, and spend a quiet hour in another universe, the printed page, slowly working through a story, a memoir, a study of old cars or rock musicians or space travel, far from the junk of TikTok.
To be sure, the image looks quaint at this late date, 20 years after the advent of MySpace, uncool and isolating. But the mentality that forms in your children after 10 years of reading with you and five years on their own will outperform the mentality of the un-booked kids on the most important intellectual measures of knowledge, thoughtfulness, memory, and vocabulary. That gap isn’t negligible.
We have, in fact, another inequality in our country to add to the others: book people and non-book people, those who do long-form print reading and those who read snippets and chats, messages and captions, memes and logos and ads on screens. The latter are less college-ready and less ready for many workplaces, too, not just elite ones but for basic clerical and service spaces as well. They haven’t the full equipment for responsible American citizenship, either, we may add, which requires of people some knowledge of Constitutional rights and major events in U.S. history.
In other words, I tell parents, as our nation slides ever further into cultural chaos, as young Americans suffer the consequences of a polity breaking up and breaking down, you do your children a far-reaching blessing when you cultivate the book habit for them and with them. It’s a bulwark against the vicissitudes of 21st-century reality. Online friends come and go, the news changes every day, people move around and switch jobs and postpone settling down. Books are a ground, a fixture, a meaning that abides for them throughout it all.
