What We Talk About When We Talk About Reading

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch warned that the end of reading had come to an end—that the period of literacy which had briefly appeared, disappeared and reappeared on the historical scene and which had fostered democratic liberalism, freedom of thought, and an ability to think abstractly had ended. Citing statistics about reading among Americans that showed that fewer and fewer people in any age group read:

Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

In a response to Horowitch’s claims, David Wallace-Wells warns that this is a claim that has been made many times in response to the rise of new technologies—recently in worries about the way that television would create a “post-literate society”. And in interpreting the NEA survey, Wallace-Wells says “But in 2022 the N.E.A. survey found that 55.6 percent of American adults had read or listened to a book in the previous year. In 2008 the number was 54.3 percent. In 2002 the figure was 56.6 percent, prompting the N.E.A. to publish a hand-wringing report called ‘Reading at Risk.’”

In his reading of the Time Use Survey that Horowitch cites, Wallace-Wells says, “Overall, the underlying survey tells us, average Americans over the age of 15 read 21.9 minutes on a given day in 2003. They read 18.3 minutes a day in 2010. In 2025, the number was 16.2 minutes a day.

The first thing to note about these numbers is that they are very small: Americans don’t read very much now and haven’t for at least a few decades…”. And, Wallace-Wells says, the biggest declines are among older Americans:

In 2003, for instance, Americans ages 15 to 24 read 8.4 minutes a day; in 2016 they read 7.8 minutes a day; and in 2022 they read 11.7 minutes a day. Also in 2003, those between the ages of 25 and 34 were reading 9.6 minutes a day; in 2016 that group read nine minutes a day; in 2025 they read 10.2 minutes a day. If these numbers represent a crisis, it doesn’t appear to be a new one.

Among Americans 65 and up, the base line is higher and the decline in time spent is larger, too: For decades, at least, the bulk of the country’s reading has been done by Americans in their golden years. In 2003, older Americans read on average just under an hour each day — 58.5 minutes. By last year, that had fallen nearly by half, to roughly 32.4 minutes each day, a drop that represents the lion’s share of overall reading declines. To the extent that we can talk about the decline of reading as a mass phenomenon, it seems concentrated not among the next generation but among the previous ones.

It’s all about how you interpret the statistics, Wallace-Wells says.

But all this raises a larger question: what’s so great about reading? In fact, reading novels and fiction was fairly recently (about 150 years ago) thought to be decadent—a pursuit to be discouraged, especially for young women who were thought to be especially susceptible to romantic fantasy. In her book The Social Life of Books (here’s a YouTube presentation, if you don’t feel like reading!), Abigail Williams looks at the way that reading and books were understood in the eighteenth century, and some of the worries about reading in Plato’s time came from worries about freedom: specifically, that reading was a form of enslavement to another and threatened the autonomy of thought that was essential for freedom generally.

And then there’s the issue of what people read, and why. Aristotle thought that reading could be corrosive if one read the wrong kinds of things. And it seems odd to equate reading a formulaic romantasy novel with reading Kant’s Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Morals. So is the activity of reading itself one that is valuable? That seems to be the assumption motivating the dispute about reading.

I am presently reading several things: a nonfiction account of the development of theories of mind that came out of experimentation with anaesthetics and hallucinogens (Psychonauts); a short novel about a person who finds that she is reliving the same day over and over (On The Calculation of Volume); and a nonfiction book about the second Trump presidency (Regime Change). Each has a different narrative structure, and each uses a different narrative voice: historical, first person experiential, and journalistic.

And while I’m glad that I’m reading the first two (although they aren’t things I’d say that I’m reading “for pleasure”), I have to admit that reading the last is depressing, and I wish I didn’t know the things I’ve learned from it. It recounts a good deal of gossip, depressing stories about how Donald Trump seems to have lost his shit (if he even had it to begin with), and the uses and abuses of power among Trump insiders. Is reading it a good thing, in and of itself? Does it help me think critically, or identify with the plight of others? No. Does it make me a better citizen? I don’t think so. But it holds a horrible fascination for me, like gawking at a car accident or reading about the last days of a doomed and drug-addled celebrity. I don’t doubt that it’s true, it’s just that I’m not sure knowing these truths is something I want to know.

And so reading: the idea that as a practice it is, in and of itself, a good thing—the premise that both literacy optimists and pessimists seem to share—seems to be the premise that much of the debate hinges on, and which seems, to me to be the one that’s least defensible.