The Quiet Collapse of Reading—and the Only Real Solution

Fiction Is Fading, Kids Are Skipping, Parents Are Scrolling. What to Do?

In the grand historical sweep of our species, humans have been reading for less than a blip. Still, my goodness, what a moment! Plato, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Cervantes, Austen, Douglass, Melville, Twain, Wharton, O’Connor, Morrison. . . But is that glorious moment fading?

“The Reader” by Federico Faruffini, 1864.

Apologies, but here are some depressing statistics. U.S. adults read less fiction today—or books of any kind, for that matter—than they did a decade ago, according to data from the 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. In 2012, about 55 percent said they read at least one book in the past year. One decade later, and that number had drooped downward by six points to about 49 percent. Fiction in particular declined seven points in the same period: 45 percent in 2012, down to 38 percent in 2022.

News and commentary have made much about the gender disparity in these numbers. I can’t tell you how often when I worked in the publishing industry I heard people toss off such statements as, “Men don’t read anymore,” or “Men don’t buy books.” It’s worth saying that everyone I ever heard utter such sliver-plated universals were men. It’s also worth saying that their own behavior should have undercut their confidence.

But it’s further worth saying that the numbers don’t do the optimists—such as, for instance, moi—any favors. If, like Olympic sports statistics, we divvy up the data between male and female contestants, women hold a definitive lead. In 2012, 55 percent of women read fiction, while only 35 percent of men did the same.

They’re making us look bad, fellas. But ladies! We’re not handing out any gold medals—nor silver or gold, either. Women slipped eight points from 2012 to 2022, down to 47 percent. In that time, men slid backwards about seven points, down to 28 percent.

Data, 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts; chart, ChatGPT.

That is to say, weirdly enough, one trend has remained constant: Depending on how you round the numbers, women maintain a 19–20 point lead over men. They had that lead in 2012 and held it over the intervening decade. So, okay, fine . . . you can have a participation trophy. And us men? I mean, yeah, sure, we get one too. Of course, it’s worthless, but we can still look ourselves in the mirror, right?

Wrong! Because you know who’s really huffing the reading wind right now? Students of all kinds, from grade school to colleges and universities.

We fogies can’t stand back and gloat. In at least some cases, and—Lord, have mercy—probably far more than our fragile egos can handle, we have failed our kids.

Compare Gen X and Gen Alpha. The National Assessment of Educational Progress tracks the reading habits of nine-year-olds going back to when kids were lugging their tin Rainbow Brite and He-Man lunchboxes to class. In 1984, 58 percent of girls and 49 percent of boys said they read for fun nearly every day. By 2022, the numbers had fallen to 42 percent for girls and 37 percent for boys.

Data, NAEP; chart, ChatGPT.

Gen Alpha kids aren’t being challenged to read in class. For a variety of reasons, schools have pulled back on assigned reading, offering synopses, chapter summaries, and other workarounds instead of complete books. The end result is that the kids are not doing well. Writes Rose Horowitch in the Atlantic,

In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks.

TED Talks? God help us. Even in advanced placement classes, we’re rolling back the reading. One AP English teacher in Atlanta told Horowitch that they used to assign fourteen books a year. Now? It’s barely half that number.

These trends lumber forward into colleges and universities, where students simply decline to read what’s assigned and struggle when they accept it. Faculty report that students complain when assigned as few as thirty pages. We’re never cresting the halfway point in Moby-Dick at that rate.

The issue shows up in the hours spent preparing for class. “In 1961, college students reportedly studied an average of 24 hours per week,” write Frederick M. Hess and Greg Fournier for the Manhattan Institute. “By 2010, that figure had fallen to just 14 hours, a decline consistent across every demographic, academic major, and type of four-year institution.” Only six of those hours appear to be actually reading assigned material.

All of this forms a negative feedback loop. If students don’t read when young, they can’t when old. They don’t have the skills, the necessary context for engagement, or the patience—which can only be acquired by reading.

Compare it to strength training. You can’t lift because you don’t lift. And just as lifting requires lifting, reading requires reading. If students can’t or won’t sit still long enough to read thirty pages, they won’t be able to read a hundred. Even if they could manage the simple mechanics of the effort, they wouldn’t understand what they’d read or possess the tools to grapple with what they don’t get.

So, yeah, we’re doomed. But no. Not really. Not yet.

Research consistently underscores the influence of Mom and Dad on Junior’s reading habits. Love it or hate it, children mimic what they see. If parents read, there’s a decent chance their kids will as well. Some parents have resorted to bribing their kids to read. (I don’t judge, I only report.) But it might not be so complicated. If parents enjoy reading, kids are 40 percent more likely to enjoy it as well.

Parents spending more time interacting with young children around books predicts better vocabulary, reading comprehension, and intrinsic reading motivation as those kids grow, according to a study in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. And that’s even after controlling for such factors as early language skills and socioeconomic status.

The problem? Parents say they love books more than they do. Kids mimic what they observe, not what we say. When parents say kids should read but spend their own time doomscrolling political news on X or playing with face filters, kids notice. Only a quarter of kids observed their parents reading books, according to one study; meanwhile, more than half noticed Mom and Dad glued to social media. All those Gen Alpha non-readers? They’ve got Gen X and Millennial parents who have let themselves go a bit.

The solution? For God’s sake, just read. “One simple thing you can do if you believe it is important for other people to read,” says

Henry Oliver

at The Common Reader, “is to read yourself.” He continues,

Read in public. Talk about the books you enjoy. Read the classics. Set a good example. Be the light that draws others towards the good. . . . Be cringe. Be a nerd. Be bookish.

I second that emotion. And that means finding something you enjoy between two covers and moving from the front one to the back one. It’s not that tough. It’s actually pretty fun! People have been doing it for years, centuries even! Not as long as our species has been walking the earth, to be sure, but cavemen were missing out on a lot.

One significant encouragement? Substack itself. Of all the social media platforms around, Substack is surely the most literate and obsessed with literary matters, at least in significant pockets of the community here. And based on everything I can see, there are plenty of male readers here, too.

So let’s take encouragement from those around us and do the one thing we all control and which will make a significant difference: Read a book, and, if you have kids, do it in the living room so they can see you. If you find a fantastic passage, stop them passing through to the kitchen and grace their ears with it. Reading is a transmissible condition, communicable by the ears and eyes.

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For those interested, here’s a deeper dive on some of the root causes of the decline.