Off the Books
I’m going to keep this short. If I don’t, you won’t read it. That’s at least what one can glean from reading (or at least skimming or asking ChatGPT to summarize) the latest book stats from the National Endowment for the Arts. If you’ve been procrastinating when it comes to getting around to finally writing that novel, you might want to skip it altogether. “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. The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.” (At least this explains my book sales.) Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The End of Reading Is Here. “And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.” (America is getting close to be postAmerican, too.)
+ It’s not just that people are reading fewer books. The way certain books become hits has also changed. And that change has circled back to how books get written and which books get published. It’s out with the librarian and in with TikTok. “Whether a given book is well written, structurally ambitious, or intellectually dense does not seem to matter much on BookTok. In fact, a book being poorly written is not at all an impediment to a recommendation as long as it otherwise fulfills the requisite tropes and themes set out by its genre expectations, which are precisely what engineer those strong emotional reactions. Even when a book is considered ‘cringe,’ ‘flat and formulaic,’ or ‘written like an 11 year old,’ BookTok users may ‘still love it with all [their] heart’ because it manages to achieve the chief objectives of its genre conceit.” The New Yorker: The Rise of the ‘As Seen on TikTok’ Sticker.
