Worries about reading books

There is no surer sign of the iconic status of books in our culture than the continuous complaints about the decline in the number of people reading literature. The endless anecdotal evidence for poor cultural literacy is increasingly buttressed by polling data, though the latter does not instill much confidence. So in the same week that a colleague pointed out to me FirstThings's approving review of Mark Bauerlein’s jeremiad, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a new NEA survey that showed a sharp up-tick in literary reading, especially among young adults.

Maybe it's just because I deal with ancient history, but I think these discussions, and especially the statistics they depend on, treat far too short a time-span (usually less than fifty years) to draw meaningful conclusions about the effect of reading rates on society in general ...