Who is reading?

When I grew up in New York City I rode the Sub­way almost every day. I recall how many peo­ple were read­ing as they rode along: news­pa­pers (in dif­fer­ent lan­guages) books, mag­a­zines, Bibles, pam­phlets. I vivid­ly remem­ber one day when it seemed that half the pas­sen­gers in the car I was on were read­ing The God­fa­ther. It was a city of read­ers. The sub­ways were rolling read­ing rooms.

A cou­ple of months ago I was in New York for a day but man­aged (which I love to do) to ride the sub­way. To get where I was going required three trains. Dur­ing my whole trip I saw only ONE per­son read­ing a book. NO news­pa­per read­ers. To be sure any num­ber of cell phones were in hands so I have no idea what—if anything—they were reading.

Pew Research Cen­ter: “The share of Amer­i­cans who report not read­ing any books in the past 12 months [1919) is high­er today than it was near­ly a decade ago—though there has been some fluc­tu­a­tion over this time peri­od. Today, 27% of adults say they have not read any books in the past year, up from 19% in 2011, but iden­ti­cal to the share who said this in 2015.”

What is miss­ing from this data is what young peo­ple (under the age of 18) are read­ing. Because read­ing books (not cell phones) is still required in schools I think it is fair to sug­gest that young peo­ple are read­ing more than any oth­er group in the coun­try. Repeat: young peo­ple are read­ing more than any oth­er group in the coun­try. That read­ing may not be freely cho­sen, but it is reading.

This has enor­mous impli­ca­tions for the world of children’s lit­er­a­ture. It has par­tic­u­lar mean­ing for teach­ers and librar­i­ans. If they can bring about a pas­sion (and habit) for read­ing among youth, it can, over time, rad­i­cal­ly shift the data cit­ed above.

At the same time in my trav­els I hear more and more that school libraries and librar­i­ans are being mar­gin­al­ized or eliminated.

In the Bible, Daniel 5, there is the sto­ry of the writ­ing on the wall, which is inter­pret­ed as fore­telling the fall of the Baby­lon­ian Empire. It was a warning.

If there is writ­ing on our society’s walls, and we can’t or won’t read it, what then?