I'm willing to donate my extra copy of Ulysses to the cause. Anyone? Anyone?

Joking aside - I haven't read the entire report either, but I imagine part of the concern is not that we're necessarily reading *less,* but that (because we're talking about the National Endowment for the Arts) we're reading less traditional artsy stuff.

It must be those durn video games. *shake fist*

Harold Bloom seems to blame it on video games and too much TV:

http://chutry.wordherders.net/archives/002210.html

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-bloom9jul09,1,67050.story

BTW, the LA Times article has multiple annoying pop-ups...

The kids these days . . .

Seriously, there is *something* here and I'm not entirely happy with my initial reflexive response, which was simply to assert that of course there are other forms of literature and literacy, etc. etc. What makes me nervous is not the report's putative findings, but its inevitable politicization. Harold Bloom is just the beginning; you'll see this one trotted out from Senate sub-committees to the local PTA. Wouldn't even surprise me if it somehow became an election year issue. In any case, I'd like to see a careful response from the scholarly community, one capable of acknowledging the extent of the shift the report claims to document and whatever consequences folllow, but one that also historicizes the findings, and productively questions its construction of the literary.

And, of course, it doesn't hurt that committees are currently discussing appropriations for the NEA and all of its sister agencies (NEH, etc.) right now. I wonder how much of this is "hey, fund us fools!"?

I picked up a hard copy of the report (found it on the floor by the NEA offices?) and will happily share with war gaming dissertation directors if, you know, you want to save your printer paper for gaming grids.

I think you're right, Matt. That's why I tried to make a connection between Bloom's comments on literacy and the conservative attack on the Worcester, MA, school for including Tupac Shakur on their summer reading list. The latter, though not an explicit response to the NEA findings, also seems to be an attempt to politicize a decline in literary reading.

It reminds me of the attempt in 1992 by Bush, Sr, to run on a family values campaign. I do think that a thoughtful response from scholars would be very valuable.

I think there are several issues bound up in this (online) report. One of them is a narrow view of Internet activity as anti-literary, and as competing with literary reading. The strong implication of the report, and probably of the survey that it is supposedly based upon, is that reading things in print is the only way to read literature, although listening to a literary reading can also count. This is the issue I tried to take on in my Grand Text Auto post about Reading at Risk, http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2004/07/09/reading-at-risk-from-library-um-i-mean-internet/

There are issues related to the acceleration of our media experiences, whether in print or online. Although in an attempt to be funny, I only posted a quick misreading of a comment that Sven Birkerts made, I think his basic point has some substance. Rapid-fire media experiences, whether they are answering emails, checking scattered paragraphs in scholarly works online, or making a series of quick cell phone calls to arrange dinner with people, do make it hard to shift gears and take on substantial tasks like reading a book. (They also make it difficult to write an involved computer program or think about a philosophical or mathematical problem, for that matter.) But to deal with that type of issue, and to see how we can make time for involved media experiences as well as casual ones, we need to look beyond the simple formulation of electronic media and print media being in competition.

i've been teaching undergrads for 7 years now and it seems to me that each year they are less willing, and less able, to hack the amount of reading (print and online) i assigned the previous year. in many ways, i find them smarter and more creative and more engaged. but few seem to enjoy reading the way many of us do. and i find that sad.

I read about half of the report on the train ride home yesterday. All the way through I kept wondering if, rather than lack of reading reflecting attention to those durn video games, but rather that lack of reading reflected a *general overall lack of leisure time*.

If readers are apparently more civically and socially engaged, as the report claims, then it seems that readers *overall* have more leisure time than non-readers. In a world of debt, overwork, skyrocketing home prices, job insecurity, etc., I would believe this to be the more compelling reason for folks not to read than that they simply find literature boring.

Also, the report doesn't count reading that applies to work or school. I wonder if the reading demands for school have increased over the past 20 years, thus leaving less time for actual leisure reading? Watching my cousins as they go through high school, I can't imagine that they would have time for leisure reading - even the summer is packed with a huge summer reading list.