  Category: Culture Harold Bloom urlLink weighs in on the NEA's findings with a characteristically perceptive essay in today's LA Times (although I'm not sure about the title...). The announcement that "fewer than half of all Americans over the age of 18 now read novels, plays, short stories or poetry, and that only 56.9% have read any book at all in the last year," he writes, "is, of course, to be abhorred. But to call it news, I think, is wrong. " I think he's right about this--there's nothing alarming about fewer than half of Americans reading these days, and much less than that reading anything good . After all, as Bloom points out, this country "has been split into two cultures for many years. If you go back through the history of literacy in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, you'll see that we've always been divisible into readers and nonreaders. " And not only this country. All countries, in fact, and all people are divided into these two cultures, and as Bloom also points out, the divisions are based much less on class, race and education that you'd think. There are simply very few people out there--have always been very few people--who see literature as really a central issue in their lives (or even as a tangential issue). While having a college education probably makes you more likely to read literature as the NEA broadly defines it (as Bloom points out, this includes Stephen King and Danielle Steele), in my experience there is little to suggest people who happen to have been born in higher-income families and attended good schools are more likely to be genuinely interested in fiction than those who were not and did not.
I actually would like to see a real anthropological study about who does read real literature, a detailed breakdown of the, I don't know...maybe 10% of Americans that actually read not just books but good books. I think the specifics of class and gender and family history would be more diverse than people think.
It's a vague hypothesis, but I wonder if the strong desire to read can be traced to childhood alienation or trauma--some early confrontation with unfairness or self-doubt, maybe a mildly debilitating lack of confidence or loneliness. It would be hard for any study to ascertain these things, but the point is maybe there's something more wrong with those of us who do feel strongly about reading than those that are perfectly content with TV and alcohol. 
