Last year, in a New Yorker article about the decline of the English major, a Shakespeare scholar admitted that until about two decades ago, he “probably read five novels a month. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot.” What accounts for that decline? It’s not, he explains, “because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” If even prominent academics are distracted from reading, what hope is there for the rest of us? Studies confirm that few of us read literature anymore. According to a National Endowment for the Arts survey from 2018, only 41.8 percent of American adults reported reading fiction in 2017. Poetry was in even worse shape: Less than 12 percent of adults reported reading verse. Compare that to the early 1980s, when about 57 percent of Americans read literature, and nearly 20 percent reported reading or listening to poetry.
Given this decline, it’s a welcome occasion when one of the world’s most widely respected public figures comes to literature’s defense. And I don’t mean Reese Witherspoon.
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