Well, Looks Like We Got Ourselves A Reader Here

If you haven't heard the results of this on the news yet, you likely will shortly.  It still bears repeating though, just because it's so disappointing, yet simultaneously unsurprising.

The National Endowment for the Arts, an American public agency dedicated to promoting all forms of art, recently released the results of a survey of 17 000 adult Americans.  The survey investigated the reading habits of those who participated, and the title given to the results, Reading at Risk, should start to get you worried before you even see the results.

As a quick summary, here's the salient points:

• The percentage of adult Americans who read any piece of literature (poetry, plays, narrative fiction) in 2002 stood at 47%, down 7 percentage points from 1992.
• Those who read any sort of book was down 4 percentage points, to 57%.
• Of the sexes, men were least likely to have read anything, with only 38% claiming to have read a book.
• The sharpest decline was found in those aged 18 to 24, which fell 10 points to 43%.
• Those who watched less, or no, television were more likely to have read a book.

The full results (PDF document) are available from the NEA.  Or, the lazy can just read the press release that accompanied it.

For some reason, I can't shake from my mind the scene in Planet of the Apes (Pierre Boule's novel, not either of the movies), where the anethetised woman goes back through her racial memories and comments on how reading, even reading something simple like detective novels, has become too much of an effort for the whole of the humanity.  All I can say is this: at least the apes haven't started talking.

One point for the title.