But I’m having a hard time setting aside the hard bitten reporter side of me, the skeptic who believes that for numbers to be believeable they have to make sense emotionally. In their latest reading survey, The National Endowment for the Arts tells us there’s good news to be announced, which the NYTimes here and everyone else passed along:

 After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.

The report, “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,” being released Monday, is based on data from “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.

The news comes as the publishing industry struggles with declining sales amid a generally difficult economy.

The proportion of adults reading some kind of so-called literary work - just over half - is still not as high as it was in 1982 or 1992, and the proportion of adults reading poetry and drama continued to decline. Nevertheless the proportion of overall literary reading increased among virtually all age groups, ethnic and demographic categories since 2002. It increased most dramatically among 18-to-24-year-olds, who had previously shown the most significant declines.

“There has been a measurable cultural change in society’s commitment to literary reading,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “In a cultural moment when we are hearing nothing but bad news, we have reassuring evidence that the dumbing down of our culture is not inevitable.”

Note where these reading gains come from: poems, plays, short stories, novels. That’s great. And guess who registered the biggest upturns? Men. Yes, men reading those plays and poems. That’s the icing, right there. Men, reading poems and plays, are reversing the illiteracy trends in the United States. I’m certain everyone has noticed what I”ve personally observed, which is men turning off the NFL finals to make room for poetry readings.  Maybe…but this one has a Harry Potter aroma to it….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 9:27 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.