The late Don Marsh, who served as my Talkline co-host for several years, was a man of letters.  He was extremely well-read and would often recall quotes and bits of wisdom.  Once when he pulled out a literary nugget relevant to the topic at hand, I asked him, “Marsh, how did you know that?”  He answered without missing a beat, “There are these things, Hoppy.  They are called books.”

That scolding has served as a frequent reminder that the more I learn, the more I realize I do not know. Out of convenience, I often use Google Search or AI to get answers. I still read books, but I am a slow reader with a short attention span.  I am just finishing King of Kings, Scott Anderson’s detailed history of what led up to the Iranian revolution in 1978-79.

Interest in works of literature among Americans is declining rapidly. According to the National Endowment for the Arts study of national reading habits, fewer than half (48.5%) of all U.S. adults read a book of any type in 2022 (the most recent data available).  That compares with 53 percent in 2017 and 55 percent in 2012.

The Atlantic recently published a comprehensive story by Rose Horowitch about the decline in reading.  She wrote that according to the American Time Use Survey, “the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.  Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.”

Americans haven’t given up reading altogether, but what and how they read is changing rapidly.  We now consume an increasing amount of our information and entertainment online with brief texts and short video clips, and that comes at a cost.  Horowitch cited a national test showing that just 35 percent of high school seniors were proficient at analyzing complex themes or drawing conclusions from concepts in a story.

Scholars are having great debates about what all this means.  Horowitch writes that some believe we are in a literary death spiral of  “shrinking attention spans and declining comprehension.”  The pushback comes from a generation that might say, “Why should I spend hours reading War and Peace when ChatGPT can summarize Tolstoy’s 587,000 words in a few seconds?”

For the record, here’s what AI told me: “Against the backdrop of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, War and Peace follows the intertwined lives of several aristocratic families as they search for love, purpose, and meaning while history reshapes their world.” Alright, I confess that is helpful to me, since I’ve never read the book.

The report by the National Endowment for the Arts suggests the decrease in reading has broad cultural and societal implications. “More than reading is at stake,” the report maintains. “Readers play a more active and involved role in their communities. The decline in reading, therefore, parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life.”

It’s not that in the future we won’t know anything—the Internet allows us to know something about everything—it’s just that much of our knowledge will be superficial and overly simplistic. Along the way, we may lose our ability to think critically. As we replace reading and studying with fragmented stimuli, algorithm-guided platforms feed us more of the same, creating a Filterworld Effect of passive consumers and closed-loop thinking.

Back to the book I’m just finishing. Yes, I could get the basics online, but Anderson’s 424 pages provide a much deeper understanding of why the revolution occurred and how the U.S. was caught flatfooted. The book gives important context to understanding the current war.  But like I said, I’m a slow reader. It’s taken me about two months to read it.

Still, reading a book at a glacial pace is better than not reading at all.