"It's becoming a quaint pursuit, like ballroom dancing or darts."

What pastime begs such a dismal comparison? Bridge? Baseball? Bedazzling?

No. No. And no. Book reading.

The above quote is from the afterward of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. It’s in the 2020 edition, published ten years after the books original release.

It’s a masterful book. Especially if you love reading and maybe feel as I do that our collective intelligence is inexorably gurgling down the drain.

The numbers Carr presents are more than depressing:

“The time Americans devote to leisure reading dropped to sixteen minutes a day in 2018 from an already paltry twenty minutes in 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual time-use survey. Remove the elderly from the picture, and daily reading time drops to about six minutes – less than three-quarters of an hour a week.”

The picture gets even darker when you look at a recent Nielsen media-use survey that shows us looking at some sort of screen for a gluttonous 9 hours and forty-five minutes a day.

Literacy in America plummeting. With it, critical thinking and probably a fair amount of civility. Recently, my 10-year-old did a report on Costa Rica. This central American country has a 97.83% literacy rate. Along the way he discovered California’s literacy rate is only 76.9%, the lowest in the United States of America.

People who cannot read have a much higher probability of going to prison, earning far less, and living shorter lives. Why alarms aren’t going off across America is a great wonder. But it points to a failing of our leadership and, sadly, our culture. This year's post-Covid scholastic testing seems to signal things are only going to get worse.

One can hope that there will be a great reading revival. That we will snap out of it, and dig into all those great books that authors have literally spent their lives on. But that seems doubtful. So how do we bring all the thinking, insights, and delightful discipline this is lost to our modern screen-filled world? Who knows? But until there is some sort of miraculous replacement this is what we will be losing:

"What was so remarkable about book reading was that the deep concentration was combined with highly active and efficient deciphering of text and interpretation of meaning. The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not just for the knowledge acquired from the author's words but for the way those words set off intellectual vibrations within their own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply."

The Shallows is worth a read.