![]() ![]() The resulting report, Reading at Risk, identified a 14 percent decline in literary reading since 1992, with rates especially low for men and young adults. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts released a survey of American reading habits-or rather, the lack thereof. ![]() Soon, newfangled blogs had me mousing through to surveys proving that even if book-length works continued to be read, it wouldn’t be by men, or in the bathtub, or off the beach. In its pages, ex-bookseller Sven Birkerts mourned the “focused, sequential, text-centered engagement” that he worried was being jostled aside by “the restless, grazing behavior of clicking and scrolling.” 1 In 1994, the window display of an independent bookshop that would be evicted a few months later to make way for a Starbucks led me to a hardcover called The Gutenberg Elegies. One Sunday morning in 1992, the New York Times sprawled across my doormat predicted “The End of Books.” Could print, asked the novelist Robert Coover, survive the age of “video transmissions, cellular phones, fax machines, computer networks”? Coover wondered, but other essayists judged. A quarter century later, my generation, too, began to feel guilty about letting chores crowd out deep relationships. W HEN THE FIRST Waldenbooks opened in my hometown in the 1970s, its self-help bestsellers urged my parents to schedule date nights. ![]()
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