Fewer People Are Reading for Fun, Study Finds

From 2003 to 2023, the share of Americans who read for pleasure fell 40 percent, a sharp decline that is part of a continuing downward trend.

...People may draw particular benefits from thinking deeply about what they read and talking about it with others.

It is not the case that “I can sit you down and give you a Jane Austen novel, you read it, and you come out with better mental health,” said James Carney, an associate professor at the London Interdisciplinary School and the lead author of a 2022 study on reading and mental health.

But discussing and reflecting on fiction — as opposed to just reading it — was linked to better mental health and social capabilities, including the ability to perceive nuances in interpersonal relationships, said Dr. Carney, who was not involved in the new study. Engaging with many forms of nonfiction would probably have similar benefits, he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/well/reading-pleasure-decline-study.html?smid=em-share

BBC Radio 4 - Take Four Books, Rachel Kushner

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002h9n8

31 Novels Coming This Summer

Taylor Jenkins Reid heads to space, Megan Abbott climbs a pyramid (scheme) and Gary Shteyngart channels a 10-year-old. Plus queer vampires, a professor in hell and an actress's revenge.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/books/review/new-fiction-books-summer-2025.html?smid=em-share

Bad news for democracies

From The New York Times: Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good That’s bad news for our democracies.

...An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West has already traveled...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/opinion/smartphones-literacy-inequality-democracy.html?smid=em-share

Reports of the death of literature are greatly exaggerated

 Ann Patchett responds to David Brooks:

 

Ann also recommends:

 

The living word

Reports of the death of literature, David Brooks, are greatly exaggerated.

Ann Patchett-
https://youtu.be/tPrH7kqGKCY

“dehumanizing effect on our culture”

I'm old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews.

It's not just my nostalgia that's inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publisher's Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find works by Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find books by Mary McCarthy and John O'Hara. From a recent Substack essay called "The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction" by Owen Yingling, I learned that E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" was the best-selling book of 1974, Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" was the best-selling book of 1969, Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" was No. 3 in 1958 and Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" was No. 1.

Today it's largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying people for decades, and the number who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982. Yingling reports that no work of literary fiction has been on the Publisher's Weekly yearly Top 10 best-selling list since 2001. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today's F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace?

I'm not saying novels are worse now (I wouldn't know how to measure such a thing). I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture. There used to be a sense, inherited from the Romantic era, that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, "The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things."

…

David Brooks 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/opinion/literature-books-novelists.html?smid=threads-nytopinion&smtyp=cur