Reading Statistics and Why You Should be Reading More

Every time I see statistics on reading, I’m floored. I guess I shouldn’t be since I often hear people talking about how little they read. I carry a book around with me most of the time. It’s a great way to pass time when you have to sit in a waiting room, stand in line at the grocery store, or wait on someone. There are times when you don’t have much choice about waiting around, and I find having a book allows me to be patient in situations that might otherwise frustrate me.

By having a book with me, I’ve had many conversations about reading with people I encounter. I’ve talked with my dentist several times over the years about reading, and he always says he doesn’t read outside of a few dentistry journal articles. I often hear from people that they wished they read more, but that desire doesn’t seem to be enough to change their habits.

The scariest thing to me is when I hear writers say they never read, and I’ve heard that more than I’m comfortable with. Even my dentist takes time to read a few articles about his profession. It’s part of the continued education that most professions require, and while there’s no organization that writers have to report to with documentation that they’re staying up to date with information about writing, it should be at the very least something that writers pursue on their own.

Statistics

Now, this next part is an informal snapshot of reading trends. This information is interesting, but a little alarming for me, as an author, to read. I’m providing links to the sites who conducted the surveys to compile the following statistics so you can read more about their pool of participants, method, standard error, and whatever other information they’ve chosen to provide, although, I don’t believe both sites provide all of this information.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average number of hours that individuals 15 years old and up are reading each day is declining for both men and women.

The next graph comes from data collected by the Pew Research Center in January of 2018 and shows who had not read a book in the 12-months prior to the survey. It shows the results for US adults, men, and women. Then it breaks it out in who had not read a book in the previous 12-month period based on age but lumps them into two age brackets, and finally based on the participant’s level of education. If you refer back to the link above, they break apart the data based on a few other categories.

There are studies that have found that reading helps with cognitive function and as a way to delay Alzheimer’s and dementia, something interesting I read while I was doing research on how to run a poetry reading/workshop for individuals in retirement homes and assisted living facilities. If you missed reading that post, you can read about the community project I’m involved in called Cracking Poetry Wide Open.

Aside from that, while reading is sometimes considered a way to escape reality, which it can be, it is also a way to explore and better understand how to navigate your life. While we’re reading, we’re watching characters interact and sometimes there is no better way to learn about what works and what doesn’t work than by watching a situation from the outside.

We also learn from reading, and while you might not think of a fiction book as teaching you something since it’s fiction, an incredible amount of research goes into writing fiction to create an authentic experience for readers. In this way, you get to submerge yourself and learn about different professions, cultures, landscapes, lifestyles, time periods, etc.

A couple of additional benefits for writers is that you learn about the craft. This is similar to the section above about learning how to navigate through things in your life by observing from an outside perspective. It is much easier to tell when someone else is doing something wrong when you have distance from the piece. And as you start reading good writing, you start absorbing those habits and techniques, oftentimes without even realizing that you are learning different skills. And secondly, I find that reading good fiction ignites my creativity. There’s something about reading a really good book that inspires me to write. It’s not even about wanting to write something similar or about the subject matter I’m reading about. Usually, when my imagination gets going, the ideas that come to me are not even related to what I’m reading. It’s the simple act of reading that gets my creativity flowing.