Below The Beltway

According to a new poll, one quarter of Americans didn’t pick up a single book in the past year:

There it sits on your night stand, that book you’ve meant to read for who knows how long but haven’t yet cracked open. Tonight, as you feel its stare from beneath that teetering pile of magazines, know one thing — you are not alone.

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn’t read any, the usual number read was seven.

“I just get sleepy when I read,” said Richard Bustos of Dallas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

That choice by Bustos and others is reflected in book sales, which have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way indefinitely. Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.

When the Gallup Poll asked in 2005 how many books people had at least started — a similar but not directly comparable question — the typical answer was five. That was down from 10 in 1999, but close to the 1990 response of six.

In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled “Reading at Risk” found only 57 percent of American adults had read a book in 2002, a four percentage point drop in a decade. The study faulted television, movies and the Internet.

I’ve always been a voracious reader. To the point where, when I was in college, I was reading economics, history, and Civil War history books on the side in addition to my regular reading because, well, I wanted to and the subjects interested me. At some point, I sort of fell off the book reading bandwagon and part of that was because other things — television and the Internet principally — were taking up my free time.  Therefore, I can sort of relate to the idea that people are choosing to spend the free time doing things other than reading, and I don’t think that we should necessarily look down on someone because they choose to spend an evening watching television rather than reading something from the New York Times Bestseller List.

All the same, though, I found myself missing reading time after awhile and,  as my frequent book reviews here will attest, I’m back to my old habits.