A Life With Less Pleasure Reading
If a life has no space to read for pleasure, is that life too full?
If you haven’t checked out this week’s episode of The Culture Study Podcast, we got Sam Sanders to come talk about all things Texas Culture. Listen here and remember that all Culture Study newsletter subscribers get a massive discount on their podcast subscription.
These episodes are only as good as the questions you ask — and right now we’re looking for your best for future episodes on mid-life reinvention (hello, the portal!) and an episode with Leigh Bardugo (author of one of my favorite fantasy/dark academia books, Ninth House) about the state of genre, the lines between YA and non-YA, and whatever else you want to ask her about. HERE’S THE VERY QUICK & STRAIGHTFORWARD QUESTION SUBMISSION FORM.
Finally, this week’s threads are exceptional (and very different): Go read Very Good Bags (1000+ comments) and What Are You Struggling With That No One Else Sees?. If you need the space to be vulnerable and hear from others who are doing the same — spanning everything from eldercare to IVF anticipation to layoff grief and late-in-life autism diagnosis — this is the place.
In the first months of dating my partner, Charlie, he sheepishly told me something that felt, to him, like a dark truth: he wasn’t “well-read,” particularly when it came to the so-called classics. He was embarrassed, he said, because he surmised that I’d read a lot (as evidenced by my bookshelf and my various degrees). Then he told me something I think about a lot: he’d been assigned so many books in his high-pressure, college-prep, very expensive high school. But he was doing so many activities — and had so much homework in his other classes — that he never had time to actually read the books, let alone like reading the books.
It was a stark contrast to my own experience of reading in high school or any other level of school. Like many of you reading this sentence, I was the kid who got in trouble for reading ahead, finishing the book, and then sneaking my own book inside the pages of the book we were supposed to be reading. In eleventh grade, I was astonished when we were assigned the alternating chapters of Grapes of Wrath (just the Joad plot ones, not the descriptive/contextual ones). How could we do that to a book? I read it all and realized the extent of the blasphemy.
In hindsight, I understand that my teacher was trying to get us to experience the Depression-era narrative without having to read the whole-ass 420+ page book. But reading the book, no matter the length, was never my problem.
I’d learned to love reading at a young age through a combination of my parents reading to me, the availability of books (purchased and borrowed through the library), freedom to read widely, an absence of learning disabilities that would make reading difficult, and watching other adults modeling reading for pleasure around me. My dad was never a huge reader, but our walls were lined with my mom’s books, all of which felt like open invitations. My Granddad was a voracious reader. My aunt and uncle were always trying to get me to read what they loved. At Christmas, Santa always got me something I coveted. But my family got me books, which I’d then spend the seemingly endless, cozy days of winter break devouring.
It took me years to realize the myriad ways my family’s class and education factored into that reality. One of my mom’s primary (and often explicit) parenting goals was that my brother and I would love to read. For work, sure, but also for pleasure. She ensured that we always had access to books. But she also ensured, purposefully or not, that there was always time to read them.
I took difficult classes in my public high school, but my homework load was always tenable. I took piano lessons; I volunteered at church; I went to youth group; I spent four to five nights a week cheerleading (or at cheerleading practice). But I was never over-scheduled. I didn’t have a full-time job but as I’ve written about before, I babysat consistently (and also read while babysitting). I spent a lot of time talking on the phone and hanging out with my friends. I wrote letters and notes all the time — or, as I got older, long emails. And I read for pleasure, pretty much every night. Even in college, and later in grad school, I was reading unassigned books.
I first learned to love reading as a child. But I was able to refine and expand that love as a teen and young adult who, unlike Charlie, still had ample time for it.
I was thinking about that distinction this week against the backdrop of new survey analysis detailing significant declines in reading “for pleasure” in the United States. For years, we’ve been told that American reading habits have remained relatively stable. As recently as 2021, a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center (weighted to reflect the population) found that 75% of adults had read at least one book in the last year. Similar surveys over the last decade found the same.
The primary purpose of these surveys was to parse how people were reading — Pew started doing this when there was a lot of anxiety over whether eBooks would eclipse printed ones. So they didn’t ask people how many books they were reading, just how they were reading that one (or more) book.
You can take a look at some of the crosstabs from the 2021 survey below:
None of these findings are that surprising; if they were to administer the same survey today, I’d guess you’d see an uptick in exclusive e-reading, but not much: people are still reading physical books, even if they’re also reading e-books and listening to audiobooks.
I honestly find this type of survey data soothing: look, we’re still reading!! But then I realize that the architects of the study set the bar incredibly low: ONE book! I mean, what happens when you ask people if they’ve read two books? Also, as a good data scientist or poller will point out, our culture understands reading books as a sign of intelligence, curiosity, leisure, class — if someone asks you on the phone if you’ve read a book, there’s a good chance you’re going to say say to yes, even if it’s not true, to paint a more impressive self-image. (The same phenomenon happens when people are asked how often they exercise).
So how do you get a better picture of how much people are reading? You don’t ask them about their reading. You just ask them about what they do on a random day. That’s what the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) does, surveying 10,000 “representative” people from the census data about what they did the day before. The ATUS is imperfect (I still think it measures leisure weirdly) and much like political polling, is overly reliant on people who are willing to pick up the phone (you can read more about its methodology here). But it does offer us a glimpse of how people are reading, again, on a random day.
Researchers at University College London and University of Florida dug into ATUS data from 2003 to 2023 and identified a significant, ongoing decrease in people reading “for pleasure” on a given day: from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.
Note how they label this type of reading in that graph — “reading for personal interest.” They use that phrase interchangeably with “reading for pleasure” or “leisure reading,” which they define as:
…any kind of reading done for enjoyment or purposes other than work or school. It is a multidimensional construct with several components, including behavioral, affective, and cognitive elements, which can be accessed through multimodal forms of reading, from print text to e-books and audiobooks.1 Reading for pleasure may include reading fiction, non-fiction, magazines, and newspapers, alongside other genres.
A few other tidbits they pull out from the more granular data:
People Who *Do* Read Are Reading More: “Despite the overall decrease [in reading for pleasure], the amount of time spent reading by those who read for pleasure increased slightly from 1 h to 23 min a day in 2003 to 1 h and 37 min in 2023”
Only a Small Percentage of People With Kids Are Reading With Them: “Although reading with children did not change over time, rates of engagement were surprisingly low, with only 2% of participants reading with children on the average day. Overall, 21% of our sample had a child under 9 years (the age by which most can read independently) with them during the diary day. So a large majority of those with young children did not read with them”
People Are Doing More of Their Reading At Home: “A large majority reported reading at home, as opposed to at a library, in the workplace, or other community locations. The proportion who read outside the home decreased over time.”
People Bought More Books During the Pandemic But Did Not Read Them: “We expected to find increases in reading from 2019 to 2021 due to the rise in print book sales during the pandemic. Yet, we did not see an increase in the proportion of participants engaged in reading…Restrictions on movement thus were not accompanied by large increases in reading.”
Reading for Pleasure is Classed and Raced (and more):
“Rates of reading varied across population groups, as those who identified as female, of White race, were older, who had higher education, greater annual family income, lived in metropolitan areas, and did not have a disability were more likely to read in 2023. Disparities between population groups increased during the study period for those of Black race, with lower education levels, less annual income, and living in non-metropolitan areas.”
You can dig deeper into the findings here, but I want to work through a few initial ideas about the overall decline in reading for pleasure —
Theory 1: People *Are* Reading — It’s Just Not Books
The first thing I thought when I saw this data was that most people I know spend a lot of time reading the internet — but reading the internet is not considered “reading for pleasure,” even under the more expansive definition of reading a newspaper or magazine. Would someone classify reading this newsletter as reading for pleasure? Depends! Is that reading your inbox or is that “reading for pleasure?”
What about our Culture Study threads? Is scrolling internet strangers’ carefully crafted renditions of their relationship to work reading for pleasure? What about reading Reddit? Or the “reading” we do on social media, or skimming the articles you see on the New York Times app, or reading an article that your friend sent to you at 9 pm over text?
I’m thinking about how I would respond to an ask about how much “reading for pleasure” I did yesterday, and while I did spend 30 minutes reading a book before going to bed, I also spent a solid 45 minutes waiting for the ferry reading the captions and Q&As of various dahlia accounts, catching up on newsletters in the Substack app, and reading interviews with someone who was coming on the podcast (but whose general subject area fascinates me). Is that reading? Is that reading for pleasure?
I don’t want to argue over what is and isn’t reading or is or isn’t reading “for pleasure” so much as point out that the lines are incredibly blurred — and I don’t think the American Time Use Survey has figured out how to fully account for that reality. I don’t blame them! This shit is fuzzy! Technologically fuzzy, obviously, but it gets even more muddled given the freelancification of American labor. If I sell dahlia tubers very much on the side, but take pleasure in reading about dahlias, is reading about dahlias “pleasure” reading? Is reading a cookbook, or parsing an extended Reddit thread on a style of knitting, or getting super detailed in Dungeons & Dragons forums reading?
Again, I don’t have answers, but I think it’s worth considering how this sort of slippage is convincing us that people read for pleasure far less than they do.
Theory 2: People Are Learning and “Reading” — It’s Just Through Podcasts
If we consider audiobooks to be books — and listening to audiobooks as a form of “reading for pleasure” — how do we think about podcasts? What do I glean from a celebrity memoir, or an issue of Us Weekly, that I don’t receive from an episode of Good Hang with Amy Poehler? What do I learn from an Ezra Klein 1200-word opinion essay that I don’t learn from a 70-minute podcast interview?
We’ve long consumed “news” in a multi-modal way, but the expansion of the podcast universe should also expand our understanding of “reading for pleasure.” What happens to these overall numbers when we ask how much time you spend in the last twenty-four hours “listening” for pleasure?
Theory 3: Adults Work Too Much
Reading takes time — and we don’t have it. We spend so much time working (and reading, online, for work) that when we’re done, reading often doesn’t feel like “leisure.” Hence: TikTok, “reading” Instagram, streaming, gaming. We’ve also convinced ourselves (with good reason) that reading demands a chunk of time (especially if you want to reach the truly pleasurable state of immersion) so we convince ourselves that we don’t have time to get there, so CLEARLY we don’t have time to read (see: me, many weeknights).
Theory 4: Adults Parent Too Much (also: no place to read)
This is a touchy one, I realize, but it’s worth noting what a good parent my mom was and also how much time I watched her reading. Reading “good” books, reading “trash” books, reading magazines, reading the newspaper, reading to me or my brother — she modeled reading constantly, and I never conceived of it as a failure in her parenting.
But we’ve come to conceive of “good parenting” as direct supervision that is energy-intensive and involved. Within that paradigm, reading a book while parenting is “bad” parenting — and more obviously “distracting” than reading your phone, because WHO KNOWS MAYBE YOU’RE TEXTING ABOUT A PLAYDATE, THAT’S GOOD PARENTING! Put differently, a book is an obvious (and mindful) distraction; a phone is an ambivalent one.
We’ve talked about the pitfalls (and difficulties of disinvesting in) intensive parenting so much in this newsletter. I’ll just say that the benefits of kids in your life observing you read a book might outweigh you staring numbly at whatever they’re doing on the playground.
Theory 5: Adults Optimize Too Much
Charlie attended a high school that was attempting to produce graduates who were perfectly optimized for college applications: deliriously well-rounded, high-achieving, and well-resourced. The problem — and this is one that’s becoming increasingly apparent against the backdrop of spiking anxiety and depression rates — is that when you ask a kid to be and do everything, they either develop coping mechanisms (sometimes healthy, often not) or collapse under the pressure. Charlie had to figure out what he just couldn’t do, and then fake his way through the classes that required him to do it. He “read” a lot — but actually read very little, and never for pleasure.
You cannot optimize reading for pleasure — even though I know so many adults who try. They make lists and goals and they pick short books to juice those goals. But when you’re reading because you’ve convinced yourself that reading is a mark of your general achievement as an adult, is it actually for pleasure?
I also think that we’ve convinced ourselves, often within a larger optimization framework (in which our food, sleep, and exercise also all need to be optimized) that when we do read, it needs to be “the best.” The book. We stress over the sunk cost if we choose poorly, or feel apologetic if we get sucked into reading a whole bunch of mysteries or romances or thrillers. This is classed and erudite bullshit, of course, but it’s also a symptom of optimization culture and its corroding effects.
Theory 6: Leisure is Bad
I’ve talked about this before, but in grad school my friends and I had a saying that everything that felt bad (studying all the time) was actually “good,” and everything that felt good (hanging out with friends, hiking, not doing work) was actually bad. This is burnout workism bullshit, and at this point most of us recognize it plainly. But it still laces our vision of our days — especially if you’ve been socialized as a woman. If you have time to spare, you should spend that time cleaning, or parenting, or regimining your body, or freezing future meals, or seriously hobbying (and for many, reading is not considered a hobby — although it absolutely is).
Within this framework, reading might as well be napping. And rest is for lazy assholes. To be clear, I don’t believe this — but sometimes I think putting it in very clear and profane terms helps underline just how pernicious these messages are. Why else are we worried about people (and by people, I mean young women) “overconsuming” books? (If you haven’t heard of this discourse, it’s all over BookTok; see this episode of the Culture Study Pod for in-depth discussion). All of this is just half-baked hustle propaganda directing us to think of our leisure as bad, or at the very least, reserved for specific moments on vacation. ●
Numbers — like what we see in the survey data — can only tell us so much. We’re changing what we read, how we read, and why we read, but the reasons why we don’t read (“for pleasure”) are also changing. The survey analysis gives us the prompt; now we get to work through our answers.
I’ve been working through my own reflections, so now it’s time for your own. How are you reading, and how are you reading for pleasure? If you value the practice, do you feel like you’re modeling it for others (especially kids) in your life? If a life has no space to read for pleasure — whatever that reading looks like — is that life too full?
The comments are a subscriber-only space; that’s part of what makes them one of the good places on the internet. We’ve learned how to talk to each other about stuff that matters, and I know that we’ll have a compelling conversation about ~all of this.~ If you’d like to join the discussion — and get this week’s Things I Read and Loved, including the Just Trust Me — subscribe below.