Fewer than half of US adults read a book last year.
— Athenaeum Book Club (@athenaeumbc) April 30, 2026
Even fewer read an actual novel, and the trend is looking worse still for teenagers.
Why is nobody talking about this?? pic.twitter.com/OHP5jzo2vg
This number is about the same among college professors.
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Clarissa's Blog 
Pathetic.
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Why would they?
An illiterate population is one that will not understand contracts, laws, rights, and on and on and on.
Essentially an illiterate population is prey to those predatory narcissists who have delusions of becoming the new nobility. It is in their best interest to not only not report this growing issue, but to encourage it.
Its the same reason there is no real urgency to do something about the massive uptick of those who can’t read or write. After all its hard to call them out on their corruption if you can’t read the laws.
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I’d be more horrified if my usual books-per-month finish rate had not recently been poleaxed by The Complete Novels of Anthony Trollope, and The Collected Works of St. Gregory Nazianzen. Those are like 85% of my time-spent-reading at the moment, and if I wasn’t sneaking in a dumb novel here and there (usually while migrainous), I would not be finishing any books. Possibly for the rest of the year…
But that hardly means I didn’t read anything! It’s just that in the same time it takes me to read a dumb genre novel, I can put in a tremendous effort and get through maybe 30 pages of St. Gregory.
None of these metrics make any sense if they don’t say what people are reading.
-ethyl
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So true! I’ve been reading the Diaries of Rafael Chirbes for 3 years and I’m a about halfway done. I keep returning to the beginning, I research the books and the movies he mentions, the process is so much fun that I don’t see a reason to rush it.
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IKR? Last year, maybe the year before, I read Vladimir Lossky’s *Mystical Theology*. I understood very little of it. Like, I don’t feel like I can honestly say I read it at all. But I want to read it again and understand what he’s talking about, so I’ve turned his bibliography into an epic “to-read” list that I’ve been plodding through ever since: St Gregory of Nyssa, St. Basil the Great, St. Ephraim the Syrian… Planning to read Lossky again maybe after I get through John of Damascus in… another 3 years 😉
I’m sure it’s good for my soul or something. But for the pedantic data-collecting part of me that loves graphs and numbers and quantities, it’s been a disaster.
ethyl
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