i am a student at the universtiy of south australia. i was wondering if anyone could perhaps email me with a 'no frills' definition of 'reader positioning', as i cant find anything satisfying on the web at this point. thank you!

Carylon makes a great point in saying "we may not see a reversal of the trend but we may learn how to measure the effects of literature differently". The truth has come to be that almost everything we do as Americans has been conditioned by popular culture. Seriously, who is Oprah? Where did she go to college? I don't know the first thing about her taste—nor does she mine. So why would I purchase a book based on her recommendation? And what exactly does the “Harry Potter phenomenon” do that Joyce, Nabokov and Hemmingway can’t? Okay, that might be a little extreme. But even the Best Selling Da Vinci Code’s content is over-simplified and offers no basis of critical study beyond the fact that it’s historically inaccurate. What I’m trying to say it that, perhaps in order to achieve literary popularity in contemporary society, the content of the book has to include extreme elements of the fantastic—witchcraft, occult, conspiracy—elements that function as an escape from the time consuming reality through which we traverse. The content of these “fun” and “fast” reads is essentially one-dimensional, and thus offer little room for intellectual interpretation. Unfortunately, the emphasis on the importance of literature is only exercised through education in America, which means that J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown are here to stay. It is, however, better than nothing.

I think Carolyn made an excellent point of the "time restraint". In a society that is dominated by the up-and-coming tv show, movie star, singer, computer, cell phone (when's the last time someone read about an up and coming author in a widely circulated magazine?) we've come to believe we don't have the time. But time hasn't really gone anywhere, has it? We still have the time-we just don't make it. Literature has faded into the background of our ever-distracting lives and I'm not sure how to bring it back into the foreground.

I don't exactly have time to read everyone's comments thus far on the Reading At Risk article- so I apologize in advance if I somehow repeat what everyone's been posting. In general, I think that surveys do in fact offer sufficient evidence, but at the same time, did every single American participate in this survey? Surveys, to me, offer a very vague pool of results, and while they can be helpful, they also cannot account for everyone in this country.

I am not saying reading rates are in fact NOT decreasing. I believe that. But are they that much? I was not a part of this survey; were you? We are both in school (or teach it Paul) and that alone requires a ton of reading. I think as we mentioned we must look at the education system and if the number of people that attend school is rising, then we can assume reading rates will go up as well. But do we really know if more people are attending school? I think this is ALL a bunch of hypotheticals and generalizations.

It's hard to come to an exact conclusion about all of this. I think it has been an issue for quite some time regarding reading activity among the general public. People in school should be left out of it. Movies, as we again mentioned, take over- and in class someone made a good point that it's easy and more relaxing than reading a book. I think it's also important to mention that because we are all so busy, you can catch a movie in two hours but a book may take several days. We are taking the lazy approach, and we have re-iterated that over and over because I think we all agree that laziness is a big factor in the results of this survey. Or rather, the reasoning behind its results.

This all makes me wonder what the same survey results would maybe 15 years from now. But at the same time, I certainly don't think any of us need to worry that Barnes and Noble or Amazon.Com will go out of business. Ever.

Theres not really much left to be said concerning the "Reading at Risk" article, and I agree with just about every point made so far. Americans in general watch alot of tv, spend just as much time on the internet and are shackled to their cell phones. But I don not necessarily believe that the number of people reading, and the number of books being read is actually decreasing. Instead, I think that there has been a population boom of uneducated people, and this increase is causing the drop in the percentage of people who read. People who are less educated tend to have higher birthrates and less wealth. This is a perpetuating cycle that exponentially increases the number of uneducated people that do not read. The equation is as follows:
(LESS WEALTH = LESS EDUCATION)
(LESS EDUCATION = HIGH BIRTHRATE)
= (SHIT LOAD OF PEOPLE WHO DON'T READ)SQUARED

I agree with what has been said so far about the Reading at Risk article. I myself was scared to see the statistics of my age group and how steep of a drop we have taken in our reading of literature. I think another big thing (especially for gossip lovers) are magazines. It has come to a point where they are practically jumping off the shelves at you everywhere you go. From grocery stores to gas stations they are everywhere inviting you to read about your favorite celebrities. They encourage you spend time that you could use reading a good novel and instead catch up on who's dating whom in Hollywood. I come from a home where reading was really pushed at a young age. My mom was an English teacher and now is a reading specilist at a middle school and her love of reading has always be evident. Even now when I go home, the bookshelves are overflowing with novel after novel that she is planning on reading but just hasn't had the time. It's not that the love of reaiding isn't there, it's the time that's not available. I think that is something we have to keep in mind that like everyone else has said we live in a fast paced busy world that is allowing less and less time for reading.

I like what Carolyn said about Americans having so little time to indulge in reading. It's ironic isn't it, that many of the most popular inventions in the last century were "time saving devices" and yet our free time is now scarcer than ever? Just as dishwashers and vacuum cleaners didn't free our parents and grandparents, so have cell phones, PC's and remote car starters failed to increase our quantity of quality of life. The solution however is ridiculously easy. Turn off the TV. Permanently. Cold turkey. Go ahead, you can do it. I've been without it since 1992, and with the exception of last year's Pennant and the World Series (which is what bars are for) I haven't missed it one bit. I always feel a little self-consciously holier-than-thou when I talk about this to people, so forgive me if I come across as preachy, but my quality of life is better without television. I've been juggling full-time employment and 2 credits per semester for six years and I still find the time to read for pleasure. And believe it or not, but my wife and I actually spend time having conversations (how quaint), which have nothing to do with CSI or Survivor. It's really that easy.

I'm not surprised to read that American's don't read as much as they used to. How could they? There just isn't time, anymore, to enjoy the luxury of reading for pleasure. We have developed into a nation that places a great value on speed - fast cars, fast food, fast internet connection, even speed reading... We do not give ourselves the time necessary to read and evaluate what we read. It is sad.
I was raised to love reading - we spent a great deal of time reading and talking about what we had read. More often than not, our parents had read the book so there was plenty of discussion. Now we have discussion about last night's episode of "Survivor"! I am encouraged, though, by the "Harry Potter" phenomenon. I don't think these books will ever be judged as great literature but JK Rawlings found a formula that made kids want to read books. I think it's called a good story?!
They seem to be taking that experience and applying it to more challenging books. My grandson devoured one of the Harry Potter book's more than 700 pages in less than a week. Then he called me to say "hurry up and finish it - I want to discuss it with you". Having had, and enjoyed, that experience encourages him to read more books. This is much like the "chick lit" course reading "Bridget Jones' Diary" and learning about Jane Austen - it's all in there!
So I'm optimistic. I think educators will find a way to take popular literature and relate it to the great books. We may not see a reversal of the trend but we may learn to measure the effects of literature differently.

After reading Andrew Solomon's article on literacy, I completely agree with his statement about "learning to love to read." My question is how do you teach someone to love to read? As a future educator, how do you teach young students to LOVE to read when there is so much technology in our world? The only way that I know how to teach this is for students to make connections with literary texts. I think that teaching students to love to read is not an easy task, maybe one of the hardest tasks as a teacher.

For English majors in general and for all the aspiring writers in class who wish to sell books in the not-too-distant future this is certainly bad news. But is it really news? Is anyone surprised? Our culture has long been on the path of self-destruction through self-consumption; our national emblem could well be that of a snake eating its own tale. Whoops, typo there. I mean tail. Or do I? The land that brought motion pictures and subsequently television (the defining texts of the latter 20th century) to the world is now hardly capable of producing anything truly unique. Cookie cutter sequels and seasonal doses of formulaic pabulum are presented with ever-increasing measures of pomp and promotion to a public that seems content to eat anything that's thrown at it. Been to Chili's lately? A chilling harbinger of doom hit the bookstores a decade ago in the form of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. The book of the movie. The children's book of the movie. The fucking children's book of the fucking movie. Oh well, why do I care? The illusionary feat of "reinvention" is the goal of the new millenium.
And let's face it: of the 50 or so percent of people surveyed who actually read a book in the last year, a good 90 percent of those probably didn't dive much deeper than The South Beach Diet, Dan Brown or the latest offal from Kellerman, Grisham, Roberts, etc. etc. etc. Depressing isn't it? It would be easy to conclude that we are a nation without an imagination, however if you look at the advances in our culture in the last 20 years it's obvious that we continue to create and evolve like never before. From whence springeth this imagination? Is is possible that Friends, Destiny's Child, Magnum PI and Halloween 5 are sufficient nutrition for a modern republic on the go? Or are we too distracted by all the pretty lights to see our imminent fall, propped up as we may be by the still-breathing pillars of preceding generations who remain unscathed by entertainment-on-demand? Although the link to Harold Bloom's response didn't work when I tried it, I can imagine his elegiac cry as he screamed "I told you so! I told you so!" while demanding to be lashed to the rudder like a proud captain determined to go down with his ship. Alas, poor Harold takes himself too seriously. And me? Everytime the world gets me down, every time I feel that there's no sense in keepin' keepin' on, I think: At least I'm not Canadian.