Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust

The United States is in the grip of a reading recession—nearly half of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2023, and fewer than half read even one, according to data from YouGov and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Since the early 2000s, leisure reading has plunged by nearly 40 percent, a decline mirrored in falling reading scores and broader academic performance. What is at stake is not merely how people spend their free time, but a deeper erosion of the habits that sustain knowledge, empathy, and democratic life.

Decades of research show that the advantages of reading are both wide-ranging and profound. Regular engagement with books strengthens cognition, vocabulary, emotional intelligence, and empathy. These cognitive and social gains are closely linked to higher academic achievement, improved career prospects, greater economic stability, and increased civic engagement. Reading is one of the few activities that consistently bridges social divides—strengthening communities, encouraging civic participation, and sustaining democracy.

“The most important contribution of the invention of written language to the species is a democratic foundation for critical, inferential reasoning and reflective capacities,” writes cognitive neuroscientist and reading researcher Maryanne Wolf in her 2018 book Reader, Come Home. “If we in the 21st century are to preserve a vital collective conscience, we must ensure that all members of our society are able to read and think both deeply and well. … And we will fail as a society if we do not recognize and acknowledge the capacity for reflective reasoning in those who disagree with us.”

Literacy at Its Peak

Understanding the stakes of deep literacy today invites a look back at a time when reading was more than a pastime. More than a century ago, American writer and minister Gerald Stanley Lee captured reading’s transformative power in The Lost Art of Reading (1904): “The novel which gives itself to one to be breathed and lived… is the one which ‘gets a man somewhere’ most of all.”

Often described as America’s “golden age of reading,” the mid-20th century was a period when print media dominated daily life and literacy was widely cultivated across generations, supported by robust libraries, vibrant print journalism, and school curricula that treated reading as a central pillar of cultural participation.

According to NEA surveys, in the late 1940s, roughly 56–57 percent of adults read novels, short stories, poetry, or plays for pleasure. Daily newspaper readership was high, with about 65 percent of adults subscribing to or regularly reading newspapers, according to historical data from the Pew Research Center, while magazines such as Life, Time, and Reader’s Digest reached tens of millions of households.

Children and adolescents also read frequently outside of school, with 60–70 percent engaging in daily or near-daily reading, sustained by libraries, schools, and family practices, according to the National Literacy Trust. The period also saw the rise of shared reading experiences—fueled by organizations like the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild—which broadened access to new titles, shaped national reading tastes, and helped make communal reading a mainstream cultural pastime.

The Data of Decline

By the early 2000s, national surveys were already signaling a decline in leisure reading in the United States. The NEA’s 2007 report “Reading at Risk: To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence” found that only 46.7 percent of adults read literature for pleasure, down from 54 percent a decade earlier.

Subsequent NEA surveys confirmed that the proportion of adults reading 12 or more books per year continued to fall. Gallup polls also reported a decline in the number of books read per year, from an average of 15.6 in 2016 to 12.6 in 2021. Time-use data from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences also shows that the share of Americans reading more than 20 minutes a day for personal interest dropped from 22.3 percent in 2003 to 14.6 percent in 2023.

Reading habits in the U.S. vary sharply by community type, income, and education. According to

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