Reading for pleasure is in painful decline

Exiting the movie theater after a showing of "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," I overheard the following conversation between two teenagers:

Girl 1: "So, what happened at the end?"

Girl 2: "You have to read the book."

Girl 1: "You know I don't read. Just tell me!"

Curmudgeon that I am, I was tempted to draw from this snippet sorrowful and far-reaching conclusions about the state of reading among our youth. The eerily defiant attitude of Girl 1 puts one in mind of Kanye West's bizarre proclamation that he is "a proud nonreader of books."

Being a nonreader is nothing to be proud of. A rise in proud nonreaders would bode ill for the nation's future.

Let us distinguish (as the scholarship does) between what we might call reading as obligation and reading for fun. Presumably, Girl 1 was not suggesting that she skips her academic assignments (although I am willing to believe that she, ahem, economizes on them). It's likely, that her statement "You know I don't read" meant "You know I don't read except when I'm forced to."

A decade ago, a National Endowment for the Arts report, "Reading at Risk," linked the rapid fall in "literary" reading to a decline in civil participation generally. We should be especially worried, the report warned, if we believe "that active and engaged readers lead richer intellectual lives than nonreaders and that a well-read citizenry is essential to a vibrant democracy."

I am one of those believers. Democracy needs readers — in particular, readers of literature. Tackling a book (whether print or e-) is a considerable undertaking, requiring an investment of time, attention and serious thought — and the tougher the text, the more serious the thought. In return, we readers learn the importance of reflection, of patience, of trying to understand another's point of view — all skills that are vital to democratic politics and seriously in decline across the spectrum.

The more of us who reduce reading to no more than an unpleasant obligation, the faster we descend toward the world of Ray Bradbury's novel "Fahrenheit 451." In a much-quoted and much-misconstrued passage in Bradbury's masterpiece, the fire chief, Capt. Beatty, is explaining why they burn books: "What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives."

Beatty's point — and thus Bradbury's — is often overlooked: The censorship that the novel describes moved from the bottom up, not the top down. The motive force wasn't the regime's desire to stifle dissent; the motive force was the public's desire to stifle complexity. To the end of his days, Bradbury insisted that his polemic wasn't against state power; it was against a public that decided to stop reading.

Reading that challenges us is important — for adults and young people alike. I don't mean reading that challenges our ideas; I mean reading that calls upon significant intellectual resources. I mean books that are hard.

Young adult fiction is a fine thing, but the lingering question is whether the upsurge will prove a gateway to literature of greater complexity or whether young people will sit around waiting for the next big trilogy, until at some point they age out of reading for fun completely. We don't yet know the answer, but I remain hopeful.

Which brings us back to the two teenagers outside the movie theater.

In my optimistic imagination, I see Girl 2 refusing Girl 1's entreaties, and Girl 1, still perplexed about an ending that even otherwise favorable reviewers found "an incoherent, rapid blur," decided to pick up the novel after all, and so enjoyed it that she embarked on a lifelong quest to read ever more difficult literary texts, and so to embrace the patience, tolerance and appreciation for complexity so crucial to democracy.

On the other hand, maybe she just looked up a summary on the Internet.