It goes without saying that I enjoy reading – somewhere, amidst all the papers that litter (purposefully) my room,  I have the Accelerated Reader badges from elementary school, and up to a few years ago, I could still fit my “I am an AR Star” shirt that I got in the fifth grade.  My favorite series then was the Boxcar Children (I was a late convert to Harry Potter).

Now, my reading is almost purely (and at times depressingly)  non-fiction: an endless stream of subscriptions to The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs.  You can usually catch me reading two books at a time, one fiction (if not literary) and one not.  (I’m currently finishing Alan Greenspan’s The Age of Turbulence and am starting Tolkein’s The Fellowship of the Ring).

Even as I fret over the lack of color in my reading (occasional pick-ups of The New Yorker or Atlantic), it also goes without saying that all of it is atypical (put kindly) compared to readers themselves, let alone my generation, or the nation as a whole.  According to the NEA’s Reading at Risk, The nation’s readers have declined 7.3 percentage points from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002.  And of those who do read, only 16% consume more than 12 books a year.

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