The Amount of Time We Spend Reading

The New Yorker's Book Bench blog has a post up about the findings of a new government survey on how Americans use their leisure time. Among other things, the survey finds that Americans have more and more leisure time because of the economic recession and that the recipient of these bonus hours is the television set:

The Journal also notes that the increase in leisure time brought on by the recession hasn’t resulted, as one might think, in Americans finally getting around to all the productive things (like tackling “War and Peace”) they hadn’t had time for before, but in more television-viewing: an average of two hours and thirty-one minutes per weekday.

The study also finds that despite very clear benefits to a lifestyle that includes regular reading for pleasure, teens only read for six minutes out of every weekend. As Mark Bauerlein puts it:

There is, he writes, a strong correlation between time spent reading for pleasure and academic success: those for whom reading has a “personal import” are better able to grasp complex texts of the kind assigned in a college classroom. Of course, leisure-reading rates among all teens, minority and otherwise, are nothing to smile about: individuals age fifteen-to-nineteen read for pleasure on average only six minutes a day on the weekends.

In an earlier article, Bauerlein argued that this is a bad thing because:

Complex texts aren’t so easily judged. Often they force adolescents to confront the inferiority of their learning, the narrowness of their experience, and they recoil when they should succumb. Modesty is a precondition of education, but the Web teaches them something else: the validity of their outlook and the sufficiency of their selves, a confidence ruinous to the growth of a mind.

To which I would add, all of these purported benefits of reading (confront inferiority of learning, expand experience, etc) would seem to be enhanced when reading international literature.