August 25, 2025
As if writing, scrambling to get published, and being rejected weren’t hard enough, the audience for books appears to be shrinking fast. According to a new study, just 16% of American adults – one in six – read for pleasure on a given day in 2023.
That’s down about 40% since 2003, despite the growth of e- and audiobooks and the explosion of indie publishing. What’s most alarming for the long haul is that only 2% of participants read to their kids. Other recent research has found that Gen Z moms and dads in particular don’t like reading aloud.
I don’t have children and am three generations removed from the Z crowd. That said, I have very little sympathy for those who claim reading to the kiddos is “so boring,” because if I had been raised that way, my life would be quite different.
I was blessed with parents who were avid readers and got me started at a young age. One of my earliest memories is my mother reading The Boats on the River to me, well before I met Dick and Jane in school. When I got older, I moved from DC comics to middle-grade / YA science fiction, then adult SF and Star Trek. I inherited my father’s love of mysteries, including some Agatha Christie, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series, and noir from Raymond Chandler. Like a lot of boys in those times, I read nonfiction about World War II, because all our dads had served. Perhaps best of all, The New Yorker was always in the house along with books by its legendary writers like James Thurber and A. J. Liebling. To this day I’m a New Yorker nerd who knows the magazine has had only five editors in 100 years and can name them.*
All of this had a big influence on my decisions downstream. If I hadn’t learned to love the written word, I might not have taken Our Town to heart and been determined to make the most of every day. I wouldn’t have become a journalist whose stories were broadcast all over the world on the Voice of America. Today, instead of being “retired” and writing fiction, I’d probably still be sweating at some job I couldn’t stand. It goes without saying that all the non-reading kids won’t grow up to be authors either.
That’s why, even though it’s not my genre, I’m encouraged by the excitement about romantasy inspired by Harry Potter fanfic. Hopefully the fans will keep reading after the craze dies down, as all trends do. Meanwhile, I’ll keep querying my historical fiction novel and knocking out short stories, which I also learned to enjoy way back when. I wish my folks could read them, but you can find them here.
*Harold Ross, William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick.