Literally speaking

On Friday, the Indiana Daily Student ran a story about the decline of reading for pleasure among college students. According to a study done by the National Endowment for the Arts, 65 percent of college freshmen spend less than an hour a week reading for pleasure, or don’t read for pleasure at all – and, for seniors it’s 63 percent. Young adults, defined by the study as 15- to 24-year-olds, read for pleasure only seven to 10 minutes per day, compared to two to two-and-a-half hours spent watching television. All this, the organization warns, will harm the U.S. economy and society, as reading for pleasure boosts reading comprehension, which, in turn, is positively related to economic competitiveness and civic involvement.\nBut more important than its potentially negative impact on the economy or society is this trend’s potentially negative impact on me. \nIt’s an open secret that the Opinion page is packed with wannabe writers and novelists – and yours truly is no exception. Our brethren on the news pages might dream of working for The New York Times, but many columnists, I suspect, are more likely to dream of getting on The New York Times Best Seller list. \nThis, of course, means that our job prospects are even worse than our reporter colleagues – and whenever you get angry at a column, you can take solace in the fact that its writer will probably starve to death two to three years after leaving IU (charitable donations can be sent to Brian McFillen c/o the IDS Opinion Page, Ernie Pyle Hall Room 120, 940 E. Seventh St., Bloomington, Ind., 47405). And even those of us who sell out and get, you know, jobs are only able to face the day-to-day grind by resting sure in the knowledge that, if we could just get past finishing the third chapter in our novel, we would rock the literary world in a way that hasn’t been seen since the Algonquin Roundtable closed up shop. (If you don’t know what the Algonquin Roundtable was – well, see, that’s part of the problem with not reading.)\nThus, I want you to sit down and read something for pleasure today (besides this column, of course). I know, I know, you’re saying “But I have homewoooorrrrkkk!!!” But you can’t con me – this year the Princeton Review ranked IU No. 18 for students who (almost) never study. And it’s not like that anthropology article on the sexual practices of Bonobo apes is going to teach you any techniques that you don’t already know. \nLook at it this way: It’s for the sake of your future job prospects. The study reported that 63 percent of employers ranked reading comprehension as very important while 28 percent complained that college graduates are deficient in written communication.\nAnd on my end, I’ll hunker down and try to make sure there’s enough reading material – I’m just to the part in my novel where the critics realize that the tough but sexy columnist is totally misunderstood.