The decline of pleasure reading may not be quite as steep as it seems. The amount of U.S. adults who partake in literary reading in 2015 has dropped 3.9 percent, according to the National Endowment for the Arts’ Annual Arts Basic Survey. The number of U.S. adults who partake in literary reading now stands at 43.1 percent. According to the survey, literary reading is literature such as poetry, plays, short stories or novels.
Despite this decline, the amount of U.S. adults who read for pleasure has stayed at 80 percent from 2011 to 2016, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Even though this survey did not specify the content of “pleasure reading,” it still shows that a good amount of people still enjoy reading.
Katie Mihaly, library associate, said the University Library’s leisure reading section has gotten a lot of attention. The section has been in the library since January 2017, and within 2017 300 checkouts were made in the section. It contains about 50 bestsellers — including novels, cookbooks, memoirs and celebrity biographies, graphic novels and popular non-fiction.
“The reason we did it is because we would get a lot of questions like, ‘I just want something to read for fun, where would that be?’ and the way our collection is set up, there wasn’t really an area where you could just browse and find something to read. So, we wanted to provide that,” Mihaly said.
Mihaly said she switches out novels in order to keep the leisure reading section recent. One shelf of the collections has a number of bestseller and the second shelf usually contains a theme. The theme for this month is “Black Artists.”
She also said the University Library provides Kindles that students can check out. These Kindles have about 50 to 60 bestsellers on them that students can choose from for pleasure reading.
Mihaly also said that students may start reading more after they are done with school. In her experience, she never had time to read when she was in school, but now it is part of her routine after work.
