What The Hell America!

When was the last time you read a book?

According to a new NPR/Ipsos poll, reading is something a majority of Americans enjoy, and want to get better at. But it’s nowhere near a top priority.

The online survey, conducted in late February, heard from a representative sample of more than 2,000 American adults.

According to the poll, 82% of respondents think reading is a useful way to learn about the world, 76% say reading is relaxing and a whopping 98% of respondents with children in their household want their children to “develop a love of reading.”

Reading is “certainly aspirational,” said Mallory Newall, vice president of Public Polling at Ipsos. “We certainly want to be a reading nation.” And yet 51% of people read a book in the past month, according to the poll. In comparison, about 80% of people watched streaming services, used social media or watched a short-form video.

Interestingly, respondents who classify themselves as readers are also more likely than non-readers to consume other forms of media. So it’s not necessarily a direct competition between, say, reading and scrolling on your phone. When asked about the “reasons you don’t read more,” “other life activities” was the most common answer, which could mean anything from doing chores to sleeping to hanging out with friends.

“I think reading is up against the fact that we just don’t have enough time in the day. It’s not one particular thing,” said Newall.

But for many Americans it’s not going to take precedence. When asked what they’d do with one extra hour of leisure time, the top of the list is spending time with family. Below that is a tied race between watching TV, reading and exercising.

“Women are significantly more likely than men to say that they would spend that extra hour reading,” Newall said. “Folks with a higher education are much more likely than those with lower educational attainment to say the same thing.”

Thrillers top the list of genres

Among the population who are reading, what are they reading? The thriller, crime, mystery category of books is the clear winner, with 37% of respondents choosing it as their favorite genre. There’s a second tier of favorites with 24% of respondents choosing historical non-fiction, and memoir and historical fiction tied at 21%.

While reading tastes vary by gender and age, there are some patterns to note. Newall said it was women and respondents over 50 years old driving the thriller genre to the top of the list. But women’s tastes tend to vary more than men, who “coalesce around nonfiction or historical nonfiction,” she said.

Age, in general, plays a large factor in reading. Respondents over the age of 65 are the ones actually carving out time in their day to read. Newall said there’s a transition of sorts we undergo over the course of our lives. “By the time we get older, reading is more ingrained in our daily or weekly routine,” she said. Which is understandably easier if you don’t have young kids, or are retired.

And for younger people, as aspirational as reading more may be, they say “it’s lower priority and frankly, that it’s a little boring,” said Newall.

Meghan Sullivan contributed to the development of this poll and edited the story for radio and the web.