Who Reads in America?

By Mark Schurmann, Pacific News Service. Posted January 19, 2006.

Two years ago, while sitting in a café in Brooklyn on a cold winter night, I ran into "Chicago Mike." In the crook of his arm he held a thick and tattered book. I asked him what he was reading and he told me it was the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon. I asked him if it was the abridged edition.

"No, it's one volume of the un-abridged text. Who needs to read the edited version?"

After ordering a cup of coffee, and with a smile on his face, he got on his bike and rode off into the snow. Mike delivered weed for a living.

The other day I read in a local paper that the department of education had released a report describing the eroding literacy skills of college students in America. One wonders if this is a bellwether for the country as a whole. What does it mean when high-achieving college students are reading less proficiently than their counterparts a generation ago? Are we slowly becoming a nation of non-readers?

This isn't the first time I've seen a red flag raised. Ten years ago Lewis Lapham heralded the death of literature in a published letter to his nephew (himself an aspiring writer) in Harper's magazine. I wondered then, as I do now: Could this be true?

I've always found literacy and literature outside the mainstream and in the private corners and cracks of society. Below Manhattan, in the city's subway system you can find more readers of classical and contemporary literature than you can in all the city's libraries. I wonder how the report might have come out had NYC subway riders been tested?

I once helped run writing workshops in the maximum security units (cell blocks) in Juvenile Halls in San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland. Young inmates, considered the worst offenders in the Juvenile system, found themselves confined to a small cell for the majority of the day. In many of the units even paper and pencil were considered contraband. Though desperate to get out and resume their lives, many of the kids confessed that before doing time they had never finished a book.

Among the titles I was asked to bring in by kids in the program were The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas and, on one occasion, Oscar Wilde's De Profundis.

Rob Tell was an old roommate. A college dropout, he worked a variety of jobs to earn a living -- bike messenger, shuttle driver, spot carpenter. Some years, Rob would follow the harvest trails. He spent his late summers in Maine raking blueberries, early fall in Massachusetts picking cranberries and he harvested beets in Minnesota in February. In a bar or at home, Rob could recite verse from Dylan Thomas or William Blake or a sonnet by Shakespeare, and always at an appropriate moment, either to break up a fight or during a toast.

Schurmann, an avid reader, works for New America Media, a collaboration of ethnic media in the United States.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Media and Technology! Sign up now »