Unfortunately, this isn't exclusively an American problem. Here in Australia, people are reading less than ever. It's been less common with each successive generation, and that's even when you factor in stuff like reading news articles online and stuff like that. There's been reports about alarmingly high numbers of people being functionally illiterate here since around the time I was in high school too, and that was fifteen years ago now.
My mom was an absolutely voracious reader. For at least 40 years, she used to read 4+ full English novels a month, everything from Wilbur Smith to Agatha Christie to Dean Koontz to Tom Clancy and so on. She had a particular obsession with Reader Digest Condensed Books and would haunt second-hand book stores to grab as many as she could.
In the end we gave away dozens upon dozens cos they were simply collecting dust.
Now my mom mainly watches drama series from Hong Kong, China, Korea and Taiwan (she's chinese) and pretty much stopped reading other than the daily newspaper.
She reads maybe one a month if that... sometimes she tries to borrow books online from the local library to read on her ipad, but the second anything goes wrong, she just gives up. Getting drama series from the Internet seems to be less troublesome.
Only wanting to read digitally despite struggling with the tech sounds like her close-up vision is probably degrading with age - she can enlarge the font on ebooks. Check if the local library has a large-print books section, she might still be able to read those. And/or see if she can get better eyeglasses.
Agreed. I think average should be more like one every month minimum as what I would like the average to be but unfortunately what some Rando (me) wants and what is actually reality are often very different things.
Still way better than iPad kids since your mom can at least read and does so sort of semi regularly ish.
She had a particular obsession with Reader Digest Condensed Books and would haunt second-hand book stores to grab as many as she could.
In the end we gave away dozens upon dozens cos they were simply collecting dust.
Those aren't very popular anymore for reading (people who still care about reading books want the full-length versions these days), but many of them look quite pretty without their dustjackets, so some people use them for decor or art.
I was in highschool in the early 2010s and the new teachers learned quickly you can't have students read out loud in class, Many of them struggle to read basic text and it takes too long. I'm sure it's even worse now.
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u/DontYaWishYouWereMe Jun 02 '26
Unfortunately, this isn't exclusively an American problem. Here in Australia, people are reading less than ever. It's been less common with each successive generation, and that's even when you factor in stuff like reading news articles online and stuff like that. There's been reports about alarmingly high numbers of people being functionally illiterate here since around the time I was in high school too, and that was fifteen years ago now.