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Well, we won. Kind of.

I think in my very firstest blog post I referenced a study by the National Endowment for the Arts that showed there'd been a decline in literary reading among adults every year for the last quarter century. But 2008 was different.

In a study conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau - "The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts" - data showed that the number of adults who in the last year had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play...had risen. From 46.7% at the time of the last survey to a whopping 50.6% last year. Is this marginal? Possibly! Is it meaningful data? Who knows?!

This article in the Times details the virtues and false hopes of the report. I'm a little skeptical that the census appears to count reading one short story or one poem as a reason to put someone in the 'reader' column. But then there's all the reading that people do online that, one person suggests, may not have counted. Also, should the "Twilight" series count as 'literary' reading? Were the people who read Clay Aiken's memoir, Learning to Sing: Hearing the Music in Your Life, automatically deducted from the list? Just to be safe, did they have their eyes gouged? And their ears speared with pencils? Am I really pandering for hits by needlessly knocking Clay Aiken again?

This paragraph from the actual article is a good summary of everything I just said:

In each survey since 1982 the data did not differentiate between those who read several books a month and those who read only one poem. Nor did the surveys distinguish between those who read the complete works of Proust or Dickens and those who read one Nora Roberts novel or a single piece of fan fiction on the Internet.

It seems the faltering economy might help out with the nation's literary reading rate. Because libraries are free, and people don't have money anymore, there's been this sort of strange convergence of people and libraries lately. Already circulation numbers have seen a little boost in the last couple months. This despite the fact that the faltering economy has been devastating to the publishing world - New York's answer to Hollywood, to be sure - where half the industry's editors and publishers have been laid off or denied their retreats to the Caribbean.  

I wonder if, in Minnesota, the literacy rate climbs every winter because no one wants to leave home. Certainly today's weather (Dude, did I hear negative forty wind chill?) makes me extremely thankful that I get paid (marginally) to sit in my room and read. I wonder if our winters are one of the primary reasons that we're usually ranked as being (among) the state(s) with the highest literacy rate(s).

So then if you mix together a crap economy with crap weather, really everyone should be reading this blog. But does that count as literature? I'm going with yes, yes it does.