Newsweek has a sobering article on the state of literature in our society. Based on report by National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), less than half of Americans read for pleasure. One of the best lines of the report:  "Indeed, at the current rate of loss, literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century." Nice! That's not good.

Using Census Bureau data, the NEA found that the number of Americans who say they've even opened a single book of fiction, let alone a poem or a play, over the course of a year has declined by 10 percent, from 56.9 percent in 1982 to 46.7 percent today. It gets worse. Young adults between 18 and 34, a category that once claimed the status of most-active readers, is now the lowest, dropping 28 percent since 1982. And by literature, "we're not talking about the number of people who reread Proust," says Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA. "Literature" means simply any books that people read without guns pointed to their heads. "If people read even three pages of a Harlequin romance, it got counted."