Flak Magazine Review of Bookmark Now

Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times
Edited by Kevin Smokler


Kevin Smokler opens his introduction to this collection of essays by making reference to the National Endowment for the Arts' much-discussed 2004 study, 'Reading at Risk.' The study made headlines last summer for reporting a number of worrying trends that spanned the demographic spectrum. Not surprisingly, people of all ages and classes, from all corners of the nation, are reading less, buying fewer books and spending more time on other media. The percentage of the population that had, over the course of the entire year, read at least one work of 'literature' (defined broadly enough to include Danielle Steel and 'The Da Vinci Code') fell below the bellwether figure of 50 percent for the first time in the study's history. Even more worrying was a statistic suggesting that the greatest rate of decline in reading was that between ages 18 and 24. The barbarians were close at hand. Flak Magazine 5.31.05