MAKING WAVES

Poetry reading is up in America while reading books for pleasure is down slightly. So says the National Endowment for the Arts, which has published the results of a study, “U.S. Trends in Arts Attendance and Literary Reading:

2002-2017.” The study shows the percentage of adults who read books (those not required by school or work) fell to

52.7 percent in 2017, compared with

54.6 percent in 2012 and 56.6 percent in 2002. Adults reading fiction (novels and short stories) dropped from

45.2 percent in 2012 to 41.8 percent in 2017. Poetry reading surged a remarkable 76 percent, to 28 million in 2017. Numbers were especially strong among those ages 18 to 24.