READERS

Some people are much more likely than others to become members of the reading class. “The patterns are very, very predictable,” Griswold told me. First, and most intuitively, the more education someone has, the more likely they are to be a reader. Beyond that, she said, “urban people read more than rural people,” “affluence is associated with reading,” and “young girls read earlier” than boys do and “continue to read more in adulthood.” Race matters, too: The NEA’s data indicate that 60 percent of white American adults reported reading a book in the last year outside of work or school, which was a higher rate than for African Americans (47 percent), Asians (45 percent), and Hispanic people (32 percent). (Some of these correlations could simply reflect the strong connection between education and reading.)

Of course, possessing any of these characteristics doesn’t guarantee that someone will or won’t become a reader. Personality also seems to play a role. “Introverts seem to be a little bit more likely to do a lot of leisure-time reading,” Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, told me.

children who grew up surrounded by books tend to attain higher levels of education and to be better readers than those who didn’t, even after controlling for their parents’ education.

Paul also advised that parents seed books throughout the house, not stash them “preciously in your own bedroom, away from everyone else, or in one [specific] area of the house.” It may seem expensive to assemble a large home library, but Paul points out that it’s cheap to buy used books and free to borrow lots of them. “You don’t need a lot of money to fill your home with books … [and] it’s very hard to have a bored child when there are always books around,” she said.

At one point in our interview, Russo referred to reading as a “private pleasure-delivery system,” which seems like a key way to think about getting kids to read: There are, as so many parents are all too aware, loads of benefits to being able to read in terms of later-in-life outcomes, but the focus should be on helping kids discover the intrinsic value in it, in the moment. After that, other good things will come.