Unexpected Twist: Fiction Reading Is Up

But what about prose nonfiction? Why did the NEA decide to single out the "literary" category in the first place?

"Because we're the National Endowment for the Arts," Gioia said. When the agency did its first survey, in 1982, it excluded nonfiction from consideration, and that's the long-term database it has to work with. Questions about overall book reading were added later, but the data don't go back as far.

This is understandable, but the result is confusing. It means, for example, that reading Barack Obama's "Dreams From My Father" won't get you counted as a "literary reader" by the NEA.

The confusion is only made worse by the decline the NEA found -- but chose not to emphasize -- in the percentage of adults reading any book.

Why wasn't that the headline?

"We're not interested in the format of this, we're just interested in the activity," Gioia said. But it's true that "the literary reading seems to be going up, and the general reading seems to be going down."

The rise in literary reading, Iyengar pointed out, was the first really significant positive trend the NEA had seen in five surveys done over 26 years. The spike was "aberrational to us," he said. "We were like, 'What's going on with this?' "

One possibility is implied by Gioia's point about format. Could an increase in online reading -- or in the reporting of online reading by survey respondents -- be a factor? After all, the new survey asked specifically about Internet reading for the first time, and nearly 15 percent of adults said they read literature online.

It's not a question the NEA numbers can really answer, Iyengar said. But he pointed out that the overall reading question was asked early in the survey (as it always has been) and thus the later query about online reading would not have influenced responses.

The spike in reading in the 18-24 age range being so high -- it accounted for nearly 40 percent of the overall growth in reported literary reading -- raises another question: Was the "Harry Potter" phenomenon a major factor? The final volume of J.K. Rowling's series came out early in the 12 months covered by the survey, and in the years since the first "Harry" arrived, the young-adult sector has become one of publishing's main growth areas.

Maybe. But Gioia pointed out that Potter books were in stores when the NEA's literary reading rates were still tanking. He was happy, however, to spread around credit for the fiction-reading uptick.

"It's 'Harry Potter' and 'Twilight' and Oprah and the Big Read and the Internet," he said -- though he's not planning to declare victory as he returns to the private sector later this month.

"We've turned around a war that we were losing," Gioia said. "But victory is a long way off."