Are we doomed?

Nobody's reading, and the people who are reading are mostly reading Harry Potter and Twilight and Dan Brown. (I love HP, and read the others, but you must admit that it might be nicer to extend the range a bit ...)

Nearly half of all Americans ages 18 to 24 read no [emphasis mine] books for pleasure. And reading is declining as an activity among teenagers. Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers.

Also, 15-24-year-olds spend about 2.5 hours a day watching TV. A day! And nearly one in four Americans read no books at all. And that's with Harry Potter and Twilight and Dan Brown selling in the millions.

It's not just reading for pleasure, either:

The survey shows that reading for pleasure strongly correlates with academic achievement. The average reading score for high school seniors who read for pleasure almost every day was 302. Those who hardly ever read scored an average of 274. Frequent readers also score better on writing tests than nonreaders or infrequent readers.

Here's the full article.