I am embarrassed about my number.
I don't like what it suggests about me. But I'm willing to confess it publicly, in hopes that I will make better choices moving forward.
Here it is: The details are blurry now, but I'm fairly certain I read fewer than 10 books last year.
This puts me below the average for women, who read 14 books in the previous 12 months, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center study. It also puts me below the average for college-educated people, who read 17. The median number of books read annually by American adults is far lower: about five, meaning half of us are reading fewer than five books in a year. But for someone who grew up a bookworm -- consuming at least 50 books a year for most of my youth -- this under-10 realization is shameful.
Oddly, I'm reading all the time: blog posts, pithy tweets, essays on my phone while I wait in lines. But it's byte-sized reading. It's qualitatively different from the immersive, sustained experience of reading a novel or a long work of nonfiction.
I'm not the only book lover who has strayed.
Nicole Thompson of O'Fallon, Missouri, started a book club about six years ago. When the club started, most people would read the selected book, she said, but that gradually changed.
"Over the years, only a couple of people would read the book," Thompson said. One month, not one person finished it.
Like her, the other members are time-starved working mothers. So about six months ago, she allowed the group to pick articles or blog posts instead of full-length novels. This option made it easier to get together during the hectic months of November and December.
"We're not opposed to doing books" in the club, she said. "It's just that people have less time."
Parents consistently say they want to raise readers. Trends show that young boys and older teens are reading less today than they did before smartphones and digital distractions monopolized leisure time, and that's cause for worry. The number of American children who say they love reading books for fun has dropped by nearly 10 percent in the last four years, according to Scholastic's 2015 Kids and Family Reading Report.
It's not that young people don't enjoy reading. It's that the other stuff they enjoy creates incredibly tough competition. Children have near-constant access to media that's either more fun or easier to mindlessly, intermittently consume. The percent of children who play games or apps on an electronic device at least five days a week has risen from a third in 2010 to half of respondents in 2014, according to the Scholastic report.
Even as a middle-aged adult, I can relate.
When I look at posts on Medium, the online publishing platform, I glance at the "reading time" metric posted right above the headline. I've bookmarked long-form essays that end up in the TL;DR (too long; didn't read) digital wastebasket. And I have large stacks of unread books next to my bed, on my desk and in our study room. It's the paradox of this Information Age that I am reading 10 to 12 hours a day and still finishing far fewer books than I did a decade ago.
Would I be happy if my children read as few books as I do currently? Of course not.
I want them to be the voracious book reader I was years ago. I want them to get lost for days in a story, to inhabit richly drawn worlds in their imaginations, to take a journey with a writer and discover new ideas along the way.
There's a socio-economic and educational link between those who read books frequently and those who don't. Those with college and graduate degrees, and those in higher income brackets, report reading the greatest number of books per year. But if our attention spans have shortened or our interests have shifted, our love of books won't translate to future generations.
"We are all capable of reading good books," Thompson said. She doesn't think her book club's evolution to blogs and articles speaks to a change in attention span.
I want to prove her correct by reviving my own book habit.
At this point, it's not even about setting an example for my children.
It's about reconnecting with a part of myself that I miss.