A Case for Pleasure Reading in Grad School (opinion)

"The work by authors at University College London and the University of Florida used data from the American Time Use Survey to look at how time spent reading for pleasure has changed in the United States over the past 20 years. The terrible news is that fewer and fewer people are reading, falling off at a rate of 3 percent per year, even as gaps in time spent reading for pleasure across different races, education levels and incomes have grown."

"Whatever your field, graduate school is fundamentally about a few critical tasks: identifying and filling gaps in your earlier education that might keep you from taking up your chosen academic discipline, finding a problem or question to work on, defining your strategy for addressing the problem you have chosen, acquiring the knowledge you need to carry out that strategy, carrying out that strategy by doing your dissertation work, publishing what you have learned, and laying the intellectual groundwork for whatever comes next"

Data from the American Time Use Survey show that time spent reading for pleasure in the United States has declined roughly 3% per year over the past 20 years, with widening gaps across race, education, and income. Reduced leisure reading raises concerns about its impact on the development of future scholars. Scholarly reading faces additional pressures from a rapidly expanding literature, variable growth across fields, and the emergence of AI-generated papers of uncertain prevalence. Relevant information increasingly arrives via podcasts, videos, and growing gray literature, complicating discovery and comprehension. Graduate training requires filling educational gaps, selecting problems, defining strategies, acquiring knowledge, executing dissertation work, publishing findings, and preparing for subsequent work.

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