“I am not aware of a time after the rise of mass literacy when reading did not compete with other forms of leisure: dance halls, theater, and religious revivals, plus cinema, art galleries, and, more recently, video games. It may feel as though we read less now than we did before the advent of smartphones and social media, but statistics do not bear that out. In January of last year, Gallup found that Americans were consuming books at roughly the same rates as in 2002.”