As I’ve said, oh, dozens of times before, I am not a book blogger; I am merely a blogger who occasionally writes about books. That’s not to say, of course, that I don’t read book blogs. They’re a good way for readers to keep abreast of the latest literary developments (… or gossip…). But, we’ve noticed some disturbing trends over the past few years.

Trends that aren’t to do with the blogs themselves, necessarily, but with the world that they’re describing: There’s the decline in mainstream book coverage and suggestions for dealing with it; and then there’s the decline of literary reading, and the increase of books not worth reading to make things look even more grim. But it’ll get sorted, what with all these dedicated folks examining the problem, right?

There is just one tiny, microscopic, minor little thing. I mean, really, it’s probably nothing. But, maybe we bloggers who write about books should ask: Are we all pretty sure that the great mass of the general public can, you know, actually read?

I’m not talking about profound illiteracy (which is a problem, but skip it for now); nor am I attempting to be alarmist in that NY Times, oh lord the Internet is making us stupid kind of way. But literacy, like physical fitness, has many subtle levels.

For example, there are people who can coast through a Pynchon novel like a hot scalpel through a person’s nose. Then again, there are people who fell in love with Harry Potter because it was the first time they had found a book that was both fun and comprehensible.

Listen: I worked with the general public for about a decade, and during that time, I think I’ve learned something.

A big part of my work has been getting people read things to me over the phone. I just needed them to read single, entire sentences to me. Not just the first bit. Not just the last bit. Not a random selection of words that they thought were important. The whole thing. Simple, no?

No. Because at least 90% of my anecdotal sample could not get through a simple sentence in one go. Either they dropped words, mispronounced them, read them in the wrong order, or found them so incomprehensible that they would get to a trouble-spot in the sentence and just stop.

You’d be surprised at how difficult this was for a lot of people. At first, I chalked it up to the generally harried and over-busy lives my customers were living. They didn’t read the whole sentence because they didn’t have the time, they were just too damn busy, and being on the phone with customer service or support is like being tortured.

Except, when I insisted that users read an entire sentence all the way from the beginning to the end, I found that, rather than simply rattling it off as quickly as possible, they struggled, sounding as if they were trying to push-start a Cadillac.

It’s not that these folks couldn’t read. They just weren’t particularly good at it. It seemed as if reading was such a chore and took so much effort, that the only way they could cope with daily life was to develop a strategy whereby they took in only the words that seemed important, trying to get the gist of whatever it is they were looking at.

And hey, even the most sophisticated reader in the world probably does that, sometimes. I’m nowhere near that level and I do it too. We all do, probably.

The thing is that — yes it works, but — it only works well enough. It’s good enough for road signs, and executive summaries, and FARK headlines; but it’s a shitty way to read a book.

If sitting down to read a book is the mental equivalent of heavy-lifting for these normal, everyday sorts of people, it’s little wonder they don’t read for fun and don’t miss the book review section when it disappears from the newspaper. Oh sure, they could pick up a book and skim, skid, and careen from one important-seeming word to the next, but, not being able to enjoy the painstaking construction of concepts as intended by the author, most books would be really dull, if read in that way.

Getting someone from total illiteracy to functional literacy is hard enough, and people who try deserve all the support they can get. But, with all those bookish blogs out there, sounding the warning about lost column inches and waning interest in reading, I haven’t seen much discussion about just how do help people that are functionally literate, but do not read particularly well. I suppose we could say that developing a skill like reading requires a lot practice, then tell anyone who asks for help to pick up a book and sod off — but, that won’t work, will it?

I suppose that it’s much easier to harangue newspapers for their continued shrinkage of their book sections — such actions imply an unwillingness to serve what bookish population exists and, as a bookish person myself, I am dismayed by that. Nobody likes being told his/her group is not worth pursuing, commercially. So, simply tell these corporate, profit-motivated entities to stop shutting down book sections.

That’s certainly easier than trying to increase the overall bookish population, because that would require a much more complicated set of reactions: Public education reform, for one. Something that various groups have been pushing for decades, with not much headway on any of the million fronts currently under contention. It’s a fray that most book bloggers don’t, can’t, or won’t get involved in because it’ll take up all of your time, and break your heart.

Look, it’s complicated. And it’s not an either or proposition, where you have to choose whether you’re going to try to save those things that serve the already book-savvy, verses increasing the book-savvy population. But why all the discussion about the former, and not much talk about the latter?