By Maggie Downs
Enquirer staff writer

Ed Barnes of Mount Washington doesn't get around to many books.

"I spend so much time reading magazines, I don't have time for books anymore," he said.

Rita Miller of Price Hill prefers to stick to the facts by reading biographies.

"I don't enjoy anything more than learning how a person struggled and went through life," she said.

Janet Essen and her son Scott, 11, shop for books at Joseph Beth Booksellers at Rookwood Commons. (Melissa Heatherly photo)

These Cincinnati folks are not alone. A national survey, released July 8, showed that most adults aren't reading literature, even with all of Oprah Winfrey's valiant book club efforts.

"Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America," put together by the National Endowment for the Arts, said that fewer adults read novels, short stories, poetry or plays. And most often, younger adults are doing the snubbing.

The study of 17,000 adults found that from 1982 to 2002, the number of literary readers declined by 10 percent. Only 46.7 percent of adults said they are reading literature, compared with 56.9 percent 20 years ago.

The figures are based on data collected by the Census Bureau in 2002.

The survey indicated women read more literature than men, even though reading by both genders is declining.

Literary reading also declined among whites, African-Americans and Hispanics. Among ethnic and racial groups surveyed, literary reading decreased most among Hispanic Americans, dropping 10 percent.

"This report documents a national crisis," said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. "The decline in reading among every segment of the adult population reflects a general collapse in advanced literacy."

Education appeared to be a major factor. Only 14 percent of adults with a grade school education read literature in 2002. By contrast, more than five times as many respondents with a graduate school education - 74 percent - read literary works.

In Cincinnati, the numbers look a little brighter.

Through June of this year, circulation of books and other print materials (such as magazines) at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, was 4,618,575, a less than 1 percent increase over last year for the same period. But while the number of books being checked out has stayed fairly flat, the population in Hamilton County is drastically decreasing.

"So we're serving fewer people, but they're reading more materials," said executive director Kim Fender.

More than 2.3 million of those materials were adult materials, meaning not in the children's department. Among those, many were fiction.

"Typically, the single most popular category of books are novels, particularly from best-selling authors," Fender said.

Stephanie Porter, new books manager at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, said they're not seeing a drop in literary reading either.

"Fiction is very trendy," Porter said.

While former President Clinton's biography is the hot tome of the moment, the bookstore has also been selling a significant amount of fiction. Among them: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy's 1877 classic, which was a book club pick by Oprah.

Cindy Mahin, who teaches advanced placement literature at Walnut Hills High School, said she doesn't get any groans about her assignments, like the Oedipus trilogy, Heart of Darkness or Hamlet.

"I don't have any trouble getting my kids into the literature," she said. "Part of the problem is that there's a lot of really crappy literature out there. But some of it is really great."

The key, Mahin said, is making literature comprehensible.

"It's showing people that these things are funny, accessible, sexy, real - that they're about us," she said. "Think about Othello, a guy who didn't understand what love was, but felt it and was easily led into being jealous. High school kids understand that."

The NEA study said technology could be to blame for the decrease in reading, with people spending more of their leisure time on computers instead of with a book. But Fender said the Cincinnati library circulation has continued to rise every year, even with the growth of the Internet.

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E-mail mdowns@enquirer.com