Stephen Krewson | An age of unreading?

Walking into the Penn Bookstore yesterday, I smiled to see the Campus Bestseller display. A prominent stripe of Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) ran across it, three books wide and ten books in length. Below them, I spotted several copies of Susan Jacoby's just-released The Age of American Unreason. The juxtaposition could not have been more revealing: Satire, it seems, has become the dominant mode of confrontation with an increasingly stupid, irrational and ignorant American society.

But if your eye is caught only by Colbert's narcissistic cover, you are either missing out on a vital piece of cultural criticism or dumb enough to be part of the problem yourself.

Several of Jacoby's contentions are worth considering with respect to the current intellectual climate on Penn's campus.

Her most disturbing allegations deal with the death of discourse outside the classroom: "The late-night and all-night conversations that were such a staple of student life for generations have given way to whatever individual experiences are going on in rooms where everyone is online or in an iPod cocoon," she wrote.

Jacoby's two pet peeves - computers and iPods - highlight the absence of her pets: conversations and books. Indeed, the national decline of reading leads to Jacoby's most despondent moments: "The nation's memory and attention span may already have sustained so much damage that they cannot be revived." When an NEA study in 2002 found that less than half of American adults had read a work of fiction or poetry within the preceding year, it's hard not to agree.

But what's the prognosis for our own Ivy-garnished community? Reading, it turns out, is the second-most popular interest of the 38,822 members of the UPenn Facebook network.

The books they're reading, however, are a mixed bag, ranging from the unabashedly populist (No. 1 Harry Potter) to the hopelessly romantic (No. 7 Pride and Prejudice). Interspersed are classics (No. 2 The Great Gatsby), trash (No. 3 Angels and Demons) and even one selection of nonfiction (No. 8 Freakonomics) - unless you're one of those folks who includes The Bible (No. 10) in the last category.

Of course, this method isn't scientific, but it still makes for fun observational studies like the one performed by Cal Tech grad-student Virgil Griffith. His "Booksthatmakeyoudumb" Web site graphs the correlation between the favorite books listed on a college's Facebook network and that college's mean SAT score.

Griffith then assigned each book an adjusted SAT score out of 1600. Penn ranked 16th among U.S. schools, dragged down by The Count of Monte Cristo (1066) but buoyed by Freakonomics (1275). The overall lesson? Read more Nabokov: Lolita is the "smartest" book on today's campuses. Incidentally, the Kelly Writers House (my workplace) will be hosting a marathon reading of Lolita on March 27. I'll be there - and I haven't even read it.

Even a mustard seed of self-motivation can blossom into a lifetime of reading and inquiry when combined with the fertile academic climate at Penn.

Each research paper should lead to other texts; each assigned reading to related works of interest.

Forming reading habits can be hard, but for me at least, they're well worth it. But surveys of students from Penn and surrounding schools also gave me a more nuanced picture of the situation on college campuses, of the constraints of time and work, of the very real need to be "brainless" sometimes.

"I like writing analytical essays, but in my leisure time, I kind of like to tune out," said Drexel sophomore Holly Conrad. "I just had a conversation today with a friend who kind of made fun of me for not wanting to think while I read."

Ironically, a fuller exploration will have to wait. Jacoby laments the MTV mentality common in today's print media. Case in point: The Daily Pennsylvanian's editorial page recently slashed its target length for a column from 750 to 600 words. This soundbyte's over.

Stephen Krewson is a College sophomore from Schenectady, N.Y. His e-mail is krewson@dailypennsylvanian.com. Every Other Time appears alternating Tuesdays.

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