The Aisle Nobody Walks

Cedar Valley News — February 25, 2026
The Aisle Nobody Walks
By: Lars Olson
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

A man came into my store last week to buy a kitchen faucet. I asked if he had read the installation guide. He had not. I asked what kind of sink he had — top mount, undermount, single hole, three hole. He did not know. He had watched a video. That was the extent of his preparation. He wanted me to tell him what to buy.

I sold him the faucet. He will be back. They always come back.

I have stood behind this counter for thirty-one years. The customers have changed. A man used to walk in and say, “Three-quarter-inch ball valve, brass, threaded, not soldered.” He had read the manual. He understood his problem. He needed the part. Now a man walks in holding up his phone and says, “I need whatever this guy on YouTube said to buy.”

This is not a story about plumbing. It is a story about what happens to a country when it stops reading.

In December, YouGov reported that forty percent of American adults did not read a single book in 2025. The median American read two. Nineteen percent of readers did eighty-two percent of all the reading in the country. Fewer than one in five carried the intellectual weight for the rest. Everybody has an opinion in 2026. Almost nobody has a paragraph.

We live in the most information-saturated society in human history. Yet daily pleasure reading has dropped forty percent in twenty years. Adults between eighteen and twenty-nine averaged fewer than six books for the year. One in five American adults cannot read well enough to follow a prescription label. That number should unsettle us more than any headline.

A Duke University study found that when people relied on artificial intelligence to summarize material for them, comprehension dropped twelve percent. The tool did not sharpen the mind. It weakened it. Understanding decreased because effort disappeared.

Reading requires effort. It asks you to sit still, follow someone else’s reasoning, and wrestle with an idea you did not choose long enough to agree, disagree, or revise your thinking. There is no shortcut. The understanding happens inside the effort. Skip the effort and you skip the understanding. What remains is a man who knows what to buy but has no idea why.

Behind my register hangs my father’s handsaw. The teeth are worn nearly flat from forty years of work. Mildred tells me to throw it away. I tell her a tool used hard shows the wear. A tool left in the drawer stays sharp and useless. The mind works the same way.

I have never met a well-read man who could not think for himself. I have never met a man who read nothing and could.

A good column walks straight to the aisle. But the aisle is empty if nobody prepared before they came. A man who reads enters the room ready to ask questions. A man who does not enters ready to be told what to think. One leaves with understanding. The other leaves with whatever someone decided to sell him.

I am not arguing that everyone must read a book a week. People work long hours. People are tired. Many learn with their hands, and I respect that kind of learning. But there is a difference between reading a little and reading nothing. Forty percent of this country crossed that line.

The man who reads a little still has a chance. The man who reads nothing has handed his thinking to whoever talks loudest, posts fastest, or pays the most to reach his screen.

Mildred reads every night. Fifty years now. She once said it is how she keeps her mind her own. I used to smile at that. Now I think she has been practicing the quietest resistance in Cedar Valley and nobody noticed.

Mark Twain said it plainly: “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot.” Forty percent of America just proved him right.

Pick up a book tonight. It does not matter which. What matters is that you chose it, you read it, and you decided for yourself what it meant.

The man who reads decides. The man who does not gets decided for.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Want to know the full story behind Cedar Valley? Teresa, Caleb, Dan, and the community you’ve come to know in these editorials first came together in Quiet Echo. Discover how a small town found its way from fear to fellowship—one quiet act of courage at a time. Available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3ME4nSs

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