The More You Read

Two reports landed in April 2026. Neither made the front page. Together, they tell a story every author needs to understand.

The first came from the National Literacy Trust in the United Kingdom. The organization had surveyed more than 114,000 children and young people aged five to eighteen. Its finding was stark: children’s reading enjoyment has reached a twenty-year low. Only one in three children aged eight to eighteen say they enjoy reading in their free time. Thirty-six percent fewer children enjoy reading now than in 2005. A report released alongside the data warned: the “relentless” focus on measuring literacy progress in schools has “pushed reading for pleasure to the margins.”

The second came from the Pew Research Center in the United States. In a survey of more than 8,000 American adults, researchers found 75% of Americans had read at least one book in the past 12 months. Sixty-four percent had read a print book. The physical book, declared dead by technology forecasters for twenty years, remains the most common way Americans choose to read.

Read both reports together and a question forms. If children are losing the love of reading — and adults are still reaching for books by the millions — something is happening in the years between childhood and adulthood. Something is either being lost along the way or found.

What turns a child who endures reading into an adult who chooses it? Not a test score. Not a standardized measure of phonemic awareness. A book someone handed them at the right moment — one they could not put down.

In 1955, a researcher named Rudolf Flesch published a book called Why Johnny Can’t Read. It argued American children were not learning to read because the primers used in schools — the Dick and Jane readers, with their flat sentences and careful vocabulary controls — were too dull to make a child want to read. The report caused a national debate.

William Spaulding, educational director at Houghton Mifflin, approached a cartoonist and writer named Theodor Seuss Geisel with a challenge. Spaulding gave him a list of roughly 225 words — words a first grader should know. He asked Geisel to write a book using no more than those words. A book a child would actually want to read.

Geisel spent a year and a half on it. He later said he found two words on the list rhyming with each other and built everything from there. Those two words were “cat” and “hat.”

The Cat in the Hat was published in 1957. It used 223 words. It sold nearly a million copies in its first year. It has never gone out of print. It changed how children learned to read in America.

Dr. Seuss understood what the researchers had missed. The problem was not an inability to read. The problem: the books children were given didn’t make them want to. He wrote: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

He did not write a curriculum. He wrote a story. The story did what the curriculum could not.

Seventy years later, the reports are different. The problem is the same.

Schools are measuring literacy. They are not measuring love of reading. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where authors live.

The Power of Authors teaches: purpose begins with a reader. Not a demographic. Not a market. A reader — a specific person, at a specific moment, who needs what only this book can give them. The author, writing with genuine purpose, writes for the child sitting in a classroom who has been taught to decode words but has not yet been given a reason to love them.

The child becomes the adult, accounting for 75% of the Pew survey. Something changed between the ages of ten and forty. A book changed it. A story someone wrote because they understood the purpose of reading is not decoding — it is presence, connection, the feeling of being inside a life other than your own.

The reports from April 2026 are not a crisis for educators alone. They are a challenge to every author.

Write the book a child will not be able to put down. Write the story making a reluctant reader forget the time. Write with enough honesty and enough joy and enough truth — so a ten-year-old somewhere picks it up and thinks: I didn’t know reading felt like this.

Not a small purpose. The largest purpose there is.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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