Literature is a conversation across the ages about our experience and our nature, a conversation in which, while there isn't unanimity, there is a surprising breadth of agreement. Literature amounts, in these matters, to the accumulated wisdom of the race, the sum of our reflections on our own existence. It begins with observation, with reporting, rendering the facts of our inner and outer reality with acuity sharpened by imagination. At its greatest, it goes on to show how these facts have coherence and, finally, meaning. As it dramatizes what actually happens to concrete individuals trying to shape their lives at the confluence of so many imperatives, it presents us with concrete and particular manifestations of universal truths. For as the greatest authors know, the universal has to be embodied in the particular—where, as it is enmeshed in the complexity and contradictoriness of real experience, it loses the clarity and lucidity that only abstractions can possess.

As measured by the percentage of the population not having read a book in the past year, the lowest levels of reading are: Portugal (67% not having read a book in the past year) Belgium (58%), Spain (54%) and Greece (53%). Across the European Union (EU), 42% of the population had not read a book in the prior year. The highest rates of reading (as measured by any books read in the prior year) were clocked in by Sweden (72%), Finland (66%), the UK (63%) and Denmark (55%). Surprisingly to me, Germany and France were only at 40%. Overall book reading rate in Europe (all books - pleasure, work, study) was 45% in 2001. The comparable figure for the US was 57%. A similar gender imbalance (women reading more than men) is prevalent in Europe as it is in the US. Europe's ratio of Female to Male reading being 51% to 40% as measured by books read for pleasure (i.e. not for work or study). In the US the comparable figure is 55% to 38%. Newspaper reading appears to still be thriving in Europe with 46% of the population reading a newspaper every day. While book and newspaper reading is generally closely correlated in the statistics (for example top scoring book reader Sweden is also the top newspaper reading country with 78% of the population reading a paper every day) there are a couple of exceptions. Interestingly, a low book reading country like Germany (40%) has 65% of the population reading a newspaper everyday.