Read any good books lately? According to a report released by the National Endowment for the Arts two weeks ago, you're part of a growing minority if you've opened a book solely for pleasure since Bill Clinton's first inauguration.

Even as the number of published books increased 58 percent in the last decade, the pool of fiction readers decreased 14 percent overall during roughly the same period. It is a depressing and dispiriting series of statistics, especially those regarding the consumption of literary fiction.

To show how desperate it was to find evidence of some remnant of noncompulsory reading in the land, the NEA included Harlequin romances and thrillers under the umbrella of literary fiction. Forget about Melville or Hemingway, Americans are having a hard time getting through comic books if the NEA is to be believed.

According to the report, the percentage of young adult readers between 18 and 34 has dropped 28 percent since 1982, making the demographic most prized by television advertisers the least knowledgeable about literature. No wonder an exceptional young person like Ken Jennings can win a month's worth of "Jeopardy." His peers, on average, don't know anything.

Traditionally, young readers have been the canaries in the culture's mine. If reading is, as some headlines have suggested, "going out of style," then that trend will be particularly acute among this group. Between the distraction of demanding jobs, busy social lives and electronic gadgets at home, reading is increasingly a luxury young people don't pursue.

The problem with this particular outcome is that there is a correlation between the consumption of literature and rates of volunteerism and attendance of cultural and sports events. If the numbers continue to dip at the current rate, we can assume our democracy will be in crisis before we know it.

Part of being an informed electorate is having a sophisticated set of reference points along with a general sense of how culture and politics intersect. If television and other electronic media supply a generation's intellectual content, our democratic institutions will rest on increasingly shaky ground.

The intellectual and spiritual rigor that comes with reading is not to be underestimated. There is no greater guarantor of liberty than the intellectual curiosity stimulated by reading, but this is a sentiment that sounds quaint to a majority of Americans of all ages.

Are we in danger of slipping into the modern equivalent of the Dark Ages? Present trends would seem to suggest so. The irony is that even as the fog of ignorance falls, we'll be surrounded by more books than ever.