The Future of Reading
How one local nonprofit is helping
a national movement for “biliteracy.”
WRITTEN BY FELICIA SCHNEIDERHAN
Not long ago, Crosby resident Marcie Stokman was writing an article in a local café. The books and papers spread around her prompted a fellow patron to say, “Can I ask you what you do?”
“I run a national book club for women,” Stokman replied.
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The woman shared that she couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d picked up a book—maybe eight years? But, she said, waving her phone, she didn’t need to. She had all the reading she could do with social media.
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The short interaction struck the core of what Stokman has devoted the last thirteen years to remedy. She is the founder and president of Well-Read Mom, the Crosby-based organization that is anything but your traditional book club. With nearly 10,000 members across the country and even internationally, the local nonprofit’s mission is to accompany women in the reading of great books and spiritual classics to encourage personal growth, friendship, and meaningful conversations in order to explore the human condition and reorient themselves to what is good, beautiful, and true.
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Their hope is to deepen the awareness of meaning hidden in each woman’s daily life, elevate the cultural conversation, and revitalize reading literature.
Marcie Stokman, founder of Well-Read Mom, immersed in reading and writing at Red Raven in Crosby.
It’s vital work, says Stokman, citing research that our consumption of technology is changing the way we read, our cultural literacy, and indeed, how our brains function.
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“We’re at a crisis point as a culture with reading,” says Stokman. “Technology is changing our very definition of what it means to read. Reading literature used to be for comprehension, for understanding human nature. Now the definition of reading in people’s minds is getting information—because of our phones.”
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A variety of sources have charted the decline in American reading habits over the past two decades. Most recently, Test Prep Insight surveyed 1,621 American adults and reported in 2024 that almost half the respondents hadn’t read any books in more than a year. The Pew Research Center reported only slightly better statistics: sixty-four percent of American adults reported they had read a book in 2024. Time that might have been spent reading is often spent with electronic devices. In 2018, Americans spent an average of almost three hours each day watching television, and twenty-eight minutes playing games and using computers for leisure. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr shows how our thinking is being changed into a new kind of mind that absorbs and discharges information in short bursts. Industry leaders have admitted that tech developers intentionally build addictive qualities to increase users, according to a 2017 article in The Guardian. You may have experienced this yourself.
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But, you may be wondering, so what? If technology is changing our brains, is that a bad thing? Are there actually benefits to reading novels? Especially challenging novels, the kind you might read in twelfth-grade English, for fun?
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In other words, why cultivate a reading practice?
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The practice of reading literature strengthens cognitive processes, according to neuroscientists, because it activates parts of the brain responsible for critical thinking, analysis, memory, concentration, language and communication, and empathy. There’s also evidence to show that reading for pleasure as little as six minutes a day reduces stress up to sixty-eight percent. Even six minutes a day counts as a reading practice, one that can bring about significant results.
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“We need to maintain our ability to read deeply from print,” says Stokman. “Print is different from digital. Online, we’re hurrying to get through it. When there’s a link, we’re in a decision-making part of the brain. But when we’re sitting there with a book, we’re surrendering to the book and whatever the author has to give us. We’re not in control. Those limits are so good for us. We need to surrender. Until you can surrender, you can’t really receive what the author has to say. Even if you disagree with it, you have to first receive it. That’s slowing down, creating limits, carving space in our person for that. This space that’s created is a space we need in relationships. It creates dialogue, space for another person, to have empathy and respect.”
A stack of the selections for 2024-25 being packaged to send out to one of Well-Read Mom’s supporting members.
The new light-filled offices of Well-Read Mom are open for meaningful discussion for staff and members.
Reading online and for information is not going away, nor should it; what is needed, say Stokman and others, is a new bilingual society: one that reads both online for information and from books for leisure. The way to remain bilingual is to cultivate and tend a lifelong reading practice, which is where Well-Read Mom comes in.
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The seed for Well-Read Mom began in Stokman’s own experience. Her lifelong passion for reading was challenged as an adult by an active family of nine and a career as a mental health nurse practitioner. “What went by the wayside was reading literature for pleasure. I read professional journals and nursing journals. I was doing other kinds of reading, but reading for pleasure started to feel like a waste of time. I felt guilty for reading a novel. What’s the point? It’s not efficient. I became a mechanical mom, almost utilitarian. I was efficient, but in the end it wasn’t satisfying.”
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When, as a young mom, Stokman came back to reading good books for pleasure, she found she was a happier, more “whole woman, wife, and mother.” She began sharing a talk locally called, “The Well-Read Mom,” and found she wasn’t the only one who felt they didn’t have the time to read for leisure, or if they did, didn’t know where to begin. Then her daughter Beth became a mother and voiced her frustration that her moms’ groups focused primarily on questions of raising children. All valid and necessary, but what about the challenging, intellectual reading Beth had once done?
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Stokman founded Well-Read Mom (WRM) with a central question that remains at its core today: Would I want my daughter to read this?
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To answer that question, Stokman and her staff of seven (all women, all part-time by choice, actively involved in their own families) select a theme for each year, then cultivate a monthly reading list. They plan the reading lists three years out, with some pretty hefty choices; this year, the groups are reading The Aeneid and King Lear along with Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River and Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio.
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Each of the book clubs meets monthly, and they all discuss the same book in the same month. Well-Read Mom produces a Reading Companion with biographical information, literary articles, questions to ponder, and personal reflection essays to support discussion. They also release audio recordings about the books to be played at monthly meetings. “There’s only one rule,” says Stokman. “If you haven’t read the book, don’t apologize. But I also stress that if we make the commitment, we do it.” It’s a fine line, she admits, that all readers must walk.
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The organization’s growing membership numbers show the method works to help meet a demand among women to develop and maintain a reading practice. Well-Read Mom has seen a consistent thirty percent growth rate each year for the last six years. This is not due to marketing, says Executive Director Nicole Bugnacki, but organic growth. Women are sharing their experience with other women, inviting them along on the journey to develop a reading practice. The almost 10,000 members nationwide cross demographics—age, economics, ethnicity, spiritual practice, political leaning and yes, even the definition of “mom.”
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“It has to do with how literature is a unifying thing that we can experience with one another,” says Bugnacki. “Simply the act of reading a book and gathering together somehow increases our capacity to have our hearts cracked open toward goodness, truth, and beauty. Then it ripples out into our personal lives, to the people around us, and seeps into the culture.”
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Literature is a universal medium, and much of this has to do with the democratic nature of the group dynamic, Bugnacki says. “Women meet in small groups in their own community. People come with a unique personal story; they have different reading abilities, faiths, politics, demographics, family backgrounds, ages. They have an ability to enter into deep friendship and conversation even between people who don’t agree on everything. Literature creates that space. We can discuss difficult things without an attitude of defensiveness.”
Jamie Carlson, director of membership, (back left) shares her writing process with Marcie Stokman (back center), Nicole Bugnacki (back right), Janel Lewandowski (front center), Mary Teck (front left), and Colleen Hutt (joining virtually) in a staff development writing workshop taught by Felicia Schneiderhan.
The effects go beyond the group, as women share the books with other readers, friends, and family. The organization’s end-of-year surveys report that ninety percent of respondents have said someone close to them read something they read in the past year. The organization also produces a Family Supplemental Booklist with suggested titles for children of different ages and includes questions that can be used to foster discussion about the reading.
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Ten thousand women will read the same book at the same time, which Stokman and Bugnacki emphasized is vital to the mission. “Reading books at the same time impacts us culturally,” says Stokman. “It creates a space for dialogue, and that builds culture.”
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Culture can be built one relationship at a time, one reader relating to another, which was evidenced by another chance encounter between Stokman and a stranger, this time in an airport.
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“I saw someone reading the book we were reading for Well-Read Mom,” Stokman recalls. “I thought, ‘I have to go over there.’ I went over and asked, ‘Are you reading that book for a book club?’ ‘I am,’ she said, ‘It’s Well-Read Mom. Have you ever heard of it?’ I laughed. ‘It’s sort of taking over my life.’”
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Then, says Stokman, “We stood there and talked about Wendell Berry and his understanding of place and putting down roots in a place and here I am talking to a woman from Tennessee, having an interesting conversation, a meaningful connection, because we’re reading the same book at the same time.”
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Adults can cultivate in children a love of reading not only by reading to them but also by taking time to read themselves. Children notice what gives their parents pleasure.
Stacks of books fill the WRM office, ready to be sent to sustaining, patron, and benefactor members in gift boxes (see below).
As Well-Read Mom has grown, so has their need for physical space. The staff had grown from three to seven women. With individual memberships climbing, support-level memberships doubled. For supporting members, WRM mails all the books for the coming year to the members’ homes. That’s a lot of books to house! Between books and people, the organization was bursting out of its 650-square-foot office space.
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While space in Crosby is limited, the organization was committed to staying local. The staff communicated their need for space to the membership through emails and the monthly audio recordings, and within a short time, a 5,600-square-foot office space overlooking Crosby Memorial Park opened for them. This summer they moved into the first floor, and in the fall they expanded upstairs into more traditional office spaces. The first floor now includes a warehouse for books and printed materials, and a welcoming lounge area with large windows overlooking the park.
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“Now we’ve even had women traveling through the area who stop by and visit,” says Executive Director Nicole Bugnacki. “They’re coming to find us. That’s amazing!”
Well-Read Mom’s growing support nationwide could be the sign that, despite technology’s appeal of instant, on-demand stimuli, there’s a growing community of readers committed to developing biliteracy, both in our current generation and beyond.
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