One of my fondest memories of motherhood is of when my younger daughter, Phoebe, learned to read. It was bedtime, and her sister, her stepfather and I were settled in bed with our books. I kissed Phoebe good night and left the light on, and as I walked down the hall I heard her announce, “I am part of the reading family now!” (I felt good about my parenting, in a way I hadn’t since the incident, a few weeks previously, when, on our way to a doctor’s appointment, my other kid looked up at me with a sunny smile and announced, “Guess what I am not wearing today!”)

As an author and a lifelong reader, a girl who found refuge in books, I am glad that my children are part of the reading family. Many Americans are not. According to the Pew Foundation, almost a quarter of Americans said they had not read a book in the previous 12 months.

My guess is that school is to blame. Somewhere along the way, between “Beowulf” and Chaucer, people learned that reading was a slog and that literature consisted of books about characters who looked and sounded nothing like them, living in worlds that were nothing like their own. Reading was a duty and not a pleasure. And so, as soon as no one was forcing them to do it, they stopped.

The list of books that most schools still consider required reading — the canon, still heavy on dead, white, male authors — doesn’t help. Nor does the way some cultural gatekeepers, many of them proudly progressive and reflexively inclusive in other parts of their lives, seem invested in keeping the ranks of readers closed.