But a lot of the same articles you'll see -- here's one -- make the point that what we're reading matters way more than how much. Words on hubski, words on facebook, even words at The Atlantic, they don't help as much as Dostoevsky, Hemingway or Woolf.

I was almost buying it until I got to this

Could a country that had widely read “Huckleberry Finn” have taken Donald J. Trump seriously for a second? Twain’s readers will remember “the king” and “the duke.” They know what a bullying con artist sounds like.

What does a snide remark about US politics have to do with reading?

But also this

Lifetime readers know that reading literature can be transformative, but they can’t prove it. If they tried, they would have to buck the metric prejudice, the American notion that assertions unsupported with statistics are virtually meaningless. What they know about literature and its effects is literally and spiritually immeasurable. They would have to buck common marketplace wisdom, too: in an economy demanding “skill sets”—defined narrowly as technical and business skills—that deep-reading stuff won’t get you anywhere.

I've read some of the authors you and he list. I wasn't transformed.

The author is speaking for a group of people (lifetime readers) and making a claim about them he can't possibly know that he conveniently can't back up with evidence. If people aren't convinced, I'm not sure they should be.