Bookreading: Part I

It is likely that some of your earliest memories include being read stories by your mommy or daddy.  Perhaps you had an obsession with Dr. Seuss or Richard Scarry books, or Laura Numeroff’s “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”, or maybe you liked Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad series as I did.  You probably tore through so many Little Golden Books that your parents were fervently grateful for how inexpensive they are.  At some point you began to read the books yourself, and you progressed through various children’s series as your reading skills improved.  You might have read Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Babysitter’s Club, Goosebumps, the Boxcar Children, and more.

Unfortunately, at some point, books may have become less of a priority for you.  There were so many video and computer games to play, and the Internet to surf, and T.V. shows and movies to watch.  These provided you with more instant gratification, and subconsciously you may have thought, Why should I waste the time to read a long book when I can just watch a 30-minute show? or Why read the book when I can just watch the movie about it?

When you got to high school, teachers began assigning you books to read.  Some days you had enough time to read them, but other days you didn’t, and perhaps more often than not you found yourself looking up Sparknotes chapter summaries or forgetting it altogether so that you could spend more time doing other things.  It got worse in college; you were so busy enjoying the college life and trying to do the bare minimum to get the grades you wanted in your classes that you neglected to read even the articles your professors posted for you.  At best, you’d “carefully” skim the required readings; you figured no one had time to actually read the whole book, and the professors couldn’t expect any more with your busy lives.  Maybe when the time rolled around for New Year’s Resolutions, you promised yourself, Okay, I WILL read at least one book outside of my required coursework each semester.  Or maybe just one this year.  But of course, you never got around to it…and when you graduated, you couldn’t find the time to read a book around your job, raising a family, and everything else you had to do.  The only things you would read would be those childhood favorites that your parents read to you, and you would read them to your child at bedtime.

Now, I realize that what I have described here may not be the case for everyone, or maybe not even for half of you out there.  But this situation or a similar one is the case for enough people today (including myself, unfortunately), and it should be a concern for all of us.  What has happened to our literary world?  Why don’t we read books anymore?  Are we too busy with things that are genuinely more important?  Are we too distracted and no longer have the mental capacity to do something like read a book for more than thirty minutes?  Would we rather sit on the couch watching the boob tube because we are too lazy to hold a book and physically turn the pages?