Each summer when I teach Honors Symposium, I begin my first class by sharing the results of an NEA survey called “Reading at Risk.” Then I start a discussion by asking them why they believe fewer and fewer people are reading and what they think the consequences of this will be.Well, this year I’ll have new information to share. According to an article posted Monday on the New York Times web site, for the first time since 1982 the number of adults who’ve read at least one novel, short story, poem, or play in the last year has gone up. Bring out the party hats!
You can read the article HERE.
3 comments:
Don't bring them out quite yet. Like drinking at bars, leisure activities that help pass time tend to become more common when more people are unemployed and need to find ways to fill their day.
I've been working with high school girls mostly as a tutor -- the second prime target group for publishers after middle-aged women -- and none of them would be caught dead in a bookstore. Reading is terribly uncool. Those who admit that they do read, read Gossip Girl or the Twilight series, and even then they get comments from their friends about not turning into an old lady with no friends and a hundred cats.
So maybe the trick would be to write more entertaining books and to insist less from that bully pulpit of uncoolness -- the teacher's desk -- that reading is what good little girls and boys do, along with eating their broccoli and praying before bed.
(I mean, that's what happened to drama. In Billy Shakes' time, it was scandalous and edgy to go to the plays. Then it became the Thing A Civilized Chap Does, and now nobody goes to the theater anymore.)
Ah, Jonathan, don't bring me down to earth just yet. Let me enjoy it a little while.
I like that "scandalous and edgy" idea.
i tried commenting on your comment about my house but it didnt post! i loved your dream! my dream house is going to have a brick courtyard, but im not sure what the blocks in the kitchen were about!!!
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