So, how deficient am I because I have not yet over a 700 books?

The BBQ Pit
1

I was going to put this in IMHO, but I may have said a few nasty things.

In this thread, it appears that most on these boards have read lots and lots of books. And that’s fine, really! But it seems that some of the responses came with some negativity to those who may not have read as much as the C, D and E responses. In my lifetime (I’m 25); I would say I would have to answer B, in the lower end of the spectrum. :eek: I guess this makes me a moron, huh?

I honestly do not get this elitist attitude. Mind you, this isn’t directed to those who answered the poll with a simple answer. I’m talking about those with replies like this gem here:

Basically, the negative bias one may hold solely based on someone who does not read, or yearn for lots of books. Also note, that this isn’t directed to everyone who responded with the higher lotted letters in that thread. But to those bad apples with the a worm in their book. With these expectations of how one should entertain themselves intellectually.

This quote can already be dismissed by the fact that this particular survey probably didn’t include the income of the individuals polled from the “Family Feud” pollers. Not everyone can afford to have a 1,000 books at a cost of $5 to $30 dollars for your average book. Try to get them all at once, and you’re talking about pulling out the equity in your home to acquire them! No thanks! I guess these idiots never heard of library! :dubious: I will however give you the fact that a large number of people in this country could probably give up their $10,000 CD, VHS, and DVD collections. But you didn’t hear that from me.

But back to the question at hand, how bad is it that I haven’t read hundreds and hundreds of books at my age? Although I have devoured newspapers, magazines, and Internet message boards for years and years. I think my reading comprehension, as well as speed, could be on par with those that have read thousands of books. Because I have been reading heavily just about every day since I was 14. I learned how to read when I was about 5, and caught on very quickly. Comprehension was never a problem for me. But from this point, and until I got a bit older, I only did what was required of me in school. If I wasn’t reading, I was taking things apart, and learning practical knowledge. Books just never really excited me. I guess this is bad? You might say that I lack imagination, but I would highly disagree with you. My head is full of imagination, and it will not cease until I die, get Alzheimer’s, or end up in the last stages of a brain tumor. Reading excites me very much, just not with your average book. Although I have killed 8 books in the last 5 weeks on a specialized subject, novel stuff just doesn’t excite me otherwise. And to this day, I still don’t read procedures on things, although I do write them often for work. And highly praised at that.

I’ll tell you what though, those that I have met that read books actively, some can surely be a few sandwiches short of a picnic! So just because you read books all day, everyday, doesn’t make you some kind of Messiah. So really, if you feel deep down inside that this is some kind of competition (you know who you are), realize that it depends on the person, and not how much they read, or what they read. There are people that read very little of anything that can be profoundly intelligent. It’s a case by case thing…

So what do you think, am I doomed?

2

A rant on reading and criticizing elitists, and I fuck up the thread title. :smiley:

Screw it, it doesn’t matter anyways.

3

I don’t think that having <x number of books makes an individual deficient in any way, but I certainly agree that it’s somewhat terrible for a large portion of a surveyed group to consider 25 books to be a normal amount of books for an average household. The gnashing of teeth goes down a bit when you consider that it’s a survey of audience members at a particularly vapid television gameshow. You wouldn’t express dismay to learn that a poll of people on a tour of a dogwater brewery were inept at selecting fine wines or decent scotch, right?

As for your main question, I don’t think that people who don’t enjoy literature are deficient, so much as impoverished in some way. Someone who reads magazines and newspapers exclusively may have perfectly fine reading comprehension, but they’re still missing out on a great pleasure. I don’t think people who read disposable genre fiction and nothing else are much better off.

That’s not judgemental – I have more than a few friends who seem to read very little, and I would never question their intelligence.

I also know a few people who have lead apparently celibate lives for incomprehensibly long periods, and seem perfectly happy. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them, but I wonder how they manage to shut themselves off from something that seems like such a basic human pleasure and don’t feel poorer for it.

At the same time, I recognize that there are probably many things that I don’t touch that other people look at the same way. I don’t dance unless I can’t help it. I have no interest in sports at all. I know that these are utterly essential things for many, many people who probably feel a sort of pity for me and people like me, because these things are also a part of the larger human experience.

If you learned to enjoy reading literature, you would certainly be enriched by it. If I learned to enjoy going out dancing, I have no doubt that I would be enriched by it. If nobody in a particular culture danced, or nobody read for enjoyment, there would be a real lack there, and plenty of reason for observers to express dismay. That doesn’t scale down to the individual, though, because human beings are specialized creatures – so there’s no need to take it as a personal slight.

4

I came in here expecting to find that the linked thread had turned into a tranwreck of accusations of ignorance over something you’d posted there, **ParentalAdvisory
**, instead I find you didn’t even post in the thread and, the thread continues to predominantly feature people (perhaps with a little too much pride) proclaiming how much they love to read books.

What was the problem again?

5

I used to read a lot more than I do now. I simply don’t have as much time as I used to. And I’ve gotten into the bad habit of watching bad TV. Gotta stop that.

I think quality is more important than quantity. I try to only read good literature; no romance novels for me, thank you.

And I feel sorry for people who don’t read for enjoyment/entertainment purposes.

6

Keep in mind also that a message board (especially one like this one) is likely to attract disproportionately high numbers of high-volume readers.

Do the same poll at the pub on a Friday night and you will likely get quite different responses.

7

25 books? That strikes me as quite a lot, actually. Unless you’re counting dictionaries or encylopaedias or, uh, road maps or something. I agree with the OP though, I read compulsively for the first 13 years of my life but I bought a grand total of 0. We were poor. Books were expensive. The folks at the library did learn to recognise me by sight, though… :smiley:

8

Frankly, 25 books a year for Family Feud types strikes me as a high estimate.

to me, lack of books and lack of reading equates with lack of curiousity about the world.

YMMV.

9

This:

10

The only thing that pissed me off about that thread was the insinuation that I’m not as much of a reader, and therefore as smart, as other people because I don’t OWN many books (though I have more than twenty-five). It’s called a library, people, and it’s free and you can get almost any book you could ever want. I love to read, especially fiction, but I don’t feel a compulsion to collect books. I don’t see how not being a packrat makes me less curious about the world.

Also, I read for depth, not speed. I read slowly so I can soak in descriptions and make sure I “hear” every bit of dialogue, instead of blazing through novels like I’m cramming before a final. Not that speed readers can’t read for depth, too, but I don’t think one’s “reading quality” is determined solely by numbers.

11

Doomed? No.

A bit over sensitive on an issue in which no one would have even known your situation had you not posted a diatribe in the Pit? Perhaps.

Hey, this place has snobs. (Every place has snobs.) As a (vaguely) intellectually oriented community, our snobbishness is going to take the forms of (some folks) sneering at people who do not do expected intellectual things.

Why let your day be ruined by snobs. (I always look down on snobs; we in the courteous community look down on snobs as a rite of admission.)

12

It amazes me that even in a thread pitting the attitude of those that all elitist over reading more than the “poor souls that don’t” we have people spouting off crap about how non-readers (or even less than voracious readers) are incomplete.

It burned me in the original thread and it burns me now.

A perfect pitting ParentalAdvisory.

13

My dad is a big reader but he owns maybe two shelves worth, because he makes it a practice to give books away once he’s read them.

14

See, now I can respect that practice a lot more than hoarding. Share the wealth!

15

I think most of us who read and/or own a lot of books have gotten the reaction, at some time in our lives, that this makes us weird or that there’s something wrong with us. To call comeone “bookish” is not really a complement; it implies that they’re physically or socially inept or prefer books to the real world. And I think maybe a little bit of the elitism toward non-readers is a backlash against this attitude of reverse snobbery that non-readers show toward readers.

Still, I think the OP makes a good point. I also agree with Larry Mudd’s response. People who don’t read much are missing out on one of the Great Joys Of Life. However, there are enough Great Joys Of Life that no one has time for them all, and everybody’s missing out on something.

16

Reading is like masturbating, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it, just don’t get the pages sticky.

17

Huh.

There certainly has been a lot of talk about how my offhand comment made people feel stupid or upset with me for being a book snob. But I can’t be responsible for other people’s assumptions or feelings of inadequacy in the face of my accomplishments. Nonetheless I feel I should set a few things straight.

  1. People who don’t read at all certainly aren’t more well-read than me-- that much is probably true. But indiscriminate reading has little to do with an accurate or useful measure of actual intelligence, so if anyone here thinks I’m calling ANYONE else here stupid, or even stupider than me, for not owning a bunch of books, you certainly don’t know me.

  2. I’ve built a modest home library cheaply (well, outside my comics collection) because I buy used books or new books on sale and/or deep discount, and I could never afford to regularly pay $5 to $30 for every book I own: it’s far more like free to $20 with the mathematical mean at around $3-4. It’s a trade off. To afford my library, including quality bookshelves, I buy far fewer new clothes, or electronic equipment, or eat at expensive restaurants than most teachers in my salary range.

  3. If owning books isn’t important to you, chances are excellent reading isn’t very important to you, either. It’s probably not a daily activity with you as it is with me. How could it be, if you don’t even keep books around? Maybe you’re more into buying music, or travelling, or real estate or cars or paintings or wine bottles. Maybe you don’t have any discretionary income at all. I imagine there are people who regularly use the library for their reading pleasure without owning many books personally. I just don’t know many people like that. In my line of work, people who don’t read can’t read and don’t own books and their kids end up not reading well either.

  4. Most of you have taken my fear, worry and dismay about a lack of reading for snobbery. I am a literary snob in some respects – I don’t care much for certain genres, authors, book types or magazines – but I don’t denigrate your choice not to read so much as I’d be more worried that you defend your choice because simply can’t. Once it’s been established that your technical ability to read is fine and it’s just your attitude about reading is (to me) lacking – well, sorry. You don’t seem to value a skill I think is very necessary to progress and a certain amount of self-education and I judge you accordingly.

18

I agree with the OP: the comments in the linked thread were in very poor taste.

After all, it’s not nice to make fun of the mentally handicapped.

:smiley:

19

I read a lot.

I also give away books every time I move.

At Mom’s we have a ton of books, but they come from something like 5 generations of readers.

Most of the books we buy nowadays are not at the local library. Many of them are considered “inadequate” by the librarians. Mom was recently able to get one of the librarians to read a book by Pérez-Reverte and enjoy it; he’s “only” an Academic of the Spanish Language, which is not the kind of job you get by being unable to spell, but, you see, he writes novels instead of essays so apparently it’s not “library material”. I’m about as sick of people who think a book that’s entertaining can’t be “literature” as of people who think I’m “weird” because I read The Lord of the Rings many, many years before I saw the movies: what, Shakespeare’s not literature? His works are entertaining!

I can see the point in ParentalAdvisory’s rant :smiley: But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having read less books than me… this would be a horribly boring world if we all liked and did the same things!

20

Oh dear, do you feel inadequate if dopers post how many marathons they run, because they are insinuating that you are a lazy slob? Do you feel humiliated and belittled if dopers talk about how they got through graduate school, because you haven’t been yet and you might not go? Do you want to curl up and die when dopers talk about the cute things their kids said, because you don’t have any yet and they’re as good as saying that you will end up alone and unloved, without having procreated?

There was a pit thread a couple months back about how elitist this board is. Is that how you feel, too?

This is just my cute way of saying that you are being inappropriately defensive. It’s not adorable.