Oh, hell yes. I still read the newspaper and “serious” mags, but I find myself snarling at the articles “Sheesh, <some Doper> said that six weeks ago, while making more sense with better grammar!”
For pleasure reading, I’m all about escaping. We could pretend it is “light fiction” but “escapist crap” is more accurate. Six to eight novels a week, minimum, and the bookstore always has new ones for me. Someone else has got to be reading something, because there is no way I am supporting the entire fiction publishing industry all by myself.
Actually, I can well believe that two out of five people never pick up a book to entertain themselves. I know plenty of well-educated intelligent people who barely find time for a few leisure books a year in between work, hobbies, internet, PC games, drinking, housework, movies, TV etc. so it’s not impossible to believe that one in five people just never have the time or inclination to read. Then factor in the on in five adults who are functionally illiterate and bob’s your uncle.
I just got some insight into this as I was helping a friend of mine draw up a business plan in order to get funding for a gadget he wants to manufacture. He’d been at it for most of the morning and hadn’t progressed beyond a few very fractured notes. I got him talking about what he wanted to say and translating that into “biz-speak” with all the lovely buzzwords and painful sentence construction the form seems to require and during the course of this I found it necessary to hit a few websites in order to get some statistics and relevant data. He was sitting next to me as I’d hit a site, do some searching, skim pages to get the gist of them and pick out the relevant snippets and he commented that he couldn’t even follow what I was doing–his head just can’t process the written word that fast or in that manner. He is by no means an uneducated man, he has a BS and runs rings around me when it comes to scientific knowledge and materials fabrication; he just doesn’t process written words easily. He’s a tactile and visual processor–give him any bit of machinery that isn’t working right and he’ll retroengineer its purpose and not only fix the damned thing but probably improve it as he goes. This is a man who will never be a pleasure reader, because to him written words are a foreign land wherein it is difficult to accomplish even the slightest task.
He was agog at my ability to not only take in written information but to compose on the fly–we had his business plan wrapped up in a couple of hours with the exception of the detailed financials for initial ramp up which will require a bit more research. I told him it takes all kinds to make a world, because without me his incredibly useful gadget wouldn’t get made because he doesn’t have any facility with technical writing but then again without his gadget I’d have nothing to write about! With any luck he should be getting a check for about two million bucks here pretty quick…
I used to be incredulous and pecksniffian regarding those who don’t read for pleasure but I’ve come to realize there are a lot of people out there who can do things I couldn’t even dream of and that’s what takes up the head space they don’t use for trashy romance novels and science fiction. Takes all kinds to make a world, as they say.
I don’t really think people now days value knowledge gained from books. Reading involves thinking and thinking is work.
I also think there are an awful lot of people out there who are struggling readers. There has to be–I teach fifth grade and probably most of my class reads below grade level. Things get harder as they go through school and they don’t get any better at reading.
You could say I’m jaded.