What’s wrong with setting a personal goal? If you don’t like number of books, you can use pages instead. Chance are the goal is not going to force someone to read small books instead of fat books, but rather to read rather than watch TV.
I started counting last year - I read 76. No goal, I was just interested in how many I read. That ranges from a 1200 page Pauline Kael omnibus to the Hamilton biography down to sf magazines.
If someone is forcing a person to read a certain (large) number of books maybe a problem. Having a goal of reading lots of books isn’t. I didn’t read any more because I was measuring, and didn’t change the stuff I read.
Them and Abe have my credit card memorized; and I’ve gotten some very surprising scores through Half-Price Books. But with a lot being online now I am not going as deep pockets as I used to for things like volumes from the Jesuit Papers and the like. But sometimes when I have the cash and something is there ------- I still really really prefer the feel of a real book in my hands.
People who do things well are often surprised that not everyone can do them equally well. Can you throw a baseball 90 mph, run a marathon, or eyeball where to mark a 2x4 for the perfect cut?
And if you went through twelve years of school having to throw a baseball, but never could throw it 90 mph, would you even want to play baseball for fun?
Ann Hedonia, you had me up until this -
reading to delve deeper into a subject - great. But I hated writing papers in school and have not gone back to it since.
Heh, I’m a male who’s decided that male characters tend to be completely shallow and driven mostly by posturing and testosterone, while female characters are allowed to run the gamut of emotions from shallow and showy and angry to deep and quiet and sympathetic. I’d much rather read a female character than a male one.
I guess where I stumble in understanding is that we DO read every day all the time- street signs, packaging on goods, magazines in the checkout aisle, stuff in the mail, etc… I would expect that people would eventually just get better at it through repetition, assuming you know how to do it at all.
I mean, I’m not a particularly good baseball player myself, but if I had to throw balls every single day to accomplish things, I’d get a LOT better at it than I currently am through sheer repetition, just like anything else.
I don’t know if sheer repetition means someone is going to get better; I have seen people practice hobbies for years and they never seem to get any better at it. Some people just lack any sort of skill or talent no matter how hard they try.
But that’s demonstrably not true. Ever hear of the Mendoza Line? Mario Mendoza spent four years in the minor leagues honing his craft, then spent three seasons splitting his time between major and minor league teams, then spent seven full seasons in the major leagues. He had more than 3,100 official at bats as a professional baseball player, finishing his career with a batting average of .215. Dal Maxvill spent 14 seasons in the majors, played in FIVE World Series, and ended up with a .217 lifetime batting average.
How much batting practice must those men have taken throughout high school, the minors, and the majors, and still ended up with such mediocre career stats. How many hours must they have spent with professional hitting coaches with no improvement.
No matter how hard they try, some people can’t hit a curve ball. Or hit all the notes in the Star Spangled Banner. Or make it all the through War and Peace.
See what Grrr! and Joey P said above. With some people, the issue isn’t difficulty reading individual words or phrases, but keeping track of something longer. The skills involved in reading a novel, or even a long story or article, are more than those involved in reading a street sign or a cereal box.
The part I wonder about is: If people like that made the effort to read more books, would they get better at it with practice?
If they had read more when they were young and their brains were still developing, would they be better at it now?
Or is it purely a difference in in-born native ability?
I don’t always write and certainly I don’t write like I’m going to be graded.
But sometimes when I’m trying to piece together a narrative from multiple sources, it helps me to put stuff in writing. It’s not a chore and if it starts to feel like one, I stop.
ETA TLDR: No.
No (for me) to both of these. It’s not about practice, it’s about being able to maintain focus for any length of time. It’s simply the way my brain is wired. Occasionally a book will really grab my attention and I’ll fly through it, but that’s generally not the case. Uppers (ie amphetamines/adderall/ritalin) make an absolute world of difference in my life.
Funny thing about that. Back when I was a kid, before ADD/ADHD was ‘a thing’, I told my parents a few times that I felt like something was wrong. That I can’t just sit down and read a book and studying was damn near impossible. At some point I learned (on my own) about ADD and told my mom about it and suggested that it might be my issues since I so many of the symptoms are similar to what I’m going through. Her reasoning for me not having it was that when I find something I like (ie video games, model building) I can spend, literally, hours without doing anything else. Her reasoning, not that I blame her, was that since I can concentrate on things like that for hours on end, it’s not that I have ADD, it’s that I don’t like doing things I don’t like doing. It should be noted at this point that my mom can be a bit of a martyr, she’ll do things she doesn’t enjoy seemingly because she doesn’t enjoy doing them. I learned years later that one of the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder is hyperfocus. That is, the ability to focus on a single task and ignoring the rest of the world. It turns out her reason for thinking I didn’t have ADD was actually further proof I did.
In college I got myself a psych dr, got on adderall and it changed my life for the better.
While some people do grow out of it (and there’s also adult onset ADD) and you can seek counseling to deal with it. In general, it’s not something you get rid of by practice.
Think of it like a skill. Many people learn to play the piano or operate a metal lathe or take on acting, but for many people it’s something that, no matter how much they practice, it’s just not going to happen. They’re simply not able to do it.
What I’ve found works best for me (besides pharmaceutical speed) is, instead of lying to myself, to accept what I can’t do and work around it. For example, I know my short term memory is terrible. Instead of telling myself ‘it’s only 3 things, I can remember it’, I make a list. I hate make a list that says ‘flour, eggs, sugar’, but if I don’t, I’m going to make a second trip to the store.
Getting back to my daydreaming while reading comment. Another thing I find myself doing is not turning on the radio in the car. Driving (and, oddly, mowing the lawn) is my time to think/sort through my thoughts. I can spend an hour in the car just in my own head. It also drives people bonkers that I have to turn the radio off every time someone in the car is talking. I just can’t concentrate on what they’re saying with the background noise, though I think it bugs them more that I’ll forget to turn it back on.
PS, these super long, rambling posts that I tend to make, especially early in the morning or late at night. Yeah, all part of it.
I think part of the problem with AD(H)D and how people that don’t have it perceive it is that fact that it’s had “Attention Deficit” in the title when that’s just one small part of it. One small part that a lot of people read and think ‘so, um, just pay attention’. The same way most of us will never understand what it’s like to have depression or anorexia, a lot of people simply don’t understand how the brain of someone with ADHD functions. It’s not like yours.
An interesting comment I read not that long ago was from an adult with ADHD that started taking adderall and said ‘wow, this is how you’re supposed to think/feel/be’.
I have twin sons. We read the same books to both of them (at the same time), exposed them both to a home full of reading, made sure they did their homework, put them both in summer reading programs, etc.
One of them is going for his PhD. The other has ADHD. He prefers to work on tangible things. He reads, but short-form articles and stories, in maybe 15 minute bursts. Adderall has helped, but staying focused and concentrating through a long book will always be a struggle for him.
I’d say there’s a difference between being able to read and comprehend (which you can clearly do), and having the attention span to be a recreational reader.
I mean, you can read street signs, bus schedules, tax forms, product labels, recipes and other relatively short stuff just fine.
What I was talking about is people who can apparently read to some level, but don’t get better with practice- is it some kind of mental limitation? If so, does that count as a disability, or should it? I would guess someone without the mental horsepower to read at say…a 5th grade level is probably really deficient in most other activities of daily living that require any sort of actual thought. I mean how does someone like that do their taxes? Pay their bills? Know what they’re buying at the store?
This reminds me of a phase in my state-worker life when I was part of a cadre of “automation coordinators”. This was before the state finally created an IT department; we were all non-technical people picked because we were considered “good with computers”.
We set up and maintained “dumb terminal/mainframe” systems in field offices. There was a statewide sub-group of guys who simply refused to read either the manuals or printed (simplified) instructions sent with the equipment.
It so happens that one of them was in my region. He strongly believed that the written materials were useless or worse, and that the only effective approach was to take the stuff out of the box and set it up by trial-and-error.
True, sometimes the written instructions were confusing or even wrong. Even I didn’t get much out of the manuals-- there’s a reason they tend to stay shrink-wrapped-- but the written instructions helped. I would end up feeding him bits of the instructions as if I’d “figured out” things when he got stuck.
His anti-literate approach seemed like a point of pride-- a sort of stubborn macho belief that a Real Man doesn’t need no stinkin’ written material to do his job.
Then again, he mentioned that he’d enrolled in community college in 1970, but did so poorly that he decided to enlist in the Army. He was intelligent enough to score well on civil service tests, and was familiar with the agency’s extensive rules and regulations. But he had a “thing” about using written instructions when working on the computer equipment.
ADHD, as** Joey P** and my son have experienced, is certainly a defined disability. My son was given access to reading tutors and received extra time to take written tests when he was in school.
Dyslexia comes in different degrees, from simply inverting or substituting letters in wrods (sic) to seeing a jumble of characters that make no sense. It’s also treated as a disability. Imagine what a task it is to face an erntie paeg of wrods nad try to maek snese fo them. Particularly when the wodr looks different the next time you see it.
Trying to force a child to read before they are developmentally ready can cause the child to hate reading and seek to avoid the frustration they associate with it. But now politicians have it in their minds that education should start young and kids should be reading by the time they are 5. Some kids can read at that age, and others are learning to hate reading.
Teachers do not choose the books available at schools. School boards choose from what is made available by publishers which are strongly influenced by the American Association of School Librarians.
If you can only read at a 5th grade level, that would be very different than what I’m/we’re talking about. I, and most other adults with ADHD (as the only thing going on) can read and comprehend anything, it’s just that it’s so much work to do so that’s, at least in my case, I find very little enjoyment in it. When I say that I struggle to read a book, for example, it’s not that I’m sounding out each word, it’s that…well, you know how sometimes when you’re driving you suddenly snap out of day dream and don’t have any recollection of the past few minutes…it’s like that. I can read and comprehend everything just find, it’s that I’ll be day dreaming the whole time. That is, I can read a few pages and, as I mentioned earlier, I couldn’t tell you what I read. Reading isn’t all that fun when I have to put so much effort it it.
It is technically considered a mental disorder, but most people with it wouldn’t consider it one, at least not anymore than one would consider being an introvert a disorder (I know, it’s not, I’m just making a point).
Your brain is wired differently than your co-worker’s. Your co-worker’s brain is wired differently than your next door neighbor’s. This is just how my brain is wired. Luckily, between meds and lifestyle adjustments, it’s pretty easy to manage so long as you can accept it and work with it instead of pretending like it’s not an issue.
What you were talking about seems to be more related it illiteracy than ADHD. That would be a whole different discussion. The OP was asking more about people who can read, they just don’t enjoy it.
WRT who illiterate people function in daily life, I couldn’t tell you. I’ve only known (as far as I know) one person that couldn’t read. I knew him for years before I even realized it. The place where he worked would give him a list of stuff to pick up and send him out to stores (mine, being one of them). He’d typically show me the list and say ‘can you figure this out, I can’t read this chicken scratch’. Once I understood what was going on, when I’d see him walk in with a list, I’d just say ‘do you have a list, I can read his handwritting’ (trying not to embarrass him). My WAG for how he’d got through life was a combination of having 50 years of practice hiding it as well as being able to read well enough, even if it was at a 10 year old level, to be able to do things like go shopping. Taxes, I’m guessing he paid to have them done.
As embarrassing as I know it would be, I always wished he, and other’s like him, would suck it up and get some help. It would probably be one of the best things he could spend his money on considering the increase in his quality of life.
OTOH, he was 50ish years old, had (and still has) a steady job and appears to be getting along just fine. So who am I to judge?
One of my goals is (was?) to be able to read German books as comfortably as I do English books. My German teacher told me that would probably never come, as I didn’t start learning German until I was 30.
Have to say though, the bit about the guy making brownies brought tears of happiness. Those of us who read as easily as we breathe have no idea how difficult it is for others.
My grandfather, born in 1910, finished high school and went to work as a machinist. When he got home in the evening he worked on the garden, or listened to the radio (later he watched television), played cards, talked with the family, friends, etc. And he read the newspaper. Every day.
But that was it. He never read a book for pleasure. Just wasn’t his thing. For his retirement my dad bought him a book about some baseball player or team, I don’t remember which. That hooked him. He loved his Reds and now he found out how to get more baseball enjoyment in a book. He started reading other books and probably read more in the 20 years after his retirement than he did before then.
I have a coworker who can spend hours watching a football (soccer) game, or even days watching a cricket match. Just that. Cannot read a book, even if its about one of his favorite subjects. He can’t get into it. And I can’t watch sports. Nope.
So I’ll keep my books. And learning German.
Have a manager where I work who once said that she wished employees who couldn’t read would tell her that because (apparently) she’s worked with enough over the years to have ways to work around that problem so they could be successful at what they did. You can get a lot done with pattern-matching (does this series of symbols match the ones on the paper I gave you?) or just organizing a work task. Or, if the person’s memory is good, simply giving them instructions orally instead of in written form.
But that requires the illiterate person to be comfortable and feel safe in admitting there’s a problem. Very often there’s fear of losing their job.
I’ve heard of quite a few people who got turned on to reading by a particular book (or series or type of book), that essentially transformed them from non-readers to readers, though most of the examples I’ve heard of were kids when this happened.
So I conclude that some people who don’t read do have the capacity to read and enjoy books, while others don’t really have that capacity due to the way their brains are wired.