I’m betting everyone knows at least one person who isn’t a regular reader (or who doesn’t read at all).
I never can understand people who don’t like to read and I’m wondering who the closest people to you are who rarely read.
For me, it’s a lot of people. Neither my mom or my dad read. I don’t think they ever picked up a book in my entire life, certainly never finished one. In fact, I’m not sure they ever read any books at all, unless they had to for school.
My girlfriend doesn’t read either.
And while I’m not putting down those who don’t read, I just can’t get these people. Sure I love my girlfriend, but it’ll always be odd to me, if I think about it. I can understand people who don’t read because they don’t have the time, but her reason is she finds reading boring, she says.
I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine a life without ever reading books. I can’t even fathom going more than a week without cracking one open.
What about you…who is or are the non-reader(s) in your life that you’re closest with? Do you know why they don’t read?
Or are you the non-reader yourself?
All of the people in my immediate family love reading and, like me, I doubt that they would be able to go for a single day without reading! However, most of my friends are non-readers. I can’t understand why they don’t read and they can’t understand why I read so much.
I used to be a voracious reader, but I don’t have the same amount of time to do it anymore, which also means it’s been really hard for me to find new authors I like; all my recent attempts have come up short, which is discouraging.
So if you were to measure my actual reading time against yours, I may come up as a “non-reader” these days.
We are bombarded with information and entertainment from more directions than ever, and books are lost amongst them all.
Well I couldn’t be bothered to read all of that, but I’m an IT person and typically busy with schematic diagrams, software code, router configurations and such all day long so in my free time I want to do something less eyeball-intensive like cooking or building a cabinet or fixing shit. I wonder of the heavy readers are chefs, carpenters and repairmen by profession?
Besides, I just don’t have the time to invest in prolonged reading. Things that can be read in snippets - like Straight Dope threads or humor columns are good for me. The last thing I remember reading (somewhere in my early twenties) was The Tripods Trilogy, and those three fairly short books took perhaps a week each for me to get through.
My days are structured such that I have perhaps 15-30 minutes of down time here and there to read something. If I have more time than that on my hands, I’ll be doing something more essential, useful and/or productive.
I love to read but I have a tendency to fall asleep within a short period of time. As a result I don’t read as much as I like to.
For most people there are too many distractions in today’s society to promote reading. We use the excuse of not having time but I don’t think that is necessarily true.
Take away the TV and the Internet and I’ll bet reading would be very popular. Since the intro of things like e-readers and iPads, that has help to a small degree.
Schools no longer promote reading like they use to (especially the classic novels of Englosh lit or American authors of our history). As a result writing had also suffered as has our command of the Englosh language.
What I find most distressing is that in today’s movies (going back the past thirty years or do) is the extreme use of foul language. True, in real life it may be common to use such language but on the cinima it does not add to the storey line and detracts from the plot. Look at the great movies of the 30’s and 40’s where such language was not needed but yet the storey and plots were full and robust.
To get back on topic I believe the lack of constructive reading is in part the cause of our slip in academic rating in the world scene.
At least ONE person? Most people I know don’t read very much.
Not me - I read a ton. I’ve always got at least one book going, and typically a stack of 5 or 10 ready for the next read, and if all those fail, I have a ton of books both in hard-copy form and on my Kindle ready to go. And there’s always Amazon… if I REALLY need something I don’t have, I can buy & download one.
I actually have a set of four huge bookshelves in my office, place library-stack style, back-to-back. One of the proudest accomplishments of my life! (and that’s just the four fancy bookshelves, there’s at least 3-4 more bookshelves scattered about the house.)
Back to the OP - as I said, most people I know don’t read. My mother reads as much as I do, Mr. Athena will pick up the occasional book to the tune of maybe 4-6 books a year, and I know my sister-in-law reads enough that she bought a Kindle. Let’s see, if I keep going, I’d say about 30-40% of the family (immediate and extended) are readers. Probably about the same # of friends.
I’m in front of the computer writing code all day and squinting at requirements docs. Doesn’t have anything to do with my reading - at the end of the day, nothing is as relaxing as settling in with a good book.
Up until very recently I wasn’t a reader. I’m 31 and hadn’t opened a book since high school and those were required reading. I had/have ADD that made it extremely difficult to read. Back in high school and grade school reading was one of the most frustrating thing I had to do, be it regular books or text books. I’d read a page or two and have literally no idea what I read. My eyes would move back and forth, the words would go into my head but I honestly couldn’t tell you if I read 5 pages out of Hatchet or 2 pages of my history book. So I’d go back and start over. It usually took 3 or so passes to grasp something. I hated reading. It was extremely labor intensive. It was very difficult to stay on task. My brain (or my body for that matter) would wander off and do other things while I was trying to read.
Once I didn’t have to read anymore, I didn’t. My experience with reading in grade school and high school really caused me to hate it and once I was done, I was done with it for good. It left a really bad taste it my mouth.
Come to think of it, there was one way I could read. ADD gives people the ability to do something called hyperfocus. It’s a symptom where the person can focus on a single task for hours. It’s one of the things that made parents say “No, you don’t have ADD, I’m not taking you to a doctor, you just don’t like homework but you can do ____ for 3 hours without batting an eye” It’s one of the reasons that even though ADD is over diagnosed, it’s also underdiagnosed. Kids that don’t have ADD get meds, but kids that really, honestly need them, don’t get them. Anyway, I found that if I was super interested in a book and I took some ADD drugs and found a nice comfortable spot in my house without any distractions, I could fly through a book in a matter of hours. But I only did that once or twice.
Just recently, in the last few months, I started reading. It was mainly because I found I could get free books on my phone which gave it that ‘tech’ feel so it made it more interesting and between that and the fact that I noticed that at some point between now and when I graduated college my ADD calmed down a little bit.
It’s still hard, I still have to remind myself to read. I’d still rather watch TV or a movie that turn on the Kindle. I can understand why people like reading over watching TV, I can understand why you might learn more from a book then a TV show (though I’m not quite sure why). But I’m not quite a convert yet. OTOH, as conceited as it sounds, I still consider myself a ‘smart’ person. So I think it’s fair to say TV hasn’t totally rotted my brain out and I didn’t totally miss out on everything by not reading.
…if a lot of people in your life aren’t reading and you are, that makes you the exception, not the rule. So the question you should really be asking is: what is wrong with you?
There is nothing wrong with people choosing not to read. What a bizarre OP.
There are a lot of people who I don’t get, but I’m starting to realize that it’s me who is the weirdo, not them.
I don’t have a problem with non-readers in my presence as long as they recognize they probably aren’t as informed as they could be. I do have a problem with non-readers who think they know more than they do, though. “But I saw it on the Discovery Channel!” does not impress me. I recognize reading information doesn’t make it any more likely to be correct than watching it on TV, but it seems to me someone who gets most of their information from TV tend to be more gullible.
I used to read a lot. I don’t any more, for the simple reason that I don’t find it enjoyable anymore. I see no reason to force myself to do things I don’t get any enjoyment out of, if it isn’t necessary to survive.
I was about to say ‘but but but’ but then I realized even though I don’t read a lot of books I actually do a ton of reading on the internet. ADD and wikipedia really seem to go hand in hand. I can start reading about a topic and end up in an incredibly different place just by going ‘what does that mean, I should click on that and read about it’ and eventually forgetting where I started. Last week during the Transit Of Venus I learned a lot about the planets.
A few weeks ago I said something about the bible, my sister said something slightly different, I corrected her and she snapped back at me with “Ummm, I think I know more about the bible then you” and I just let it go but I wanted to say “Yeah, uh, there’s a big difference between going to church and reading about the bible for the sake of reading about it” (and we’re off on a tangent). I’ve learned that if all you know about the bible is what the priest tells you, you probably don’t know that much about it. If you want to try something, find the some religious people and if you can nicely work it into a discussion, ask them where in the bible Jesus died. Wait, better yet, ask them where in the bible the Gospels are.
(IIRC Jesus dies in the Gospels and the Gospels are the first four chapters of the New Testament) I’m kinda waiting for my sister to throw that “I know the bible better then you” crap back in my face so I can ask her that.
For some reason I assumed the OP was referring to fiction or other types of relaxation material, not medical journals and encyclopedias. Being a heavy reader doesn’t necessarily make one well-informed.
I recently spent a huge amount of time researching HD projectors. I learned all about how they work and how the viewing room should be designed. I’m even making my own projection screen based on what I’ve learned about brightness levels and the reflectivity of screen materials and such. Last year I had to research enterprise-class business process automation platforms for a city government. Now I know more about them than I really ever wanted to.
But based on this:
[QUOTE=The OP]
I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine a life without ever reading books.
[/QUOTE]
I didn’t think that was the kind of reading the OP had in mind. If it is, then I’m a heavy reader.
I get antsy if I don’t have one book in my lap and another on standby; it’s just the way I was raised, I come from a family of readers.
One of my local *librarians *“never reads,” has no interest in books. I don’t know how or why she is a librarian!
And I see people at the laundromat every weekend who just sit and stare into space while their laundry whirls around (they don’t even stare the the hypnotic dryer!). Sometimes I offer them my *Times *as I finish the sections, and usually they say “no thanks,” and just go back into their coma. *That *I do not understand. I mean, not even an iPad or a magazine or a phone–just sitting blankly with your mouth hanging open for 90 minutes?
My father. He’s college-educated but generally doesn’t read for pleasure. The family joke is “don’t get Dad a book for his birthday. He already has one.”
My mother used to be a non-reader. When she was in her sixties, she was diagnosed with dyslexia. She started getting books on tape from the state library for the blind. She told my that, for the first time in her life, she could understand how Dad and I could sit with our nose in a book for hours on end.
Most “informative” reading material is not “heavy”, but more like newspapers or magazines. Why wouldn’t this count as “reading”?
Being a heavy reader does not make someone well-informed, and I never said it did. But if someone says they are interested in current events and staying informed, I would assume that person is an avid reader of the print media. If they aren’t, then, no, I probably will not consider them a fount of knowledge. I’m sure there are exceptions to this, but not very many.
My sister says she doesn’t read much anymore. I read quite a bit, and I find it difficult to fall asleep without reading, so I’ll probably always be a reader.
I also have a theory that so many people are bad at spelling because they don’t read a lot.
There’s nothing “wrong” with people who don’t read. I do think it’s slightly puzzling that readers and non-readers can be close friends/partners, without sharing something that’s very important to one of them. I read every day but my husband hasn’t cracked a book in the almost 20 years we’ve been together.
It’s like anything else people do that other people don’t have an affinity for. People who don’t watch TV would be amazed that there are threads on message boards where people talk for days about one episode of a TV show.
I can intellectually understand people not reading, but it still strikes me as weird at some level. If I go to someone’s house and they have no books—no bookshelves, no books lying around—my unconscious gut reaction is “How can you live like this?!?”
One thing we readers don’t always realize is how much more slowly some people read, or how much more effort it takes some people to decode written language—whether because of something like ADD or dyslexia, or lack of practice, or just how their brain works. My fiancee’s mother remarked that she didn’t realize how slowly her husband read until an incident in the last year of his life. And I remember reading something Isaac Asimov wrote about an incident when he saw someone reading a comic book at what, to Asimov, was an unbelievably slow rate, and realizing why comic books might be worth buying to someone who, unlike Asimov, didn’t burn through them in a couple of minutes.
I’ve read plenty of books that, at the rate I read them, were enjoyable or informative enough to be well worth reading, but which would have been boring and not worth reading if they had required significantly more time or effort to get through them. And, while I like a good audiobook, there are plenty of books I’d gladly read but would hate to listen to, because they’d take too frickin’ long and be paced too dang slow.