Very grateful that I grew up with books all around me, and that reading was instilled in me as an enjoyable activity rather than a chore. I can’t imagine life without books.

Now the question is, with digital reading being as prominent as it is, how do we shape the environment of reading to encourage it without physical copies of books? How can we observe and distinguish the difference between being idly glued to the screen and digital reading?

Incredibly grateful for growing up in read supporting household with frequent visits to our public library. Looking back at 42...wow, the benefits and curtains thrown open to wonder, spirit, empathy, compassion, nature and healing are undeniably indelible.

#manifesto

#read

I absolutely loved reading this and I want everyone I know to read this.

I do wish the author spoke more about the struggle to read. It takes work, like training for a marathon, and it requires time, patience and discipline.

I’m definitely not an “avid” reader although I REALLY want to be. 50 books per year is absurd, amazing.

“Every society has some group of people—somewhere between a minuscule amount and half the adults—that read a lot in their leisure time,” says Wendy Griswold, a sociologist at Northwestern University who studies reading. Griswold refers to this group as “the reading class,” and—adding up the NEA’s “frequents” and “avids,” and considering rates of serious reading in other similarly wealthy countries—reckons that about 20 percent of adults belong to the U.S.’s reading class. She said that a larger proportion of the American population qualified as big readers between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries—an era of reading that was made possible by advances in printing technology and then, eventually, snuffed out by television.

(I just finished Into The Magic Shop by James Doty. That’s a 10, too.)