any reader knows
unique delight of settling
down with a good book
When I was in college, most of my classes were in the field of history and came with extensive reading lists.
One in particular landed with a thump on the table when it was passed out by the Professor. (I think it was a class on Imperial Russian History and it listed War and Peace with the note YES – ALL OF IT).
I was always reading.
My roommates were in The School of Engineering and they had other forms of homework but I was always just reading.
One of my roommates finally said to me, “Are you reading for class … or for fun?”
“What’s the difference?“, I replied.
As long as I can remember, I have been a reader.
I have abibliophobia or the anxious feeling that I might run out of books or other things to read.
So it was with some interest that I read the New York Times article, “Fewer People Are Reading for Fun, Study Finds” by Maggie Astor who says that she, “… covers the intersection of health and politics, including the effects of public policies and of climate change.”
Ms. Astor writes, “Researchers from University College London and the University of Florida examined national data from 2003 to 2023 and found that the share of people who reported reading for pleasure on a given day fell to 16 percent in 2023 from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 — a drop of about 40 percent. It declined around 3 percent each year over those two decades.
There is evidence that reading for pleasure has been declining since the 1940s, the researchers said, but they called the size of the latest decrease “surprising,” given that the study defined reading broadly, encompassing books, magazines and newspapers in print, electronic or audio form.”
Lets do some diagnostics here.
From Gutenberg to the invention of the radio … there was reading.
Then came TV.
Then came the World Wide Web.
Then came hand held phones.
And there is evidence that reading for pleasure has been declining since the 1940s.
Well knock me over with a feather!
Who pays for these studies?
99% of green freeway information signage has a green background?
99% of orange highway cones are orange?
I gotta get one of these research grants.
Still, as Ms. Astor opens her article, any reader knows the unique delight of settling down with a good book.
Here is the point.
Any READER.
Any reader or anyone, really, can tell you, not everyone is a reader.
Who might turn out to be a reader can’t be determined at birth or by DNA or by any test known to mankind.
In the picture below is me and my brother Tim, probably about 1964.
We both have books open on our laps.
We had the same parents, grew up in the same home but for some reason, I was a reader and Tim was not.
I went on to career in books and news and Tim went on to a be a very successful engineer.
As for the family gene pool, many of my brothers and sisters won the Math Award given to the best Math Student at Creston High School.
Me?
Someday I plan to get a book about Trigonometry and find out what that was all about.
I have worked in Bookstores and Libraries for a good part of my life.
Over those years I formed the opinion that about 10 to 15% of the American public could be classed as readers.
That matches up with where the ‘Scientific Data’ says we are now.
I had no scientific evidence to back that up, it was just a personal feeling I came up with over the years.
Still I am happy to report that a new bookstore opened up here the low country of South Carolina.
Newspaper coverage of the opening started with the line, “In the era of Amazon and e-books, who would have imagined that a brick-and-mortar, ink-on-paper bookstore would open on Hilton Head Island in summer 2025?”
Emily [the new owner/operater] said she was inspired by online discussions of third spaces, which means a place other than home or work and school that people can go to spend time such as cafes, libraries or community centers. “I also felt the need for, being someone who is in the younger generation living in the area, I felt that we had a lack of spaces to hang out or to socialize that’s not a restaurant or a bar or the beach,” Emily said.
Happy to say we were there yesterday and enjoyed the atmosphere and hope for their future.
Any reader knows the unique delight of settling down with a good book.
I can’t tell you when I started reading because I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t.
Something I attribute to my parents having books all over our house.
My Dad was a Dentist and he subscribed to all sorts of magazines for his office waiting room, and he would bring those magazines home for us to look at before they ended up being read by his nervous patients.
One the magazines he subscribed to was Reader’s Digest so all those Reader’s Digest digested books books were all over the house.
Along with the digested books, Reader’s Digest published anthologies like America’s Best Sports Stories and Reader’s Digest True Crime: Tales of Murder & Mayhem and those were laying around the house as well.
At some point in my young life, I took down Reader’s Digest True Crime: Tales of Murder & Mayhem, it had a big read thumb print on the cover and read through it.
There were stories titled, A killer is Loose and Life and Death of a Twisted Genius.
Just right for a 10 year old.
I read them all but it was a story titled, The Trial that Rocked the Nation that stuck with me.
It was a 10 page article the told the story of the Scopes Trial in Dayton, TN.
I remember asking my Dad about it and he said, “The Monkey Trial!”
With that my lifelong admiration for Clarence Darrow was born.
I wanted to learn more about Mr. Darrow and snuck into the grown up section of my local library and took home the book, Clarence Darrow for the Defense by Irving Stone.
Lots and lots of great Darrow stuff in that book (including the case he took that was heard in a Grand Rapids, Michigan courtroom – A courtroom I was in several times for wedding receptions when the building was turned into the local art museum).*
But the story that RESONATED with me was an story told about the time Mr. Darrow’s father, Amirus Darrow (A man who took young Clarence along for midnight wagon rides to bring people along the underground railroad in Ohio), visited his son in Chicago.
The narrative by Mr. Stone picks up with:
Amirus Darrow had decided to spend a week in Kinsman visiting old friends. Clarence had slipped several greenbacks into his father’s pocket, and Jessie put up a lunch for her father-in-law for the train. Amirus ieft early in the morning, riding the streetcar downtown from 4219 Vincennes Avenue. When he found that he had a half-hour before train time he descended a flight of stairs into a basement secondhand bookstore.
At ten o’clock that night the bell rang at the Darrow home. Clarence opened the door to find his father glaze-eyed, hugging a huge bundle under each arm. Amirus had found so many books for which he had always yearned that he had not emerged from the bookshop until twelve hours later, his railroad and vacation money spent. He had come home to read his precious literary treasures, all desire to visit Kinsman gone. Seeing his father standing before him on the porch, his eyes dreamy and withdrawn and beautiful, the son realized that the older man had always missed his train because he had found something more interesting in a book than would be waiting for him at the end of a journey.
Boy Howdy, Yessir!
Did I read that maybe at the wrong time in my life?
Or maybe not.
I have to say that as a guiding star in my life, I always felt that I might find something more interesting in a book than would be waiting for me at the end of a journey.
Any reader knows the unique delight of settling down with a good book.
*(Gee whiz, but when will I get to the point … authors note)
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