Reading has been in the news in the new year. Given the winter that has leviathan like levitated over much of the country, it has been a good winter to read–to stay indoors with a book in hand an a large warm ironstone mug of tea at the ready. About a month ago the Pew Research Internet Project published a report on reading enthusiastically titled E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership Jumps (the good folks at the Pew Research Internet Project have been chronicling all the doings the young and old have with all things digital for quite some time), and while they are indeed much preoccupied with E-Reading they include a glimpse of the sum total of the American reading public (click the table to enlarge):
The narrative that accompanies tabulated is here, while E-Reading is expanding, there is a fairly healthy numbers in the Print category…turning reading into a matter of quantitative dissection is, well, worth a retort something like Groucho Marx’s “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read” (which happily returns us to our reading inside in cold weather metaphor). The inspired madness of Marx’s quip speaking to the essential aspect of reading, that we can no more do without our dogs than our books, why do you ask? This gets to the question of the reader’s lifetime, recently Amazon.com published it’s list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime and while Amazon.com is no public library, it’s a good list. It’s a list that was constructed with a life in mind, with remembering reading as Sven Birkerts did in his book Reading Life: Books for the Ages “I miss those days, the excitement of wandering, that sense of the book as an entity that could hold just about anything between its covers.” Remember that kind of reading? Look at the list from Amazon and the last book on the grid lower right, Where the Wild Things Are…
