Reading

MY FOURTH GRADE TEACHER, in 1964, assigned us a reading list. We were allowed to select our own books, within reason, and we were not always required to submit boook reports. But we were asked to write down the title and author of every book we read,in a loose leaf notebaook, and to submit it to the instructor near the end of the school year for the teacher's approval. She announced her intention to award a blue ribbon, or gold star, or some such, to whoever had read the most books. We were warned not to fabricate titles, or to make false claims of titles consumed. Doing so would forever stain our consciouses, she explained. I was never tempted to cheat; I loved to read. People willing to cheat don't enjoy reading enough, or they enjoy winning too much. I won going away. If memory serves, I was awarded both the star and the ribbon, on stage, at an assembly, parents in attendance. My mother and father were beaming. The students closest behind me were clustered closely together, as if competing hard for second place. I learned to enjoy tho documentation habit, and never stopped. Now my loose leaf notebook, the earliest pages beginning to turn yellow, still sits on my desk, the list of titles and authors still growing, growing both in number and intellectual level, but starting to level off, as limits are reached, both in published books of interest to me, and in my academic level. I read ponderously slowly, partly by choice, but my retention rate seems good, and, when pressed by circumstances, I can speed read, somewhat. Everything I read in graduate school is included in my list, almost exclusively European history titles. I have omitted my doctoral dissertation; after all it was written by the reader, and to include it seems...unfair. I enjoyed reading in graduate school less than at any other time in my life. Books read under coercive infllueces from professors were less enjoyable to me, if only because of the coercive influence. I grandfathered in what I could remember from first grade on; Dick, Jane, and Sally matter. The list, I think, is about evenly divided between fiction and non fiction. Most of the fiction is science fiction, most of the non fiction is history and science. There are more than seven thousand titles on my list. I sometimes think that reading is what I did instead of getting married and having a family. No, I have no regrets. Reading is fundamental, as the old TV ad used to tell us. I must confess that my pace has slowed somewhat as the books have become more challenging and computer screens have taken time away from my book reading. Maybe I'll hit ten thousand before I'm done. My point is the we live in a country which seems to have abandoned reading, to the extent that it ever fully embraced it. Our founders were a bookish bunch; from there, its been downhill. Blame television, computers, and cell phones, but not our public education system. Teaching classes in diversity, equality, and inclusion does not prevent anyone from reading. Some years ago it was calculated that your average American read about one book per year. Today it is somewhat less than that. About half the population never reads a book beyond high school, and approximately twenty five percent of the American people are functionally illiterate. The average American reads at about a sixth grade level. Previously, it was on an eigth grade level. We are regressing, it seems. And yet, in the university town where I live the public library is usually packed. But how many of them are actually borrrowing books and reading, and how many merely browsing, killing time? Reading enhances one's health, we know, both mentally and physically, both provoking thought and lowering blood pressure. On the down side, it turns folks into couch potatoes, if allowed to. The solution is to read while standing, or, failing that, to take frequent breaks for standing, walking,and leg stretching. Another solution to literary muscular atrophy is to risk mental atrophy by limiting or eliminating reading altogether. Reading has limited value. Anybody expecting God to speak to us in books and stories is either deluded or disappointed, for, as Goethe said, books, at best, are designed only to give names to our mistakes.