Education

"Who cares what they read as long as they read" not infrequently leaves the lips of many teacher's lounge loungers. They mean to say, of course, "at this time, it's more important that we encourage students to learn how to read than worry about whether what they're reading is accurate or encourages a healthy attitude." In other words, it's just prioritizing.

Oh my God! He's burning a book!

I understand the sentiment. After all, teaching children how to read is the reason teachers exist in the first place and teachers should be applauded for recognizing their responsibility.

Taken to an extreme, however, a reading uber alles mentality can lead to self-righteousness and zealotry. I've lived mostly in an academic environment and if you did as well, you know that being well-read in that environment is like being fast on a track team or brave in the military- it's what everybody aspires to and the primary criteria for human-worth measurement.

And, as hard as it is for some to admit, reading can sometimes be worse than not reading anything at all to which mothers who have lost their children to some cult or their husbands to the Playboy-Maxim maxim, "get as much as you can" can attest.

The first time I heard reading, in and of itself, criticized was in a quote by H.L. Mencken,

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

At that moment, Mencken earned a place at the adult's table in my mind (and he's sat there ever since, gloomily complaining about the noise coming from Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh in the kitchen). It's absolutely true. Think about it. One goes home and spends a few hours reading about somebody else's life if fiction or, if politics say, reinforcing the same opinions (is the 875th example of how taxes stimulate the ecomomy more enlightening than the 874th?). How does that make one into a better person (yes, you're reading an opinion. I see the irony)?

Wouldn't it be much better for that person to go out and help somebody instead of spending four hours a day reading how the world would be better if people helped each other? Wouldn't a woman be better advised to do something nice for her husband instead of read a romance novel? How about a guy play a game of ball with his son instead of reading Mickey Mantle's life story?

And where do people apply all of the knowledge they gain? Like some kind of knowledge arms race, people mostly expend reading energy to keep up with their enemies in verbal combat, making sure that they remember that the Crusades had a complex beginning to parry attacks on the Church. People also love (I'm projecting a little) to impress. I remember when somebody in the teacher's lounge brought up an interview Gore had given in which he said that he enjoyed the book "The Red and the Black" by Stendhal, and I said that I had read (great and I don't regret it). Oh! what a victory for me that day!

When I mentioned my newfound reading ambivalence to an academically-oriented friend of mine, he said, "How will you learn how to think," or "how will you think?" or something like that.

I thought about it and said, "Thinking doesn't end when you put down the book. For many, it might, just then, start."

Tom Wayne from Kansas City, MO is burning books because:

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

How arrogant! If people don't read in the quantity he thinks appropriate, they're not thinking (dumb). I wonder how many things, besides reading, he's accomplished? I don't think my brother's ever read a book, yet I know few men as decent (and wealthy) as him. It's funny because I know some people started feeling sorry for my brother after having read the beginning of the previous sentence.

Anyways, Wayne needn't worry. Nobody wanted the books because they're reading something else, or they're wealthy enough to avoid a trip to his store and order from Amazon.

Over the last few years, people are buying and publishing more-not less books with only a slight dip last year. And, those figures don't include blogs and other internet reading or people just copying stuff.

And this site reports that

Total book sales dipped 0.3% in 2006, to $24.20 billion, according to estimates released by the Association of American Publishers. Sales in the trade segment were up 2.9% in the year, to $8.28 billion, led by an 8.5% increase in the trade paperback category. Adult hardcover sales rose 4.1%. Sales in the children's segments fell, with hardcover sales off 2.0% and paperback down 0.6%. Sales do not include revenue from the Harry Potter series, which the AAP excluded to give a better sense of the overall trend in the children's market.

The largest gain in the year was recorded by e-books, where sales rose 24.1%, to a still tiny $54.4 million. Audiobook sales were down 11.7%. Other areas where sales fell were religion, off 10.2%; book clubs/mail order, down 3.0%; elhi, down 5.8%; and the "other" segment, off 11.3%. Sales were up 4.6% in the mass market paperback category, rose 2.3% in professional and 2.8% in the higher education segment.

The Red and the Black (Penguin Classics) by Roger Gard