Excellent Reads

But the optimists overlook a crucial thread in the data: Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told me. Readers spend more time reading each day than they did two decades ago. They appear to be even more passionate about print than their predecessors. But the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture. The fact that you are reading this article almost certainly makes you a member of it.

I mean... I'm reading this off the internet and found it through a message board I spend shitloads of time on instead of reading books. I read books as well; mostly reference material for childrearing or programming. It has been a while since I read a fiction book, and challenging myself to do it in spanish since that's the kind of thing that improves my language acquisition the most doesn't help my volume of reading.

IDK. I hated the classics and anything that didn't feel like the actual language I spoke even when I was an avid reader; my dad tried to make me read Dostoevsky and I just wanted to read Terry Prattchett. I hated Shakespere. Sometimes the classics are just too fucking meandering to ascertain what the fuck they want to say.

This paragraph feels like a "yay, you go audience! by reading this, you are special!