...about 53 percent of American adults (roughly 125 million people) read at least one book not for school or for work in the previous 12 months
…23 percent of American adults were “light” readers (finishing one to five titles per year)
..10 percent were “moderate” (six to 11 titles),
…13 percent were “frequent” (12 to 49 titles),
…and a dedicated 5 percent were “avid” (50 books and up)
…about 20 percent of adults belong to the U.S.’s reading class. She said that a larger proportion of the American population qualified as big readers between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries—an era of reading that was made possible by advances in printing technology and then, eventually, snuffed out by television.
…”urban people read more than rural people,” “affluence is associated with reading,” and “young girls read earlier” than boys do and “continue to read more in adulthood.”
As Willingham explains in his book Raising Kids Who Read, three variables have a lot of influence over whether someone becomes a lifelong reader – – read on here.
Recently, while browsing in the Museum of Modern Art store in New York, I came across a tote bag with the inscription, “You are no longer the same after experiencing art.” It’s a nice sentiment, I thought, but is it true? Or to be more specific: Does consuming art, music, literature and the rest of what we call culture make you a better person?
Ages ago, Aristotle thought it did, but these days a lot of people seem to doubt it. Surveys show that Americans are abandoning cultural institutions. Since the early 2000s, fewer and fewer people say that they visit art museums and galleries, go to see plays or attend classical music concerts, opera or ballet. College students are fleeing the humanities for the computer sciences, having apparently decided that a professional leg up is more important than the state of their souls. Many professors seem to have lost faith too. They’ve become race, class and gender political activists….
And yet I don’t buy it. I confess I still cling to the old faith that culture is vastly more important than politics or some pre-professional training in algorithms and software systems. I’m convinced that consuming culture furnishes your mind with emotional knowledge and wisdom; it helps you take a richer and more meaningful view of your own experiences; it helps you understand, at least a bit, the depths of what’s going on in the people right around you…
I’d argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We’re overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured. The alternative is to rediscover the humanist code. It is based on the idea that unless you immerse yourself in the humanities, you may never confront the most important question: How should I live my life? …
I went to college at a time and in a place where many people believed that the great books, poems, paintings and pieces of music really did hold the keys to the kingdom. If you studied them carefully and thought about them deeply, they would improve your taste, your judgments, your conduct…
The hard sciences help us understand the natural world. The social sciences help us measure behavior patterns across populations. But culture and the liberal arts help us enter the subjective experience of particular people: how this unique individual felt; how this other one longed and suffered. We have the chance to move with them, experience the world, a bit, the way they experience it.
Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia and is one of those who still lives by the humanist code. In his book “Why Read?” he describes the potential charge embedded in a great work of art: “Literature is, I believe, our best goad toward new beginnings, our best chance for what we might call secular rebirth. However much society at large despises imaginative writing, however much those supposedly committed to preserve and spread literary art may demean it, the fact remains that in literature there abide major hopes for human renovation.”
Wouldn’t you love to take a course from that guy?
How does it work? How does culture do its thing? The shortest answer is that culture teaches us how to see. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way,” the Victorian art critic John Ruskin wrote. “Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”
It started on Tuesday, last week. I mistitled the post Monday Morning Wake-Up Call and here we were on Tuesday, after a long weekend. You can see where my head was at.
Rather than post original content (well is dry), I threw up yet another clip from yet another distinguished poet, essayist or author. This one by Arthur Brooks on Kierkegaard’s Three Ways to live move fully – – – instead of seeking a new life, the answer is to go deeper in the one you have.
Kiki, a virtual friend and follower, ever vigilant, gets right to the gist of the matter. So, why’d you post it? What’s going on with you? The first two nicked me. The last one – – which Kiki floated in over the weekend…Don’t you have anything of your own to post? Now that hit a nerve.
Almost nothing is worse, then, than realizing that your life itself has become boring. Perhaps you have at one time or another concluded that your work is drudgery, your hobbies humdrum; that even your relationships are superficial and unsatisfying. Each day reminds you of the one before. What is there to do?
One obvious answer is to run away, to throw out the old routines and connections, and find new ones instead. But maybe the solution to boredom is the exact opposite: not to seek a new life, but to go deeper into the one you have. This is exactly what the Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard advocated. When life becomes tedious to you, he argued, you don’t need to look outside for something to shake up your malaise. You need instead to look inward and find what’s missing within your own heart and soul…
According to Kierkegaard, when we first find life boring, we seek new delights…This is the time, usually in early adulthood, when people are most open to new experiences and opportunities. For some…“the aesthetic” might encompass a more innocent sort of experience—a hobby such as travel, say.
This is fine for a while. For many, though, this consumerist approach to living eventually comes to seem trivial—and, ultimately, boring. “Is this all there is?” you ask yourself. At this transition to the next stage, you need to shift from treating life as an act of consumption to becoming part of a process that creates deeper experiences. You need to “get inside the machine.” …
One thing is certain, and I have always known it — the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence,
DK photo @ 6:13 am, January 10, 2024, Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. 51° F in January! More photos from yesterday morning’s walk here.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Live & Learn 