Friday, August 24, 2007

1 in 4 American adults.....


didn't read even ONE book last YEAR. This is pitiful. Sad.

>>One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.<<

Now I understand that not everyone has the luxury of staying at home with their children and homeschooling them, a lifestyle which lends itself to reading. Although I do not read for pleasure nearly as much during the school year as I do during the summer. Sept-June I'm lucky to get a non-school related book finished every couple weeks. During the summer? I'd say I average 2 books a week. While on vacation, I can polish off a book a day while Chris drives. :-P Even Chris who works 60+ hours a week, drives 40 minutes each way to work and works on cars and yard stuff every weeekend, manages to find time to read and he certainly isn't wasting his precious reading time with fluff.

Still 25% of American adults didn't read a SINGLE book. In 365 days? How many hours of TV did those same people watch I wonder in that same amount of time? Hmmm???

Thank heavens I'm raising readers. Even my boys who would rather chew glass than read fiction, devour non-fiction books, Ian memorizes them, I dare any of you to ask him a question about Naval aircraft...dare you :-)
Keeping Katie supplied with books has always been hard and it's just getting harder now that she can finish off novels in a day or two, and not brain candy but literature like Jane Austen. Grace is rapidly following in her footsteps (finished 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (abrdiged) and is starting and loving The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (abridged) with some fluff reading added in ) and Emma is hot on their heels-rising first grader, plowing her way through chapter books like Little House and Magic Tree House.

So please read to your children, teach them to read and more importantly stop reading my blog and pick up a book yourself!


Link to entire article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070822/ap_on_re_us/reading_habits_ap_poll

2 comments:

Karen said...

Thanks for the link! I'm glad your kids love reading as much as you and Christopher. We're still on board books and cloth books, but we're lucky that our girls are heading in the same direction. (Really, given that their parents got engaged in a bookstore though, wouldn't it be a given? :))

Therese said...

We read with our younger three every evening. My older four all read before they go to sleep. Sam is our best reader. He use to spend his lunch break at school reading. I cannot imagine not having a book I am reading at the moment. Don't these people realize what they are missing out on?