How About Books Too?

A little more than a year ago, I posted a blog on a similar topic (Book Lovers Never Go to Bed Alone) and was drawn to this thinking again this morning after reading Tim Donahue’s opinion piece, Let Students Finish the Whole Book. It Could Change Their Lives, published in The New York times.¹

Donahue shares stats on the dwindling percentage of young people who are reading books for pleasure.‍ About 14 percent of thirteen year olds and about 37.6 percent of adults read for fun on a regular basis, figures that are dropping year over year. These numbers are troubling because along with reading rates, kids’ reading skills are also declining.² Not just parents, but everyone should be looking at this. Reading immersively as we do with books builds cognitive patience. It’s a way to engage deeply with a topic and implore all of our sensibilities to the page.³

I love books, and I love digital media too. Why does it feel to so many like an either / or proposition? Why can’t we welcome books to hold their own court in the vast landscape of armamentarium for intellectual consumption? Perhaps one reason is that scanning as we often do with digital media can erode our attention for reading books if we don’t practice often. Thought leaders say it takes about twenty minutes of reading a day to keep our brains in shape to continue doing it regularly.³ That leaves loads of time for Tik Tok, Instagram, Netflix, and all the rest.

What I found most intriguing about Donahue’s editorial this morning was his reference to an article written by Virginia Woolf in September 1926, How Should One Should Read a Book,⁴ which mainly asserts that readers reserve judgement of a text until they have finished it.

However, in that long opinion piece of her own, Woolf reminds me that the value of reading is not only discovered in the joy of the moment, sitting with my chai and book, today for instance, Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses. But that book time also pays off in “the after reading,” as Woolf puts it. Maybe a year from now I’ll hear a car crawl up a rock driveway, smile to myself, and think of bubble wrap, as Barrett describes its sound. Perhaps in a few years if my life feels stuck in a rut, I might think about Dev and Nicky, Barrett’s characters who live in these crappy motionless lives—and considering their fate, try harder to pull myself out.  

Woolf states it best, “The book upon which we have spent so much time and thought fades entirely out of sight. But suddenly, as one is picking a snail from a rose, tying a shoe, perhaps, doing something distant and different, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete.”⁴

That’s why I believe books belong in our daily media diets too. In books, we go deep and consequently, so goes our thinking.   

Note: All content above is authentic, and none of it was produced with AI.
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References

1.      Donahue, T.  Let Students Finish the Whole Book. It Could Change Their Lives. February 16, 2025. The New York Times. Accessed February16, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/opinion/read-books-learning.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xU4.qyiO.ORoit0kvA_yA&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

2.      Iyengar,S. Federal data on reading for pleasure: all signs see a slump. October 3, 2024.National Endowment for the Arts. Accessed February 16, 2025. https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-pleasure-all-signs-show-slump

3.      Thisis your brain on reading. November 22, 2022. The Ezra Klein Show. The NewYork Times. Accessed February 16, 2025.  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-maryanne-wolf.html

4.     Woolf, V. How should one read a book?September 1, 1926. The Yale Review. Accessed February 16, 2025. https://yalereview.org/article/virginia-woolf-essay-how-should-read-book

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