I try to read every day, but it’s hard.  I have a kid, another one on the conveyer belt, my own book to finish, this blog to attend to, a demanding day job, and grass to cut.  Utne says, “Don’t have time to read for fun? Me either, yet I spend a couple hours each day sifting though dry e-mails at work. If you’re in the same boat, check out DailyLit, a website that will send you daily installments of books via e-mail or RSS feed. There are over 750 books available for free, but even the copyrighted titles usually cost well under $10.”  

So, okay, reading a book in your Outlook inbox isn’t the most appealing thing in the world.  I read for about 30 minutes every day at lunch.  I live in Savannah, and if you’ve ever been here, my office is on that really, really big park downtown, straight across from that really, really giant old fountain.  So I go out there, even in the winter, and read for about half an hour.  I can get about 10 pages in.  In the last three months, I’ve been able to finish The Roots of American Order and The Brothers Karamazov, and I’m reading Crime and Punishment now.  My question: For those who are committed to reading almost every day, when and where do you get it done, and why there, and why then?

The concept of a literary canon is still on the minds of those who teach and pass along culture to the next generation of humans.  What’s a Great Book, and what does it mean to introduce young people - from birth through college - to these books?  The issue brings forth questions about culture, about what matters from one generation to the next, and about what stories are worth telling again and again.  This essay is a fascinating discussion of why we need, or don’t need, a canon.

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Do you read this blog, but rarely comment?  Do you linger and observe, but rarely participate?  Are you a lurker?

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This Times headline is so good, I don’t even have to read the article: “Study Links Drop in Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading.”  Yesterday, I wrote about the joy of the local library and how awesome they are.  Consider this article more researched evidence of that same conclusion.

Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle school students and slightly declining among high school seniors. These trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading among young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a drop that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.

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The ubiquity of local libraries is a testament to the legacy of Western Civilization in general and the American experiment in particular.  Every little town seems to have one, even if it’s stuffed in the closet of the volunteer fire department. 

I was just sharing with a colleague this morning that I fell in love with reading and ultimately became a writer, in part, because I grew up in the Middle of the Woods with very little television and was forced (forced is what it seemed like at the time) to ride with mom into town and check out as many books as they’d let me get at one time (six).  These books were my entertainment, and they mostly worked.  We had no library in my home, and without the Brandon (Mississippi) Public Library, I’d still be as stupid as I sometimes feel.  Here’s a short encomium about the local library from The Smart Set.  And best of all, it comes with pictures!

According to many, the novel and the short story are relatively dead, for many, many reasons.  For one, novels are long and boring and don’t have as many explosions.  And those are the bad novels about attorneys and spies.  For another, short stories are short, but even more boring.  But my general claim is that fiction is in the dumps because fiction isn’t fun like it used to be.  Somewhere after Cervantes, novelists forgot that it was okay to be funny. 

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