Tag Archives: reading

US a nation of aspiring readers

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New survey results suggest Americans want to read:

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According to the poll, 82% of respondents think reading is a useful way to learn about the world, 76% say reading is relaxing and a whopping 98% of respondents with children in their household want their children to “develop a love of reading.”

Reading is “certainly aspirational,” said Mallory Newall, vice president of Public Polling at Ipsos. “We certainly want to be a reading nation.” And yet 51% of people read a book in the past month, according to the poll. In comparison, about 80% of people watched streaming services, used social media or watched a short-form video.

Interestingly, respondents who classify themselves as readers are also more likely than non-readers to consume other forms of media. So it’s not necessarily a direct competition between, say, reading and scrolling on your phone. When asked about the “reasons you don’t read more,” “other life activities” was the most common answer, which could mean anything from doing chores to sleeping to hanging out with friends…

But for many Americans it’s not going to take precedence. When asked what they’d do with one extra hour of leisure time, the top of the list is spending time with family. Below that is a tied race between watching TV, reading and exercising.

This can happen in many areas of life: we might have a high regard for something but day to day life does not reflect these ideals. Think New Year’s resolutions: stated goals but maybe short on follow through.

So if someone wanted to promote more reading among adults in the United States, where would they start? One could appeal to people’s aspirations – but they already think highly of reading and do not necessarily read a lot. Is it about making it easier to read (more affordable, more accessible, more compelling texts, etc.)? Or helping people meet their other interests – spending time with family, as noted above – so they can then read? Or making reading cool?

An example of running into an academic argument that causes one to pause

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I like to read and I see a lot of texts and information. But, sometimes a sentence or paragraph or idea sticks out and makes me stop. Here is one such recent example:

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Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations (1776) in a mercantilist era, when the only free market was the slave trade, about which he wrote nothing (Appleby 2010). He was thus not describing existing conditions. Instead, he was proposing an answer to the most important question to thinkers of his time: how to sustain a social order outside of a theological framework in which God served as both keystone and source of legitimation (Dumont 1977; Rosanvallon 1979; Carrier 1997). Early industrialization and the rise of the bourgeoisie had threatened the theological foundations of monarchical and noble rule. In response, Enlightenment political philosophy produced two conceptual pillars for the new society. One was the State, founded on popular sovereignty and the social contract. The other was the Market, based on a supposed natural right to property and the freedom to exchange (Donegani and Sadoun 2007; Audard 2009). The Classical economists’ ideal, self-regulating market, in other words, was a mechanism to replace God. (Gauthier, Francois and James Spickard. 2023. “”Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain”: a Critique of the Rational Choice Approach to Religion.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 35:151)

I do not have the expertise to weigh these claims. But, the final sentence caught my attention: in the shift away from religion, the market could be a substitute. Appealing to the workings of the market could fit where previously people and institutions might have appealed to religion. Where might this fit with Weber’s argument that the intertwining of religion and capitalism faded away as economic and rational logic took over? How does this fit with certain religious traditions and institutions that embrace a free market logic that might have attempted to replace them?

Because it is the end of the semester, I have limited time to follow up on this. Yet, I will explore more later. And I can clearly remember other books and articles that produced “aha” moments or unlocked a series of thoughts and other ideas that proved interesting. Maybe someday I will compile a list of such sources; they do not necessarily come along often and they are worth noting.

Giving books away to build relationships, share good reading

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I do not know if I could ever do this regularly but I like this sentiment:

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But what if, in this quest to declutter, we think about our physical books not as baubles with which to impress potential mates, but as a way to exist in, and relate to, the world. When you give a book away, you have given it the opportunity to befriend a stranger. You’ve given it the opportunity to dazzle, to dismay, to make an impression. And no, you’ll probably never cross paths with that book again. Even a loan will not find its way home to you. But if you’re lucky, some years from now, you may hear someone mention a scene, or allude to a plot, or even misquote a passage, and you will recognize the spirit of your old friend, even outside its corporeal form: “I read that once, a long time ago,” you’ll say. You’ll say, “I loved it, too.”

As someone who likes to read, it is often a private experience. A book can involve you in a story or a world of new ideas. A lot happens in your own head and body. Sometimes you get to talk about all of this – the experience, the content, the style, etc. – with others. Lots of classes are built on this idea where you come together around texts you have all read.

Actually giving away books, especially ones you enjoyed and want others to enjoy, can have benefits. Building social capital is good. Sharing experiences and ideas is good. Perhaps that next person is also able to pass along the book.

While I am not giving books away, I have taken to buying cheaper copies of ones I really like so I can share them. Perhaps this is a small step in a similar direction. I know certain books have influenced me and I hope they might also influence others.

The heady rush prompted by a stimulating book

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I recently finished a book that I found very interesting and left an impression on me. As I sort through how to write about the text and its content, the aftermath of reading the book reminded me that there is a particular experience with finishing such a book. Here are parts of that experience after the book is done:

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-Wanting to tell people about the book and/or recommending they read it.

-The text prompts all kinds of connections and links to other works and ideas.

-There is time devoted to thinking more about the book and dwelling on the text and its implications.

-Taking the new lens or perspective the book provides and employing it.

-Savoring the reading and thinking experience.

I read a good number of books each year and know that only a few prompt set of reactions. The ones that do make such a mark tend to make it into this blog, the classroom, and my conversations. They are the ones that I tend to purchase and keep on my shelves for a long time. I look forward to finding more of them, both old and new, that open up possibilities and provide deep experiences.

Thankfulness for libraries and all they provide access to

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This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for libraries. Throughout my life, public libraries and school libraries have provided endless hours of reading, learning, entertainment, and programs. While sociologist Eric Klinenberg celebrates libraries as important public spaces, I am grateful for their physical presence as well as the knowledge they contain and provide for users in a variety of formats. Here are some ways libraries have mattered in my life:

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-As a kid, my family would go to the public library in our community once a week. The first public library was a home that had been converted into a library. It had did not have much open space but there were plenty of books to pique my interests. I recall leaving with large stacks of books to read. The second and current public library was a completely new space with more openness that enabled larger collections, providing plenty of material for me to find.

-I have experience with two academic libraries and have benefited greatly from my interactions with both. One of the underestimated perks of involvement with colleges and universities is the ability to access so much material, both on-site and from other libraries. I have used these borrowing privileges a lot, enabling research and learning from thousands of materials that would have been difficult or impossible to obtain otherwise. While I have not used library space for studying as much as some, it is always helpful to have a place to go where learning is encouraged.

-Now with my own kids, the library provides learning, opportunities, and materials to enjoy at home. The fun it is to browse through books, new areas of knowledge, and activities all in one building. I hope they enjoy both the library as a space different than other spaces and a place to enjoy learning.

In sum, I think libraries are worth every penny of my individual tax dollars as well as deserve the support of the full community. Even in a world of smartphones and computers that can provide you access to information and material in no time, having a physical space dedicated to learning and books remains very important.

(One note: none of my school libraries pre-college stand out to me. This could be partly due to my reading choices when younger which veered more toward non-fiction. Or, perhaps because of my time in them was part of organized activity as opposed to operating on my own.)

Why I would choose to read a 700+ page book versus an 11 page summary on an important historical period

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I recently read two histories of a similar time period and both texts addressed the North American aspects of the Seven Years’ War. However, the texts had very different lengths. One book was over 700 pages and included many details. The other book included a summary of the same war in 11 pages. Which was the better read?

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Much of this answer depends on what I hoped to accomplish in my reading. Months ago, I had stumbled onto the Wikipedia page for the Seven Years’ War and realized I knew relatively little about it. The North American branch of this conflict involved relatively few troops yet had very important implications for the subsequent history of the United States. I searched out some recommendations on notable academic histories that addressed this period and received a few books from my library. I wanted to know more and now I had options.

I enjoyed reading the 700+ page book. Did I need all the details in my life? Probably not, but much of what I read was fascinating and provided insights that shorter summaries could not. I am glad that I read all of this so that at least at one point in life I could say I tried to take in all of this knowledge.

The 11 page summary was also interesting and well-written. It also took much less time. I recognized the high points of the conflict from the much longer narrative. These high points made a lot more sense given all the details I had read not too long before.

In the academic world, we run into these sorts of issues all the time: how much knowledge do I need to proceed? Would a one page summary be sufficient or should I devote years to studying this? We publish different length materials, ranging from encyclopedia entries and shorter notes to longer articles and books. One cannot read and study everything so we must be judicious in what we spend our time on. Yet, the joys of diving deeply into material is one of the best parts of study and research.

Having read both texts, I am still in favor of reading the much longer text. I may go years before reading anything on the Seven Years’ War and the longer text gave me plenty to consider. I had the time to spend on it and I may not make the same decision regarding another subject area given different circumstances. But, for two weeks this summer, reading a lot about the Seven Years’ War was a good decision.

“Who sings the song of suburbia?” Part Two on novels

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Jo Giles’ book The Poetics of the American Suburbs is the first academic study I have seen of poetry about or influenced by the suburbs. And the questions posed at the beginning of the book are worth considering – see Part One.

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At the same time, the study of other cultural products or works about the suburbs is alive and well. Today, I will profile several academic studies involving novels and the suburbs. Poetry and novels might be very different forms of writing yet there is some overlap in themes. Additionally, writing and reading a novel might be more similar to poetry than other forms of cultural products – like television and film – which I will address tomorrow. (On Thursday, I will address a fourth category of works – music – that some commonalities with poetry.)

Two scholarly books, in particular, are great introductions to examining novels about the suburbs. In the 2001 book White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth Century American Novel, Catherine Jurca looks at how such works discuss the homelessness of suburbanites even as they have succeeded by acquiring the suburban single-family house and the representation of suburbanites as a whole – “empty white people” – as a sociological fact. In the Introduction, Jurca puts these two narrative strands together:

this study examines the tendency in twentieth-century literary treatments of the American suburb to convert the rights and privileges of living there into spiritual, cultural, and political problems of displacement, in which being white and middle class is imagined to have as much or more to do with subjugation as with social dominance.

Robert Beuka’s 2004 book SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth Century American Film and Fiction emphasizes the important role of place and how fictional works addressed both fixed ideas about suburbs and variation within suburbia. From the end of the introduction of the book:

For the authors and filmmakers I discuss, the suburbs present a reflection of both the values and the anxieties of dominant U.S. culture. Their various gazes into the heterotropic “mirror” of suburbia reveal a landscape both energized and compromised by manifold cultural aspirations and fears.

These two books cover a lot of literary ground: there are a number of novels that explicitly address suburban life. Additionally, their analytical lenses help shed light on important themes and patterns. There are lived suburban experiences and then there are narratives about suburban life. Both are important and influence each other – both facts and interpretation matter for a full understanding of suburban life.

More broadly, novels are important. Long, important books are signs of culture and sophistication. I am thinking of sociologist Wendy Griswold’s work on the development of a reading culture that requires a number of elements to come into place for producers to create novels and a reading public to consume them. Perhaps it is not surprising that a number of novels and the suburbs converged given the significant social change of suburbanization as well as the development of the American literary scene. For novels and fictional works to coalesce around certain themes involving suburbia matters.

Tomorrow, several of the important scholarly works I have drawn on that analyze television and film representations of the suburbs.

Why Google’s plan to scan every book in the world was halted

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Google had plans to scan every book but the project hit some legal bumps along the way and now the company has “a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them”:

Google thought that creating a card catalog was protected by “fair use,” the same doctrine of copyright law that lets a scholar excerpt someone’s else’s work in order to talk about it. “A key part of the line between what’s fair use and what’s not is transformation,” Google’s lawyer, David Drummond, has said. “Yes, we’re making a copy when we digitize. But surely the ability to find something because a term appears in a book is not the same thing as reading the book. That’s why Google Books is a different product from the book itself.”…

It’s been estimated that about half the books published between 1923 and 1963 are actually in the public domain—it’s just that no one knows which half. Copyrights back then had to be renewed, and often the rightsholder wouldn’t bother filing the paperwork; if they did, the paperwork could be lost. The cost of figuring out who owns the rights to a given book can end up being greater than the market value of the book itself. “To have people go and research each one of these titles,” Sarnoff said to me, “It’s not just Sisyphean—it’s an impossible task economically.” Most out-of-print books are therefore locked up, if not by copyright then by inconvenience…

What became known as the Google Books Search Amended Settlement Agreement came to 165 pages and more than a dozen appendices. It took two and a half years to hammer out the details. Sarnoff described the negotiations as “four-dimensional chess” between the authors, publishers, libraries, and Google. “Everyone involved,” he said to me, “and I mean everyone—on all sides of this issue—thought that if we were going to get this through, this would be the single most important thing they did in their careers.” Ultimately the deal put Google on the hook for about $125 million, including a one-time $45 million payout to the copyright holders of books it had scanned—something like $60 per book—along with $15.5 million in legal fees to the publishers, $30 million to the authors, and $34.5 million toward creating the Registry….

This objection got the attention of the Justice Department, in particular the Antitrust division, who began investigating the settlement. In a statement filed with the court, the DOJ argued that the settlement would give Google a de facto monopoly on out-of-print books. That’s because for Google’s competitors to get the same rights to those books, they’d basically have to go through the exact same bizarre process: scan them en masse, get sued in a class action, and try to settle. “Even if there were reason to think history could repeat itself in this unlikely fashion,” the DOJ wrote, “it would scarcely be sound policy to encourage deliberate copyright violations and additional litigation.”

Out-of-print books with uncertain copyright status scuttle what could be one of the great treasure troves of information? This suggests we still have a ways to go until we have legal structures that can deal with the information-rich and easily accessible online realm. If a deal could eventually be worked out for books, what about older music, art, and other cultural works?

A related thought: having all those books available might indeed change the academic enterprise in several ways. First, we could easily access more sources of data. Second, we could potentially cite many more sources.

The state of reading books in America in 2016

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Pew Research has recently put out several reports on book reading in America. First, the broad overview:

Yet even as the number of ways people spend their time has expanded, a Pew Research Center survey finds that the share of Americans who have read a book in the last 12 months (73%) has remained largely unchanged since 2012…

Americans read an average (mean) of 12 books per year, while the typical (median) American has read 4 books in the last 12 months.

Second, those who do read still do so in print most of the time:

Readers today can access books in several common digital formats, but print books remain substantially more popular than either e-books or audio books. Roughly two-thirds of Americans (65%) have read a print book in the last year, which is identical to the share of Americans who reported doing so in 2012 (although down slightly from the 71% who reported reading a print book in 2011).

By contrast, 28% of Americans have read an e-book – and 14% have listened to an audio book – in the last year. In addition to being less popular than print books overall, the share of Americans who read e-books or listen to audio books has remained fairly stable in recent years…

Nearly four-in-ten Americans read print books exclusively; just 6% are digital-only book readers.

Third, on why people read:

Among all American adults:

  • 84% ever read to research specific topics of interest (29% do so nearly every day).
  • 82% read to keep up with current events (47% nearly every day).
  • 80% read for pleasure (35% nearly every day).
  • 57% read for work or school (31% do so nearly every day).

Fourth, who isn’t reading:

Several demographic traits correlate with non-book reading, Pew Research Center surveys have found. For instance, adults with a high school degree or less are about three times as likely as college graduates (40% vs. 13%) to report not reading books in any format in the past year. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey shows that these less-educated adults are also the least likely to own smartphones or tablets, two devices that have seen a substantial increase in usage for reading e-books since 2011. (College-educated adults are more likely to own these devices and use them to read e-books.)

Adults with an annual household income of less than $30,000 are about twice as likely as the most affluent adults to be non-book readers (33% vs. 17%). Hispanic adults are also about twice as likely as whites (40% vs. 23%) to report not having read a book in the past 12 months.

Older Americans are a bit more likely than their younger counterparts not to have read a book. Some 29% of adults ages 50 and older have not read a book in the past year, compared with 23% of adults under 50. In addition, men are less likely than women to have read a book, as are adults in rural areas compared with those in urban areas.

Fifth, the book reading trends haven’t changed too much in recent years:

The share of Americans who report not reading any books in the past 12 months is largely unchanged since 2012, but is slightly higher than in 2011, when the Center first began conducting surveys of book-reading habits. That year, 19% of adults reported not reading any books.

While Internet use (with the included possibilities of streaming audio and video) is taking up more and more time in daily life, it may take quite a while for reading books to becoming an activity for a small minority. And how could is disappear completely from certain settings such as schools and colleges?

Books that influenced sociologists to pursue sociology

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Sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle discusses some of the books that most influenced her:

BOOKS: Which books had the biggest effect on you?

TURKLE: Jean Piaget’s “The Child’s Conception of the World,” Freud’s “The Uncanny,” Claude Levi-Strauss’s “The Savage Mind.” Getting into those books got me into this notion that we love the objects we think with, and we think with the objects we love. That became my life’s work.

BOOKS: Any other pivotal book?

TURKLE: I think the most influential book for me was “The Lonely Crowd” by David Riesman. I read that in high school. I said to myself I want to be the sort of person who could write a book like that. So I decided to study sociology and psychology. In fact, he became my mentor.

Given that Turkle was trained as a sociologist and psychologist (she did both together: “Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.”), these books don’t look so surprising. But, would we have known this when Turkle was in college or younger? Or were these the books that she found at an academic level that then influenced her later research and writing? It would be interesting to see: (1) what books a number of other sociologists would cite as influential and (2) whether these texts line up with the books and articles cited the most in the discipline.

Additionally, The Lonely Crowd has had an outsized effect on studying the American suburbs. I admit that I have not read the whole thing though it sits on the shelf in my office. Its claims about conformity have been widely echoed by critics of the suburbs – while cities are often presented as the bastions of individuality and authenticity – even as the data behind the claims was somewhat thin.