“Spring is here, the birds are chirping and we have more daylight hours – ergo, it’s time to read more,” writes Sophie Nguyen in the Washington Post, not imagining that many in these parts would come to different conclusions. Full of good will, however, Nguyen reaches out to some strong readers, asking them to share the secrets by which they grind pages, digital or paper. Strong readers, we said, using the label that in Italy applies to those who read at least one book a month, but it would have been more correct to speak of rascals.
The most “lazy” of the people interviewed, Rachel Dawson, a social media manager in Richmond, Virginia, reads between 150 and 200 books every year, while the group leader, Paul Scott, a pensioner living in California, was not satisfied with the 388 texts read in 2023 , aims to reach 400 in 2024 and explains a bit jokingly that his love for reading was born to compensate for a mediocre school education: «I came across a passage that talked about sand storms, dust bowls , I wanted to know more, and from book to book, I found myself down the rabbit hole…”.
Already a very strong reader (about one hundred texts a year) in the years in which he worked, Scott had an epiphany when, now retired, he found himself confined to home due to Covid: «The pandemic made me see clearly how I wanted spend my free time. There was nothing on the TV and I realized that I had long empty hours every morning. That’s when I said to myself, ‘Damn, I could really spend more time reading.’ And Scott advises potential emulators to never forget that “the space dedicated to reading is sacred” and to invest more energy when starting a text (“If you really want to read a book, it’s better to start with one hundred or two hundred pages, otherwise you risk losing momentum.” They are not original advice, but among the tricks proposed, some present us with a very different idea of reading than what we were used to until a few years ago.
The most significant case is that of Allison Whack, a veterinarian in Maryland, an annual average of about 300 texts. Very busy at work, with her family (she has two young children) and with scout volunteering, Whack “reads” almost only audiobooks, goes everywhere with headphones and, to avoid wasting time, listens to everything at triple speed. It seems like torture, but she assures us that “no, you shouldn’t be intimidated, it can be done!”. And certainly you can, but not so certain that you want to. And yet it is a fact that for many (not just the very young) reading is no longer what it used to be and that we read less and less or, better still, we spend much more time than before reading (messages, captions, short sentences on social media) but this does not translate into an increase in the reading of complex texts – books, in short.
Jay Caspian Kang writes this in the New Yorker, reporting that the number of books read on average by Americans in a year has gone from around 18 in 1999 to 12 in 2021.
Yet Kang – journalist, documentary maker, author of a couple of well-reviewed books – also sees advantages in the dispersion of reading between different media: «Like the great linguistic models that are supposed to replace us, we receive words with our eyes, we order them in our head and we spit them out in a sequence that imitates a voice”, and therefore a “multimedia” reading can have unexpected and positive consequences. It’s difficult to express for now, but the time when ChatGPT and its artificial and human descendants will produce the equivalent of War and Peace seems distant.
Tags: challenge books strong readers digital pages
