Books: January 2008 Archives

I love reading books for pleasure. A few years ago I realized that there are lots of people who rarely or never read a book for fun. There were a few interesting articles lately on this topic you might want to check out.

• "Twilight of the Books" - New Yorker article
• "To Read or Not To Read" - NEA Study on Reading

The basic finding is that reading for pleasure and rates of reading proficiency both appear to be trending downwards in young adults. The NEA study attempts to correlate other items like education attained, rates of voting participation, rates of volunteer activities in order to highlight the fact that if reading is lost as a past time perhaps societal losses will be experienced beyond the local bookseller and publisher. The reading rates for voters was especially interesting to me. While people always bemoan rates of voter turn out, since voters tend to be readers and non-voters tend to be non-readers perhaps this is a better informed electorate.

The NEA document is pretty long, you might want to wait for the movie version.

A few years ago I ran into the web site "Big Dead Place" and it reignited my fascination with Antarctica. I have read a lot of the first hand accounts of early explorers. Reading how people cope with the challenges given current technology and resources makes for an interesting contrast.

I ran into a mention of the book "Life on the Ice" on the O'Reilly Radar. Since I was Christmas shopping at the time, I decided I needed a copy of the book.

The book is a collection of fairly personal essays about Antarctica. The writing was unusually good. I suppose you really get a chance to compose your thoughts during six months of darkness. There were essays focused on the natural beauty, the human relationships and covered some aspects of the science projects that go on. The comparisons between penguin and human behavior made me laugh out loud at least once.

I would sure like to get a chance to visit there someday. I'm not sure if I have what it takes to winter over, but I would love a nice long visit.

Given my next big trip will be to India, maybe I should pick up "Travelers' Tales India: True Stories" by the same publisher.