Motivational Monday: Ralph Is a Writer's Super Power

[Link] This Is How Reading Rewires Your Brain

According to Neuroscience, reading doesn’t just cram information into your brain. It changes how your brain works. 

by Jessica Stillman

We all know reading can teach you facts, and knowing the right thing at the right time helps you be more successful. But is that the entire reason just about every smart, accomplished person you can think of, from Bill Gates to Barack Obama, credits much of their success to their obsessive reading? 

Not according to neuroscience. Reading, science shows, doesn’t just fill your brain with information; it actually changes the way your brain works for the better as well. 

The short- and long-term effects of reading on the brain.

This can be short term. Different experts disagree on some of the finer details, but a growing body of scientific literature shows that reading is basically an empathy workout. By nudging us to take the perspective of characters very different from ourselves, it boosts our EQ. This effect can literally be seen in your brain waves when you read. If a character in your book is playing tennis, areas of your brain that would light up if you were physically out there on the court yourself are activated. 

Another line of research shows that deep reading, the kind that happens when you curl up with a great book for an extended period of time, also builds up our ability to focus and grasp complex ideas. Studies show that the less you really read (skim reading from your phone doesn’t count), the more these essential abilities wither. 

Read the full article: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/reading-books-brain-chemistry.html

Motivational Monday: Doing It Wrong

The Sweaty-Toothed Madman: Reading Is Becoming; Writing Is Telling Who We Are

Editor's Note: In the interest of full disclosure, in my day job, I am a reading teacher and a literature teacher for special education students. I live this stuff every damn day of my life. And I love it.

There are hundreds of movies about writers and writing. I should know. I've reviewed many of them here for the blog. And I'm currently compiling those reviews into a book. But back to the point. Sadly, there aren't as many movies about reading. Writing is something people aspire to. Writers are something people seek to become for fame, fortune, or (for some of us) immortality of a certain kind. 

But readers, well, where are the movies that demonstrate the importance and the immortality of the flip side of writing -- READING? There aren't as many. Perhaps that's because reading is seen as something else -- a pastime, an enjoyment, an additive to life, not a calling, not an aspiration. 

Perhaps the best of the lot is Dead Poets Society. One of the things I really love about Dead Poets Society is how it stresses how much reading is tied to becoming who we are as people. Ideas are learned and adapted or learned and discarded. That's the power of reading. That's why I think a liberal arts education is so important, even for business and STEM folks.

As John Keating (played with legendary panache by Robin Williams) says in the film:

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, 'O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?' Answer. That you are here -- that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

It's not uncommon for Robin Williams to choose roles that make viewers stop and think. He's done it in his serious flicks like Good Morning, Vietnam (another favorite of mine), The Fisher King,  and What Dreams May Come and in his comedies like Mrs. Doubtfire and The Birdcage. His performances have a way of changing the viewer in the same way he explains poetry can as John Keating. 

"What will your verse be?" I can't think of a more inspiring question. 

There is a world, and you get to leave a mark on it. But how do you do that? How do you learn who you are? Sure, a lot of that knowledge comes from the people we grow up with. Family, friends, and community shape many of our views and many of our opinions along the lines of religion, politics, culture, etc. But our growth as human beings doesn't stop there. 

Have you ever heard someone complain that a child went off to college and came back a different person? The word often unfairly thrown around is "brainwashed," but let's be honest. It's not that at all. It's exposure. Suddenly that child is exposed to differing, various, equally valid points of view, and that child has the opportunity to think for himself/herself/themself and decide on their own whether the new knowledge or or the former knowledge, whether the need to think and process for oneself or the familial/community pressure to conform is the greater cause -- or how those two opposing forces are to be blended into something new. 

This takes us directly into our first responsibility when reading as lifelong learners.

"We must constantly look at things from a different way."

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader," says Margaret Fuller, because she understood the power of opening our minds to the experiences of others that can be discovered in the written word. So many people don't have the opportunity to visit all the peoples and places in the world. Books are their tickets to these peoples and these places. It is through reading that the world becomes part of us and us part of it. 

C.S. Lewis tells us, "We read to know we are not alone," and it's true. That's precisely why Stephen King goes even further to call books "a uniquely portable magic." 

Readers consistently and continually  (even continuously for those grammar and vocabulary nerds among us) learning and growing and changing. Readers are far more likely to look back on the people they were ten years ago and shudder, thinking "Was I really like that?" And the greater variety of voices readers expose themselves to, the greater the breath of that growth -- again, not because they accept willy-nilly every new idea and every new point of view they come across, but because such exposure allows them to truly pick and choose where their truths and ideas lie for (in many cases) the first time. The more ideas readers expose themselves to, the better they become at weighing and prioritizing the varying points of view rather than becoming less able to confront them. 

"When I look back," says Maya Angelou, "I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young." It is precisely by reading that writers become... well, just become. They don't exist before the "writer" begins as "reader." They are a non-entity before they discover the power of written words, or as Margaret Atwoods puts it: "A word after a word after a word is power." 

That power is the magic, the nuclear energy, the joie de vivre creates the infantile stirrings to tell stories, to matter, to exist (damn it!), and to make it know that we exist (damn it!). Margaret Atwood calls it power. Stephen King calls it magic. C.S. Lewis calls it sehnsucht. 

“Sehnsucht” is a German word that roughly translates as longing… but Lewis does a brilliant job of fleshing this rather bland translation... Lewis described Sehnsucht as an inconsolable longing in the human heart “for which we know not what.”  It is a haunting sense of longing which Lewis said touched him throughout his life.  It has elements of nostalgia and joy, but also an intense awareness of missing something. (Elizabeth Camden , "C.S. Lewis and Sehnsucht," https://elizabethcamden.com/2011/05/16/c-s-lewis-and-sehnsucht)

In many cases, Lewis uses the word for the long for belief and faith, but I think it's equally evident that he saw it as that longing for story within each of us and for engaging in the pursuit of the imaginative, and for him (by and large) that is a discovery that comes through the stories that are shared from others, particularly for him, fairy stories and mythical legends. Those shaped his understanding of life, not just fiction. And they enabled him to tell us who he is through works that continue to live on, both fiction like The Chronicles of Narnia and nonfiction like A Grief Observed.

What authors and what books you choose to read can and will and should help to shape the way you see the world -- and that is exactly the kind of truth that should be exposed in your writing as well. 

"We're not talking artists, George. We're talking free thinkers."

One of the great wrong beliefs about writing (or really any artistic endeavor) is that the person making art must obtain mastery. The goal of creating any kind of art isn't to become the most proficient or to achieve the capital "A" in Artiste. It is to create. It's that simple. Well, almost that simple. It does go one step further -- it is to create what is uniquely yours and can't be created by anyone else. 

That may sound broader and more daunting, but it's still just as simple. 

Reading helps you think. Thinking builds the imagination. Imagination fuels inspiration. Inspiration fills the mind to become its true self. 

The goal isn't to just rehash everything you read, but to take it in, to mull it over, to keep what feels like you, and then to dump the rest of it out and into the garbage. Or, as Keating tells his students:

"Boys, you must strive to find your own voice. Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all. Thoreau said, 'Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.' Don't be resigned to that. Break out!"

If Step One is to read, then Step Two is to take what you read and form opinions about it. Do you believe it or disbelieve it? Do you use it to build on who you already are? Or do you disregard it? Do you break it apart and mix the pieces into who you are?

Content that is consumed without being reviewed, without being experienced, without being analyzed is meaningless. Or, as Charlie (Nuwanda) tells the other members of the Society: "Are we just playing around out here? If all we do is come together and read a bunch of poems to each other, what the hell are we doing?"

Does what you read help you become? If it doesn't help you do that, then what the hell are you doing? And it's not just reading. It's experience. If what you are experiencing -- both read and lived -- isn't constantly creating and recreating you -- it's just the life equivalent of empty calories. 

Putting words into your brain should lead to something. Putting words into your brain should lead to becoming someone. 

According to Ursula K. Le Guin: 

"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul."

Once that work of mutual creation has begun, we have both the authority and responsibility to share that new creation we have become, or as Uncle Walt says, ""I sound my barbaric YAWP over the world’s roofs."

"Words and ideals can change the world." (a.k.a. sounding your barbaric yawp)

What does your writing, what do your stories say about the world you inhabit? What do your characters say about human nature? What do the kind of plot your create say about a sense of fairness, liberty, existential dread, love, passion, etc. in the world? 

Even if you don't say it intentionally, these are the things that your writing will say about you regardless of your silence. Why? Because that silence isn't really silence at all. Your work has been subtly (or not so subtly) speaking about you with every freakin' word you've written. 

I've written about theme several times before. Theme is where the writer can't help but enter the work -- not in any kind of Mary Sue or Marty Stu way -- but in the authentic ways no writer can avoid. Some might say even when they try to avoid doing it. Theme is never something to be ashamed of. Theme is to writers the "barbaric yawp" Walt Whitman wants to shout from the rooftops. Theme is to writers the recognition that your opinions and your points of view and your ideals matter and that it's okay for them to be inside your work. They shouldn't be merely tolerated but celebrated. 

"Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled 'This could change your life," says Helen Exley. Are yours dangerous? Are they the kinds of stories that change people and alter the ways people think about each other? Do they "happen" to the people who read them in any experiential way? According to Haruki Murakami, that's the purpose of books and stories. "Have books ‘happened’ to you?" he asks. "Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you."

Even those of us who "just want to tell an interesting story and not change the world" are going to change someone. And that's okay. In fact, that's fantastic. Who wants to create art that goes into the brain and gets discarded without a second thought? Who wants to write throwaway content? What wants to waste a life creating something that didn't matter to anyone? 

It's not just a yawp. It's a barbaric yawp you're screaming. I am here. I mattered. I matter. As writers, you are taking a courageous stance. You are shouting to the universe that you are worth noticing. You are living out loud the kind of life that says "Look at me and what I created!"

"Damn it, Neil, the name is Nuwanda."

The final part of our discussion (okay, monolog) is that of not just discovering who we are and how reading plays into that discovery, of learning to put all that stuff we read together to recreate who we are, or to have the guts to start writing down on paper (or digital space) those new thoughts that stem from who we are newly recreated to be, but it is to proudly proclaim our new identity without embarrassment, to proudly show how it defines not only us as individuals but identifies our people, our tribe as well. 

I know it's a sort of insulting cliche that we all tend to want to be ourselves by copying others (often leveled unfairly against Goths by folks dressed in Country Club cosplay), but even when we do pursue individuality it is often to find where we fit in the world. In fact, it is only when we become truly ourselves can we realize where we actually belong.

I love the way the gonzo director John Waters says this: "It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else."

It's precisely when we find who we are, what we believe, how we spread that to others and how it helps us find "our people" that we find that safety zone from which to proclaim, as Charlie, "Damn it, Neil, the name is Nuwanda." 

We find strength in both our voices and the voices of the others we surround ourselves with. That means both human beings in our circles and the human beings in our books. As much as my people are my convention and writing buddies such as Bobby Nash, Ellie Raine, Elizabeth Donalds, Barry Reese, Sorella Smith, Nikki Nelson-Hicks, and so many others, I also consider my people to be Hemingway, O'Connor, Chandler, Hammett, Phillips, Mosely, McBain, Jackson, and the other writers whose work graces my shelves. Both the living and the dead, the near and the never-have-met are my people. They help shape me and help empower me to keep creating. 

And it is that strong, continuously strengthened voice that allows us to yawp and keep yawping, against an industry that is floundering, against a public that devalues reading more and more each year (it often seems), against family members that tell us to be sensible, against the folks who would insist our name is Charlie.

Note: Quotes used in the article come from either the movie script or from this article: https://celadonbooks.com/inspiring-quotes-about-books-and-reading/

Reading Writers?

Can a person be a good writer if they don't like to read? 

www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8LRGjQD/

Sunday Funnies: Snob!

Umberto Eco: Anything but a commodity

"It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

"There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.

"If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the 'medicine closet' and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That's why you should always have a nutrition choice!

"Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity." 

            -- Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books

Sunday Funnies: Click Here to Upgrade

 

See Me at MidSouthCon 38 this weekend in Memphis! Cons are back, baby!!

 

I'll be a guest for MidSouth Con 2022 this year in Memphis again! Come visit me on Pro Row or at any of the following panels (maybe one or two more to be added). I'll also be doing game beta demos for some of the games I have in development from time to time in the game room.

Friday, March 26, 6 PM
Pulp Fiction for Today's Market

Join the New Pulp Movement as discuss how to formulate and write a Pulp story for today's market.

Friday, March 25, 8 PM
Boardgames: A Gaming Movement 

Board games are exploding in popularity in America. There are a dozen different types, all of which appeal to various players for a gambit of reasons. Panelist discuss trends, from gateway games to the newest and hottest, and why this type of game is growing is popularity.

Friday, March 25, 9 PM
Pro Row

Meet your favorite MidSouthCon professional, maybe get their autograph or buy their works. Pro Row is located in the hallway outside of the Tennessee Ballrooms.

Saturday, March 26, 10 AM
Self-Marketing for Authors

You have published your works, either independently or through traditional publisher - now what? Our panelists discuss how to market yourself.

Saturday, March 26, 4PM
Pro Row

Meet your favorite MidSouthCon professional, maybe get their autograph or buy their works. Pro Row is located in the hallway outside of the Tennessee Ballrooms.

Saturday, March 26, 9 PM
Short Stories: How to Fit It All In

Writing a short story can be harder than it seems. One of the biggest challenges is to figure out how much detail is needed without having to be minimalists.

Sunday, March 27, 10:00 AM
Reading: Sean Taylor

Sean Taylor reads his from his collections Giddy and Euphoric and Show Me A Hero.

Game Demos
Saturday & Sunday, March 26 and 27, between other sessions after 11:00 PM

I will also be running game demos of the beta versions of several games I have in development between my other posted sessions at MidSouthCon. Come look for me at Table 23 any time after the Open Gaming Room opens at 11:00 on Saturday and Sunday!

"What games?" you ask. 

• Last Mouse on the Left
• Cap'n Kelly's Custom Critters
• The Battle for Classic City
• Shark Detective

Come join the fun as a beta tester for new games!

INTO WRITING AND READING (AND RAY BRADBURY)? GET ‘GIDDY AND EUPHORIC’ WITH ESSAYIST SEAN TAYLOR!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Sean Taylor wants to be a time machine.

Sean Taylor believes redemptive stories still matter.

Sean Taylor knows that Ray Bradbury lives forever.

Don’t believe us? Then this book is for you. GIDDY AND EUPHORIC, now available from Pro Se Productions and its nonfiction PULPSTUDIES imprint, collects the essays of author and comic book writer Sean Taylor. In these pages, Sean shares his thoughts on subjects across the board, including his love for Ray Bradbury, why diversity is important to artists, and even the right way to become a short story reader!

“I’ll sum it up as simply as I can: you’re going to care. That’s what Sean does with his characters and the stories they inhabit. He makes you care.”
-- Erik Burnham, Ghostbusters

“Once you’re done reading, you’ll know you read a well-crafted, fully rounded piece of work.” 
-- Dan Jurgens, The Death of Superman

Featuring a cover by the author and print formatting by Antonino lo Iaocono, GIDDY AND EUPHORIC is available for 11.99 via Amazon. 

Formatted by Antonino lo Iaocono and Marzia Marina, Taylor’s stellar collection of essays and insights is available as an ebook for only 99 cents from Amazon. Kindle Unlimited members can read for free!

For more information on this title, interviews with the author, or digital copies for review, email editorinchief@prose-press.com.

To learn more about Pro Se Productions, go to www.prose-press.com. Like Pro Se on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ProSeProductions.

Coming Soon -- Giddy and Euphoric: Essays on Writing and Reading (and Ray Bradbury)!!!

I'm thrilled to announce that the galley for my first nonfiction book has been approved and is in the process of getting printed courtesy of Pro Se Press. This one features my essays and tutorials about writing, reading, and as advertised on the cover, a little bit of my favorite sci-fi author Ray Bradbury too. 

With luck, timing, and the gods and goddesses of shipping (would that be Apollo and Diana?) on our side, we'll hopefully see this one in time for my appearance at Mid South Con at the end of next month. 

Fingers crossed. 

[Link]The rise of audiobook snobbery—and what it’s really about

by Caroline O'Donoghue

Reading a book—not listening to it—has become its own sort of status symbol

Illustration: Kate Hazell 

You can’t talk about reading without talking about snobbery. At some point in the last decade, we decided to abandon most forms of physical media, therefore making a rod for our own backs when it comes to gift-giving (remember when you could just give someone a Monty Python boxset and be done with it? Now your choices are a candle and a skydiving experience) and providing us even fewer clues as to who we really are. Once upon a time, you could walk into someone’s home and piece together their entire existence based on the DVDs and CDs on their shelves. Now we’re supposed to puzzle out who they are by how they yell at their Alexa.

Books, for some reason, have survived this unremitting cull. Books are the clue, the key, the Rosetta Stone for finding out who someone is. As a result, books have become more of a lightning rod for conversations around snobbery than ever. Every day there’s another riot on social media about people who aren’t reading “properly” (see a recent panic about people who chop big books up into chunks as they read them, to lighten their weight); there are fights about book awards and who has been snubbed by them; fights about book awards mattering at all. And, despite the fact that we are living in the era of podcasting, there is still snobbery around audiobooks.

“Well you didn’t really read it then, did you?” has become the common response to conversations around audiobooks, which have been growing steadily more popular over the last few years. And as with many items in rising demand, audiobooks become more scorned the more popular they get. “Nobody sits on a couch to listen to one. Nobody rewinds to linger on a particularly beautiful passage; nobody dog-ears a book on tape,” claimed an essay in Wired published in 2018. “It’s hard not to feel like something is lost in this transition.” Yes indeed, here is “reading” you can—very practically—do at the same time as driving, dusting or anything else. Which is exactly why audiobook snobbery has come to symbolise something big, deep and strange in our collective unconscious.

We are no longer using things to demonstrate status. We are using time. In 1899, Thorstein Veblen brought us the image of the silver spoon. It is “no more serviceable than a machine-made spoon,” he wrote, but exists to showcase our taste, our refinement, our ability to make elegance of our own daily lives. In the 20th century, we were driven by having beautiful things—now we focus on beautiful time. Time is the only resource that we cannot buy more of—and it’s the one that is often most scarce.

Read the full article: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-rise-of-audiobook-snobbery-and-what-its-really-about

Reading Damage

 

Trust the Words Only

[Link] The Pleasures of Tsundoku, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Book Pile

by Antoine Wilson

Recently, while moving several piles of books (31 titles) from the floor to another place on the floor to make space for my office chair, I experienced a moment of clarity during which I felt like I had arrived at the end of a manic episode and was confronting the aftermath.

Hoarders have been known to describe how seemingly insignificant detritus—an old cup, a yellowed newspaper, a toothbrush—are so meaningful to them that they couldn’t possibly be thrown away.

I, too, was capable of justifying the presence of each of my individual piled up volumes. There was Thomas Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence. Purchased on the recommendation of a friend, begun at some point, set aside not because not good but because quietly usurped, knowing that someday I would get back to young Thomas on his bicycle. The usurper? Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear. I wanted to soak in Marías for a little while, but apparently not long enough to finish. Next, Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, awaiting comparison to the only other one I’d read, Tobias Smollett’s. And adjacent in stack and century, Tristram Shandy, half-finished, waiting for the right mood to strike. Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, uncracked—a purchase inspired by Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book. Bergman’s The Magic Lantern, just begun, which I picked up because Dorthe Nors mentioned it somewhere, and, below that, her story collection Wild Swims…

Other stacks contained more yet-to-be read novels by authors I loved, books bought for research, various computer programming guides, more than one how-to book on writing, an excess of belles lettres, journals, books by friends, and, perhaps the most pathological and well-represented category, various iterations of the book I had to buy to magically solve the problems in whatever project I was currently working on.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/the-pleasures-of-tsundoku-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-book-piles

[Link] Reading Science Fiction Will Make Your Child More Resilient

Geeky reading won't just distract your kid during lockdown. 

Sci-fi helps us cope with crises, experts insist. 

by Jessica Stillman

See a kid curled up with a novel about space aliens instead of swinging on the jungle gym at the park and one word will probably pop into your mind: geek. 

Maybe that young bookworm will grow up to be a billionaire (many of the biggest names in business were dedicated sci-fi fans in their youths), but many of us associate a love of sci-fi with social awkwardness and getting pushed into your locker a lot. 

Instead of a sure, straight road to social isolation and nerdiness, parents should think of science fiction as a great way for kids (and adults) to build mental strength, weather uncertainty, and imagine better futures, experts argue. 

Predicting the unpredictable ... 

"Science-fiction writers don't know anything more about the future than anyone else," admitted celebrated sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinsonin The New Yorker recently. "Still, if you read science fiction, you may be a little less surprised by whatever does happen." 

Why? "By presenting plausible alternative realities, science-fiction stories empower us to confront not just what we think but also how we think and why we think it. They reveal how fragile the status quo is, and how malleable the future can be," Eliot Peper pointed out on the Harvard Business Review site. 

Science fiction nudges us not just to imagine other worlds, but also to face up to the fact that the world as it exists today isn't fixed. Alternatives are possible. Maybe even inevitable. The status quo can feel like an all-enveloping fog around us. Sci-fi (and global shocks like the one we're living through) part that fog, reminding us empires fall, tech advances, certainties crumble, and nature regularly dishes out corrections to our hubris. Unpredictability is the only thing that's predictable. 

Read the full article: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/reading-science-fiction-will-make-your-child-more-resilient.html

Motivational Mondays -- Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

By Neil Gaiman

It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So I’m biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And it’s that change, and that act of reading that I’m here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it’s good for.

Read the full article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming

[Link] Yes, graphic novels count as 'real' reading

By Alex Mlynek

Really, they do! Whether you have a reluctant or avid reader, graphic novels are entertaining and improve literacy skills.

Until last year, Kevin Yu’s now 8-year-old daughter, Olive, wasn’t really into reading books for pleasure. But then, Olive discovered the graphic novel series Dog Man, and everything changed.

“We would catch her reading in bed at night by herself, and were like, ‘I’m proud of you, but go to bed!’”

She now begs her parents for new graphic novels at the school book fair, and rereads all of the Dog Man books and Captain Underpants, too. She’s also started creating her own comic-style drawings. And recently, says Yu, she brought home her first non-graphic book from school.

Graphic novels are teacher approved

“I used to look at graphic novels as the junk food of reading,” says Vicki Fraser, an elementary school teacher in Rosemère, Quebec. But that changed when she was introduced to a graphic novel biography of French-Canadian strongman Louis Cyr that she couldn’t put it down. “I was quickly pulled into the story, and the images helped to guide me, keep me focused, and make the story more clear,” she explains.

Now, graphic novels are an essential part of her grade 5 classroom and she highly encourages her own daughters, who are 12 and 14, to read them.

She says graphic novels actually help her students become more sophisticated readers, thanks to visual cues, like the font used, which helps to communicate a character’s emotion, for instance. This teaches them to pick up on a book’s tone, which is a skill they are able to use with non-graphic texts, too.

Read the full article: https://www.todaysparent.com/kids/school-age/graphic-novels-real-reading/

Nugget #142 -- How to Read a Short Story Collection

Step one -- open to the table of contents.
Step two -- read the list of titles.
Step three -- pick one that sounds interesting.
Step four -- if you're not enjoying the stories you've read, 

close the book and pick up a different collection.

By Atomicdragon136 - Own work, CC BY 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67470250

 

[Link] Leisure reading in the U.S. is at an all-time low

by Christopher Ingraham

The share of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day has fallen by more than 30 percent since 2004, according to the latest American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In 2004, roughly 28 percent of Americans age 15 and older read for pleasure on a given day. Last year, the figure was about 19 percent.

That steep drop means that aggregate reading time among Americans has fallen, from an average of 23 minutes per person per day in 2004 to 17 minutes per person per day in 2017.

Reading declines are higher among men. The share of men reading for pleasure on any given day fell from 25 percent in 2004 to 15 percent in 2017, a drop of nearly 40 percent. The decline among women was a more modest 29 percent, from 31 percent in 2003 to 22 percent in 2017.

The survey data shows declines in leisure reading across all age levels. Percentage-wise, the likelihood of reading declined the most among Americans ages 35 to 44, with smaller declines for both younger and older age groups.

The American Time Use Survey is based on a nationally representative sample of about 26,000 individuals. Respondents answer questions and fill out detailed time diaries about how they spent the previous day. The large sample size means the survey's time-use estimates are extremely precise relative to traditional phone surveys, which may involve only 1,000 people or fewer.

The findings on reading comport with some other recent data on American reading trends. Numbers from the National Endowment for the Arts show that the share of adults reading at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the prior year fell from 57 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2015.

Survey data from the Pew Research Center and Gallup have shown, meanwhile, that the share of adults not reading any book in a given year nearly tripled between 1978 and 2014.

It's tempting to blame the decline on the recent proliferation of computers, cell phones, video games and the like. But the data don't really bear that out. For one, the NEA data show that reading has been on the wane since at least the 1980s, well before the advent of Facebook and Fortnite.

A long-term study of reading trends in the Netherlands points to a different culprit: television. From 1955 to 1995, TV time exploded while weekly reading time declined. “Competition from television turned out to be the most evident cause of the decline in reading,” the authors of that study concluded.

In the United States, the American Time Use Survey shows that while the average reading time fell between 2004 and 2017, the average amount of time watching TV rose.

In 2017, the average American spent more than 2 hours 45 minutes per day watching TV, every day of the year, or nearly 10 times the amount of time they devoted to reading for pleasure.

Read the full article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/29/leisure-reading-in-the-u-s-is-at-an-all-time-low/?utm_term=.3aa9826ab2af