The Armchair Adventurer Returns

Aaaaa-choo! Achoo! Pardon the dust as I reopen the shutters and shake out the dust cloths. Ah good, my overstuffed armchair is no worse for neglect.

Whoosh!

Twelve years ago, I started this adventure to cope with the rigors of doctoral studies. Seven years ago, life disconnected me from blogging about the adventures hidden within the pages I’d been thumbing. Where did I go? Since 2011, I have driven across the country three times for work, run 3 full marathons and nearly 50 half marathons, and acquired a feline family. Through it all, the books have persevered. Each relocation has added another box or two of volumes to complement those shipped from Scotland nigh on ten years past. Slowly. Steadily. The library of my childhood imagination is growing.

Why am I back on the air now? A conversation… Some facts… A story… New goals.

Recent conversation,

               MAM                   Why don’t you read a book?
               9-yr old girl          Why? Am I being punished?
               13-yr old boy       I get punished when people see me reading.

In utter disbelief, I stared at these two children. They’d shot arrows at my bibliophile heart, wounding the very fabric of my being. I love language and ideas and books. How could these tweens not understand the joy found within their pages? It got me thinking. Why do we read? There are tomes on the subject, yet the answer is unique to each reader. In a world where schools require only 20-minutes of reading a day, how will children develop the concentration and imagination to be life-long learners and problem solvers?

Is the problem reading, and intelligence, are out of vogue again? Or are we reading less and if so why? I’m not the only one asking these questions. In Caleb Crain’s essay “Why We Don’t Read, Revisited”^[1] he dug into the Department of Labor’s American Time Use Survey for answers. “Between 2003 and 2016, the amount of time that the average American devoted to reading for personal interested on a daily basis dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours.”^[1] Basically, the average American of 2016 is reading 17 minutes a day down from 21 minutes a day in 2003, or a 20% decline. Worried yet? After an excellent discussion of possible composition effects (i.e. what might be some of the causes for this change), Crain discovered, “The average reading time of all Americans declined not because readers read less but because fewer people were reading at all, a proportion falling from 26.3 per cent of the population in 2003 to 19.5 per cent in 2016.”^[1] Back of the napkin, that’s a decline of about 13.2 million readers, more than the population of the state of Pennsylvania^[2], our fifth most populous state. Anyone else’s master alarm flashing?

Digesting and daydreaming, I remembered being a young reader of 7 or 8. There were the typical books of the early to mid-1980s and carefully chosen classics my parents insisted we have before they were banned or redacted. The volumes that spoke to me were the adventure books. Beverly Cleary’s curious mouse, Ralph, and his motorcycle. Brian Jacques’ Redwall fantasy. A quirky new genre of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books. I would get lost in the pages, becoming the protagonist, making choices, learning, exploring, going on adventures not possible from our bungalow in the suburbs of Los Angeles. As soon as I’d finish one plotline in a CYOA, I’d read it again, making different choices and traveling a different story arch. I think those early experiences, both with words and books, as well as exploring, set the stage for my life as a scientist and generally curious adult. Now I read for all sorts of reasons. I wonder though, how will children four decades later be shaped if not by books and imagination?

Left to right: ©Joanne Scribner, ©Thomas Canty, ©Paul Granger/BatmanBooks

Although I can’t change the reading habits of Americans, or even my nieces and nephews, I believe as Gandhi did “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” My goal for this space is to share the books and thoughts which color my adventures. I expect to post a review or opinion every Sunday. During the week, feel free to join me over on Twitter for a quiet moment of pause daily.

Next week I’ll offer my opinions on Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages but as a meditation on empathy and civility since the lessons extend well beyond relationships. Until then…

What is your earliest memory of books or reading? How has it shaped who you are today?

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1: Crain, Caleb. “Why We Don’t Read, Revisited” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 18 August 2018, www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-we-dont-read-revisited/.

2: "Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for theUnited States, Regions, States, and Puerto Rico: April 1, 2010 to July 1,2017" (XLSX). United States Census Bureau. Retrieved 20 August 2018.