A Kid May Read Your Book but Not a Teen

An IWW member passed along an interesting report regarding the reading habits of youngsters in this age of text-messaging and video games.

It begins ...

"A new report released today from Scholastic corroborates the findings of the company’s 2006 report on children’s reading habits, finding that pleasure reading in children begins to decline at age eight and continues to do so into the teen years."

The report comes from Scholastic, the Potter publisher, and concludes ...

"As to the influence of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, of the children who had read the books, almost three-quarters said the series had made them interested in reading other books. Some, however, would be happy simply to have more Harry in their lives: 31% of children don’t believe the series is over."

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• Read THE 2008 KIDS AND FAMILY READING REPORT™ CONDUCTED BY YANKELOVICH AND SCHOLASTIC here.
• Read The Publishers Weekly article here.

So Many Books, So Little Time ...

There's an interesting article in the New York Times Books section currently. Written by William Grimes who begins the article "Volumes to Go before You Die" with "An odd book fell into my hands recently, a doorstopper with the irresistible title 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. That sounds like a challenge, with a subtle insult embedded in the premise."

He goes on to make some interesting observations, of which these three are only a small sample of his point of view ...

• "Two potent factors make “1001 Books” (published in the United States in 2006 by Universe; $34.95) compelling: guilt and time."
• "More than half the books were written after World War II. Already I feel my hackles rising."
• "Drop the bloated, self-indulgent Ada from an otherwise correct Nabokov list (Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin) and insert Laughter in the Dark or The Gift. J. M. Coetzee, with 10 novels, can afford to lose 1 or 2. That would open up space for “The Cossacks” by Tolstoy and A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov."

If the average book-lover reads ... let's use the word intelligently ... for sixty years (from age 15 to age 75), that reader would need to read 17 over these books each year (1001 divided by 60 = 16.6833333). Is Professor Peter Boxall's list do'able?