In our current age of technology, we find many people, particularly adolescents, rapt in their laptops, cell phones, and video games. Does “screen time” diminish the amount of time available for reading? Does it diminish the desire to read? Reading is a critical skill to master and retain.
Even as I write this blog, I am cautious of its length, knowing that many people will not read beyond the first paragraph. Please read a little further. Dana Gioia, former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts had this to say about reading in 2006.
“Franz Kafka once said that the book is the axe by which we break open the frozen seas within us. That metaphor is very true. We tend, by our very nature, to be encased in our own egos. What literature does – nowhere more powerfully than in fiction (the novel and the short story) – is put us in the inner lives of other people in the dailyness of their psychological, social, economic and imaginative existence. This makes us feel, more intensely probably than anything else, the reality of other points of view, of other lives. That is obviously in jeopardy if we now have a society in which the majority of adults are no longer reading.”
Think about it. Not only does reading build vocabulary, enhance creativity, develop confidence, increase knowledgeability and improve our ability to find new solutions, reading has a major impact on who we are in the world, and who we become as a society.