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This week, as your guest blogger, I'll be sharing some of my thoughts with you about reading and that includes how an economist thinks about reading, why we read, and how we can make our reading more effective and more enjoyable.

It's often claimed reading is in trouble in modern America, but just for perspective please consider the following passage by Timothy Egan:

Reading is far from dead. This year, about 400 million books will be sold in the United States. Overall, business is up 1 percent--not bad, in a rough economy, for a $15 billion industry. Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller number--27 percent--had not read a book lately, which means nearly three-in-four have read a book. Steve Jobs may be many things (maestro, visionary, demi-god), but he apparently isn't a careful reader of certain market reports.

The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.

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It's the middle of a thirty-city book tour, and I miss home. It's not that the tours are difficult and they are fun, but I just start missing my own bed, my ranch projects and, most importantly, my writing. I've finished the fifth in the Walt Longmire series and even started the sixth, but I've got three more weeks on the road before I can settle down at the ranch and really get going again.

Two days here at the ranch-just long enough to unpack, do laundry, repack, and head out for the coast-but I had my first-ever event in Ucross last night. The Ranch at Ucross has busloads of folks who roll in there everyday to take advantage of western hospitality and the pool, tennis courts, horseback riding, and wonderful food. I know this, because I ate there last night-the first time in seventeen years-and then read, answered questions, and signed books. There was something special about doing an event that I could walk to and, since the guest ranch and the Ucross Foundation are our only going concerns since Sonny George's junkyard closed and somebody used the bar as a literal drive-thru (a Caterpillar bulldozed it a bunch of years ago), I've felt a certain responsibility to hold up my end of the town of twenty-five.

There's a story about the bar-well lots of them actually-but this particular one figured in my decision to make the crown jewel of the UCLA (Ucross, Clearmont, Leiter, and Arvada) area my home. I had just graduated from college and had taken the summer to work up in Montana. The rancher I was cowboying for had me deliver some horses to Ucross, where I was supposed to meet up with a fellow from Tulsa by the name of Schaffer. I got there, but the other guy didn't show. I went to the payphone and called the rancher I was working for and explained the situation.