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As I searched archival films from the nineteen-forties through -sixties for footage to use in a funny book trailer for my upcoming novel, How To Buy a Love of Reading, I chuckled at the depictions of readers and reading that made them seem as exciting as Brussels sprouts (and as humorless). One of Coronet's "instructional films" shows a student library volunteer-who patently aspires to the position of hall monitor-repeatedly denying a classmate's pleas to keep an overdue book out one more day with, "I can't. It's a rule." The narrator of another film proclaims that the purpose of leisure reading is to "learn things you'd like to know about many subjects."
Fifty or so years later, for many people reading still appears that boring. The protagonist of my novel, teenage Carley Wells, thinks it's stultifying. She's learned from her parents that people read books or pretend to read them to impress other people. She's learned from school that books are supposed to be dissected into symbols and metaphors and other literary devices, like "fetal pigs." According to the most recent NEA study on reading, while overall reading is on the rise, we're becoming a nation divided into two categories: readers (like you, I presume, since you're reading a book blog) and nonreaders like Carley.
