Books

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American spends about 28 hours per week watching television. When they aren't watching TV, they spend 5-6 hours working out, or nearly an hour socializing with friends. What doesn't factor into the equation of work and fun? Reading.

Books are antiquities in American culture today. We collect old, pretty ones to put on our shelves, and we occasionally give them as presents. For the most part, books serve only to adorn our coffee tables... not to expand our minds.

Between Facebook and TiVo, our leisure time is pretty much filled up. We can easily waste hours mindlessly flipping channels or perusing Perez Hilton's latest updates on celebrity goings-on. What we don't do anymore is reach for a book to escape into. What has changed that has caused us to shy away from books? Is it our ever-growing list of learning disabilities that keeps us from wanting to try a book? Is it the fact that reading is one activity in which it is very hard to multitask? Or is it simply a lack of good material?

In my opinion, the answer is all three. Nearly four million kids and teens in America have learning disabilities, most of which involve reading and writing skills. In our culture, if something is hard, we choose not to do it. Therefore, if someone has a disability that inhibits their ability to understand a book, they simply choose not to read it. Why waste that time?

We live in a society where people always need to be doing three things at once. While our child is at dance class, we are on the phone with our best friend making coffee plans, and simultaneously emailing our latest design to our boss. We watch TV while eating dinner, and we blog as we wait for our nails to dry. But when it comes to books, it's just not possible to do that many things at once. When it comes to books, and novels especially, significant concentration is required to follow the storyline. That limits what we can and can't do while reading... which aggravates most of us to the point of giving up. After all, time is money in America, and reading a book won't help us reach anything but a better understanding of how creepy Stephen King's mind is.

Lastly, even if we were to read more, what would we read? One of the eight million Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich? Or perhaps the latest celebrity biography... My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands by Chelsea Handler. It's no wonder people aren't interested in reading- there's nothing good out there! But what about returning to the classics: Little Women, The Catcher in the Rye, 1984.  There are plenty of good books out there; our I-want-everything-handed-to-me-on-a-silver-platter society just needs to learn to look a little harder.

America would be a vastly different place if we were more interested in books and less fascinated by which celebrity got liposuction this week. There's something so romantic about books... they have friends you can always return to, memories that will bring you straight back to the last time you read this tale. Americans are obsessed with interesting things these days, from food-on-a-stick to Kim Kardashian's... well, you know. Wouldn't it be great if we revived a long-lost American pastime? Sure, we've still got baseball, but what about the days when we played it with Roy Hobbs in The Natural, or stood on the field with Reuven Malter in The Chosen?

I wish we would see a reading revival in America... until then, excuse me while I go spend some quality time on the banks of Plum Creek with my good friend Laura.