Reading is Fundamental

by Libby Hellmann

Every year, one of my new year’s resolutions is to improve my writing. For me, writing is a challenge, and I usually feel unequal to the task. I’m not one of those people who love the process of writing, and I’m jealous of people who do. I’m more the “I-hate-writing-but-loved-that-I’ve-written type. Which begs the question of why I’m writing in the first place.

The answer is I’m not sure, but I have my suspicions. I love stories, and I love characters, and I love it when either the story or the characters surprise me. I wasn’t always a book junkie (although I started out that way as a kid)… I was a film-maker way before I was a writer, and my goal was to be the Lina Wertmuller of the United States.

But somewhere along the way I came back to words. There are so many authors writing such wonderful books -- stories that inspire, that educate, that shock, bring me to tears, cause me to question, or make me fall in love all over again. There is a delight in settling down with a book and knowing I’m going to be taken on an author’s journey – whether physical, metaphysical, or emotional -- and let into their heads for a while. In fact, that joy is one of the most pleasurable activities I can think of.

So it’s probably not a stretch to see how that fueled my desire to write… to create stories and characters that would bring the same delight to others as I’ve always felt.

Sadly, though, (and yes, I’ve blogged about this before), people aren’t reading the way they used to. We all know the statistics about the hours Gen X’ers and Y’ers spend online, visiting social networks, or melding with their Blackberries. It's time they aren’t spending reading. Now, it seems that Baby Boomers are getting into the act too.

Shelf Awareness, a wonderful resource about bookselling btw, cites an article from the New York Times last fall:

"Technology investors and entrepreneurs, long obsessed with connecting to teenagers and 20-somethings, are starting a host of new social networking sites aimed at baby boomers and graying computer users. The sites …look like Facebook--with wrinkles.”

According to the article’s author, Matt Richtel "there are 78 million boomers--roughly three times the number of teenagers--and most of them are Internet users ... Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm."

Does that mean Boomers, traditionally the backbone of the buying public, will be reading fewer books as time goes on? As a Baby Boomer myself, I spend more time online these days… time I used to spend reading. But if reading is the activity that inspires me to write, how do I improve my writing by reading less? The simple answer is that I won’t.

Author Elizabeth Berg wrote an incredible essay in the Chicago Tribune Books section last weekend about her resolution to read more. Here's part of what she said:

A lot of people say they don't have time to read, not even an hour a day. Whenever I hear that, I always think of my partner Bill, who says, "Give up 'Wheel of Fortune' in favor of reading, and you can go through 25 books a year, and that's with taking the weekends off!"

In this age of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, of pop-ups and links exhorting us to go somewhere else when we're not even done with where we are, it is a relief, if not salvation, for us to focus on one dang thing at a time. Instead of being lost for hours in the time-sucking quicksand of the Internet, one sits in dignified, tick-tock, one-blue-mountain silence and reads a page ... turns it ... reads the next page, and so on. Such an elegant act, reading, isn't it? And such an elegant image, a person sitting in a chair, a book resting on a lap, lamplight spilling onto the page. Can't you just feel your blood pressure lowering, contemplating such a thing?

I can, and I've decided to modify my resolution. Like Berg, I’m going to try and read more this year and spend less time online.

What about you? How much time do you spend online? Has your reading declined as a result? What do you think about that?