The Rant of A Bibliomaniac

“People don’t read anymore. My son says it’s because it takes too much effort for people to move their eyes across the page.” The following quote is not from a disgruntled parent, but from a magazine publisher in the movie In Good Company. Even though the character’s statement may sound trite, it doesn’t make it any less true. People don’t read as much as they used to. Whether it takes a lot of effort to move the eyes across the page or not is another matter entirely.

I grew up in a family where reading was a very common activity. My grandparents on both sides were book people. They read a great deal in all kinds of genres. My paternal grandparents would subscribe to the complete works of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Zola, and Balzac since the volumes couldn’t be purchased individually. My own parents also ordered books or bought them from a Russian language bookstore in Sofia. My sister and I are also readers. I suppose I’ve been reading since the first time I ever saw a book even though I wasn’t “reading” at the time, but only looking at pictures.

I still read a lot. During a good week, I can plough through four or five books. That’s about twenty books per month or two hundred books a year. I’m a bibliomaniac. If it’s been two covers or digitally available for a Kindle, I will read it. I really do not care what is between the covers as long as it’s interesting. There’s very little that I won’t read apart from romance novels and erotica. Otherwise, everything is fair game.

Reading as much as I do, I’m always surprised by how little other people read. My own sister reads a lot of magazines, but she probably only reads one or two books a month. There are other people I know who don’t read at all. As a matter of fact, I’ve found that my generation is probably the last one that reads on a consistent basis. After all, we were the last generation before the internet showed up and it was easy for all of us to read everything online and not have to go to the library to dig out an encyclopedia for a report on Ulysses S. Grant. (Yes, I wrote a report on him during fourth grade. Yes, I did have to rummage through several encyclopedias before I found the information that I wanted.)

When I was living in Maryland, I went to bookstores in downtown Washington on a weekly basis. In Dupont Circle alone, there were Books for America, Second Story Books, and Kramerbooks & Afterwords – A Café. Since I went to these places frequently, I was able to look at the same shelves over and over again. Sometimes, books would sit there for weeks or months without anybody purchasing them. Sometimes, they stayed on those shelves for over a year. I don’t think that people didn’t buy them because they weren’t interest, but simply because they don’t read anything.

And if people do read, what is it that they read? A lot of people read pot boilers and best sellers like Gone Girl or The Millennium Trilogy, others read thick political thrillers or biographies. Very few, however, read literature and fewer still read classics. I think part of the reason for this could be that classics are somehow viewed as inaccessible and elitist. Unfortunately, that is not the case. You do not have to be a genius to understand My Antonia or All Quiet on the Western Front. You do not have to be an English major in order to  read David Copperfield or Paradise Lost. All you need is an open mind and the patience to get through them.

Patience is probably the main thing that a lot of people don’t have in this day and age. We like having instant access to everything. We like clicking on a Youtube video and watching it play. We logging on to Facebook ten times a day to see what other people have liked or disliked. Due to the instantaneous nature of these things, we do not have the patience to sit down and read a book or even to schedule some time out of our busy schedules in order to do it. More and more frequently, people don’t read as much as they did before. Books are sometimes thrown out of library entirely or thrown away into garbage bins.

After reading one book after another for years, I can tell you that reading is one of the most enjoyable and interesting activities you can engage. It opens up the mind and exercises the imagination. It allows a person to explore different worlds, to travel backward and forward in time, to meet new people and make new friends. Reading demands very little – only time. You don’t have to be rich in order to read a book. You just have to sit down and do it.