The Decline in Reading Is a Symptom of Disappearing Reality

Public education is purposefully turning off students from reading by making them read DEI stories instead of the traditional stories that have charmed students for centuries.

I read every night in bed before I go to rest.. sleeping is a luxury when it occurs.

Been reading daily for close to 50 years.

Went to the Drs office the other day. Sign said scan the QR code and fill out the form and hit send. I stood there for a few minutes and a receptionist came over and repeated what was on the sign. I looked around the waiting room with about 10 or 12 people in it. All had there face buried in their phones. I said loudly enough that I don’t live by phone and that it’s home where it belongs.

Receptionist had to fill my paperwork in online. Folks in the receptionist area I don’t think flinched except an older guy who chuckled and said..he doesn’t live by phone !

Reading has to be cultivated as one gets older.

Blogs are not all bad and are better than just watching the networks.

But history and politics have little interest to young people, however that changes dramatically when one ages a bit, and things start becoming comprehensible and to be honest, not-so-far-in-the-past.

As I have said many times on this forum, we (the right) need to bring along, and NOT bash, the young people.

Just as Kirk brought along many of the young, we need to show them how to access life as a mature person would.

The crop is ripe for the harvest. The Rats' method of appealing to young people is to use foul language. Which they do by design now.

We need to win the young to our side.

This is the best article I’ve read this year.

Unbelievably thought provoking.

Congratulations Chronicles.

I have read solidly from Golden Books to adult books. Usually in phases - turn of the 20th c romances, mythology and biographies and poetry, then mysteries and spies and science fiction, then back to biographies of historical figures that interested me, usually Civil War, as well as histories. And always room for fantasies like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Frequently interrupted by obsessions of movies and TV series.

Our hallway is 42’ of bookshelves on both sides. It ends in a library with a 10’ ceiling of more bookshelves and a rolling ladder, which is a little scary to climb at my age. And the rest of the books are scattered in bookcases in corners in other rooms and the remainder in boxes in the closet. Packrat here with all the books of my parents and grandparents and my old Golden Books.

We commuted 3 1/2 hr each way to work, once a week. Before unabridged was commonly available, that was one audio book each way. Went thru a long audio book phase and then got caught back into paperbacks and hardbound novels - mysteries mostly, like Amelia Peabody, and WEB Griffins books.

Now in my Chinese drama stage but still rereading WEB Griffin for the 6th time almost every day. I wrote for many, many years and loved creating worlds and dragging people in with me. Stopped writing fiction around 8 years ago and just can’t get off my duff to do it again so just do plots. All my writing now is nonfiction.

WHAT YOU WROTE TIMES 100!!!

I have read a lot since about age 5 or 6. In my family I was known as the bookworm. (Honestly helped me survive.) Lately I have reverted to reading old books...they were leftover from my hubs parents and grandparents. And, I am tired of political or historical. That said there were books I never read. Recently finished HEIDI...now working on TREASURE ISLAND. Read many obscure books from 1920s to 1940s, too.

As someone here said they seem to aim titles at kids today that titilate only. On another level, kids have been cheated, again.

I read. A lot. I have found a trove of history, old and recent in the local library’s “discarded” book store. I have read about the CIA fṛom 5 different vantage points and the Gulf War in the memoirs of each of the commanders, Army, Marines, Navy and overall. I have read the history of the Wars of the Roses and of the Tudors and much et cetera. I am reading the life of Cab Calloway now. For 7̀ cents each I read many things I would not havepicked up otherwise and only one was not worth the time.

Best spy book I ever read was Without Cloak or Dagger, by Miles Copeland. Published in the 1970s. A great primer on the basics of espionage.

A former intelligence officer told me that's one of the two best books on espionage, the other one being Allen Dulles's book.

That is amazing.

What if any pre-1923 book recommendations do you have regarding the U.S. Founding Fathers? I ask pre-1923 because those books will be public domain and I can legally try creating audio books out of them.

Yes. This is a bad thing. Very bad.

We are "progressing" back to hieroglyphics and grunts to communicate.

We’re already there!

It makes me think of this:

'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.

'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating.'

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.'

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well -- better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those pieces that you write in The Times occasionally. They're good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?'

Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'

And it is primarily the Left that is involved in the manipulation and destruction of language today. Add on top of that the natural progression away from physically printed books that you could take anywhere and read anywhere and have the same experience on a plane or next to a swimming pool towards an electronic medium that is physically presented differently depending on the device, along with the fact that the human brain is more attracted towards multimedia and moving images (rather than the printed word) and it all pushes us towards less reading.

Worse still-multimedia can present far, far more information to be absorbed into the brain, but a huge amount of that is not conscious absorption, it is passive absorption, which I view as very dangerous. It makes us far more susceptible to deliberately implanted propaganda or misinformation.

When you read, the printed word doesn't go directly to storage in your brain. It has to pass through a language filter, which is linked to an analytic/intellectual filter. That is, you have to parse it and think about the printed word before it is stored.

These last three paragraphs are not from some kind of class I took in school-they are observations I make because I am forced to listen to audiobooks and watch movies. I could be all wrong about this. But I don't think so, because in my own personal experience, I have listened to thousands of audiobooks, and pondered on the different way my own brain stores the information, and how it stores it.

I used to be a nearly rabid reader, when my eyes could handle reading. If I went on a vacation meant for relaxation, I would bring five books with me, and could get through all of them. Now, I cannot read more than a few pages at a sitting. So, I definitely see a big difference in the way my own mind handles physical printed text versus a computer screen, even one that displays an eBook. One would think it is the same, but it just isn't, at least for me.

I have read several really good books-also from the library castoffs- about the founders but they are all more recent than that. Those I pass on to my grandsons who are being home-schooled. My daughter does not have a TV and the boys are not allowed to use cell phone and can look on the PC for only what their mother deems useful for their education. So far that is limited to the 13 yo’s use in teaching himself calculus. He is also allowed to use the cell when talking to an aeronautical engineer who has taken an interest in his education and has sent him a huge book on drafting.

We also place limits on screen time in our house.

For what it is worth, a group of us have been working for years now to transform old works into audio so that it may increase convenience and efficiency - particularly for home schoolers.(in my view anyways) I try to list them all under the key word freeperbookclub.

https://freerepublic.com/tag/freeperbookclub/index?tab=articles

Our more popular works include a biography of John Hancock, a bio of Patrick Henry, and Mercy Otis Warren’s 3 volume set recording the history of the American Revolution.

Additionally there is two recorded audio versions of the Federalist Papers, and works by really amazing authors such as Bastiat, Hayek, Mises, President Calvin Coolidge, several works about Ben Franklin, the papers of Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams, the Journal of Lewis and Clarke, and Christopher Columbus.

All is in the public domain and all of the texts are also directly linked.

I have read several really good books-also from the library castoffs- about the founders but they are all more recent than that. Those I pass on to my grandsons who are being home-schooled. My daughter does not have a TV and the boys are not allowed to use cell phone and can look on the PC for only what their mother deems useful for their education. So far that is limited to the 13 yo’s use in teaching himself calculus. He is also allowed to use the cell when talking to an aeronautical engineer who has taken an interest in his education and has sent him a huge book on drafting.

Outside of FR I don’t look at screens much. I have a cell phone because my boss requires I have one but I don’t give my number to anyone other than boss and wife. I do read many boooks- no fiction.

I prefer long books, 400 pages or more. All history and biography. Short books in that genre don’t do their subjects justice.

Last week one of the conservative news sites (maybe Breitbart?) finished a seven-part series about the state of book publishing which was written by a youngish female author.

One of her points was the lack of reading and book purchases was due to the publishing industry only printing DEI garbage and ignoring so many great, upcoming, authors. She also excoriated the awards as leaving out any book that wasn’t leftist blather.

I have to agree with her. The few remaining books stores keep the conservative items hidden and stores like Sam’s and Costco, where I could always find at least one good book, now place worthless garbage on the tables, forcing me to order online.

One of her points was the lack of reading and book purchases was due to the publishing industry only printing DEI garbage and ignoring so many great, upcoming, authors.

That was already true in the 1990s. Perhaps in the 1980s.

I actually plodded through the three Rama sequels to Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. Each sequel worse than the last.