Me and Jason were looking at our movie and book lists today, and I did counted up my totals for this year and realized I’m both a reading whore and a movie whore. This year I’ve watched approximately 100 movies I had never seen before and read about 30 books. That’s a lot of freakin’ media. That’s about one new movie every three days and about one book every week and a half.
I wonder how many movies the average American watches in a year and how many books they read. That’d be interesting to see. I’m gonna go look it up.
Oh wow…this is nuts, check it out:
The NEA says that reading is in a big decline and in 2002 fewer than half of American adults reading literature and less than 16% of adults reading more than one book a month. But almost half of all adults watch an average of three hours of a TV a day. (http://www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf) These kind of statistics are pretty depressing. Especially since that was three years ago and it’s only getting worse. Soon we’ll only have people who think that U, R, Y and 2 are words.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying don’t watch TV…I certainly watch my fair share. But reading is FUNdamental people. The chairman of the NEA, Dana Gioia said, “America can no longer take active and engaged literacy for granted. As more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent minded. These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose.” I think I agree with her.
So go out there and help make our society better. Read a book!
