Writing for The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker tries to uncover the factors that lead to folks joining the “reading class.”
This made me laugh in recognition:
“Introverts seem to be a little bit more likely to do a lot of leisure-time reading”
“I’m Parenting Right Now” is my new motto:
Reading will seem more like chocolate cake if it’s something that parents themselves take part in happily and regularly. “When I’m sitting there on my couch, reading a book, and my kids are doing their own thing, I like to think, ‘I’m parenting right now—they can see me reading this book,’” Russo told me.
This ignores the very real possibility that one would have to actually move to a larger, more expensive space to accommodate the influx of cheap books:
Paul also advised that parents seed books throughout the house, not stash them “preciously in your own bedroom, away from everyone else, or in one [specific] area of the house.” It may seem expensive to assemble a large home library, but Paul points out that it’s cheap to buy used books and free to borrow lots of them. “You don’t need a lot of money to fill your home with books … [and] it’s very hard to have a bored child when there are always books around,” she said.
All kidding aside, it’s been one of the biggest pleasures of my life to share a love of reading with my whole family, and to look up most afternoons and evenings and see everyone tucked away in their own corner, lost in a book.