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Reading Rainbow got me into reading books in first grade and I haven't stopped. We need more Reading Rainbow and less whatever the hell is going on now.

I wonder if this is part of why I don't care for AI? Cause I actually like to read? I can see that connection

As an avid reader, AI slop also has absolutely no soul and I can't imagine reading shorter AI summaries is anything other than reinforcing the idea that reading never feels good. 🤷‍♀️

My kid is not naturally a book-reader and definitely not a fiction-reader--wild to me because both me and my husband are bookworms. But we make him read an hour a day on non-school days and I've always told him that fiction is instructions for being a person.

I read constantly

I'm an ex-digital evangelist lol. I love my digital media, but the last 4 years if I buy anything to read, watch or listen to, I want a physical copy. Give a kid a book or a CD and he has a Precious Treasure he can hide and share with his friends. Analog is part of how we get kids reading again

Turns out that a lot of schools have been teaching people to read the wrong way. Great deep dive documentary on it has led 25 states to pass laws changing their curriculum requirements in the past -3 years! features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

I've just discovered that listening to a podcast at 2x while reading the transcript is a good way to absorb info. You can get some of the spoken nuance - and back and forth if the podcast is a conversation, while also not missing anything because it's still a comfortable reading speed.

Yup. I looked once at a BBC science documentary of about 50 minutes. The actual content could have been typed onto one side of A4 - 10 minutes reading at most.

Also a book will not just be 90% stuff copied word for word from other books, unlike some YouTubers I could name

Yeah I run a missing persons database and have found news articles to be a much more efficient means of finding information than all of the missing persons podcasts (some of which are admittedly wonderful).

I think the exception is humor when I read stuff like discworld it just seems cringey but the video version of good omens was so funny

I've been known to complain that "we need to bring back blog posts because I can read a lot faster than you can talk."

been having reading time in class every day and one of my kids has what I will call a pathological avoidance of reading and we've tried many things to make him more comfortable with it, but he's done it like 4 times, which is more than 0.

I love reading. One of the things I am most grateful for from my parents is that they taught me to love reading and to love learning for the sake of learning.

Agree! Am encouraged by the youth I know/teach who like to read non-fiction, fiction, graphic novels and anime outside of what they're assigned to read. Storytelling can be accomplished in many ways, but reading is a form of contemplation and self-regulation in a world of distractions, I think.

Another proud mom moment is reading The Best Christmas Pageant Ever together, and the kids asking questions and talking about the central theme of the Christmas story being a lot more human than people sometimes think, and how privilege factored into the dynamic btwn the Herdmans and the other kids

Books have saved my life so many times in so many ways.

It’s good for self, family, community and society at large. And the quality of what one reads is ever more important.

Totally! This is where I think Oprah has actually been playing a political mastermind long-game with her book club for stay at home moms.

Same. It's very lonely for my mom, too. It is a very particular kind of hurt and grief that comes with realizing that your still-living friends are gone. The people they were no longer exist.

There have been some studies that demonstrate this relationship: www.discovermagazine.com/mind/how-rea...

That doesn't mean you can't partake in other forms of media, obviously. I try to engage in almost all of them, at times. But books are something different. They engage the mind differently. They are less passive. Excluding them is excluding a lot.

unfortunately aversion to reading is worse than ever because the kids weren't actually being taught to read in most US schools for basically an entire generation

i think they like the idea of it more than they care to actually read it