Interesting, Catttleman. I didn't know Librarians will offer children different cards than adults. Like you I'd like to be the one deciding what my son cannot read.

When I was young the local library had a separate kids section. I'll always be grateful to the boss nun at my primary school who contacted the library and asked them to enroll me in the adult section so I could get books that would interest me. The only good thing the Catholic Church ever did for me.

It would be great to get people to read my books. It is difficult with so many books out there. Getting involved in a local book club discussing your books will be great. Even having a few friends over and discuss your books.
Harel

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Start with why people should read books and the how will follow.

Why: Books are far superior to any other medium. Not only do you have the plot (yawn), there is word choice and syntax, representation of sounds/dialogue, meta fiction, intentions of the author, temporal considerations. The only downside is that reading is high investment and you can't do other things while reading.

How: Instead of forcing children to read terrible books in school (30 min reading etc) they should actually be taught how to read well written books and given the tools required to read beyond the plot. Reading books for the plot is boring and provides nothing more than tv series or movies.

Aside from all of this, most people are lazy and dislike their life. TV is a mindless escape. I have not met a single person that can discuss their favorite TV show or movie beyond the plot or by quoting some dialogue.

It seems to me that if people don't start reading early and often, they won't be reading much as adults. I remember being too young to read and it frustrated me that I could not read. I couldn't wait to start reading. By 2nd grade, I was reading everything I could get my hands on. I mean, sure, a lot stuff was over my head then but by asking my parents and older siblings what this word and that word was and what it meant, I built a decent vocabulary up on my own.

The problem is that many people stop reading once they hit their teens. While 4th and 5th graders tend to read voraciously, 11th and 12th graders don't want to read anything. They want to ride around with their friends and drink beer and smoke pot. At least that's how it was in my day. I don't know what drugs kids do these days. It wasn't that I didn't do these things. I was a fair druggie in high school but that wasn't all I did. That wasn't my life. I read all the time. Everything from Burroughs to Vonnegut to Poe to Hawthorne to Salinger to Henry Miller to Lovecraft to jazz poetry like Leroi Jones. I would try to get my friends interested in the stuff by reading them passages but it never worked.

I wanted to read forbidden and subversive literature, secret literature. I was a big fan of Chris Miller who wrote fiction for National Lampoon. His stuff was always well written and entertaining. He wrote a few of what I think were autobiographical stories in Nat Lamp concerning a high school student in the 50s identified only as Mr. Rock and Roll and I kind of identified with him. I was kind of the Mr. Rock and Roll at my high school in the 70s. I knew everything about music--not just rock (of which I have an exhaustive knowledge) but jazz, blues, classical. I listened to stuff nobody else at school even knew existed. I would check out books and encyclopedia entries on music and artists and then go find their records. I was the coolest guy that ever lived but I was the only person who knew it. The guys that were regarded as cool were anti-intellectual jerks, for the most part. They never read anything and didn't want to. They were just dumb. They were bad boys and did their best to live up to it because the chicks dug it. They didn't dig me much, that was for sure. In this society, we reward being an idiot. Idiots get attention--hell, idiots get elected to the White House.

It's even worse for girls. Studies show that girls do as well or better than boys academically in elementary school but then start to fall behind badly during their teens. i think that's because society sends an implicit signal to females that hot & dumb is desirable, that guys think it's cute when she's asked what is the largest state in the Union and she says Canada (only she asks it: "I don't know--Canada??") So, as dumb as guys get in their teens, girls get even dumber. This is bad because girls 16-19 with poor literacy are six times more likely to get pregnant and have kids out of wedlock than girls in the same age group who can read and write proficiently.

There is a direct correlation to literacy and poverty. 90% of high school dropouts are on welfare while students who can't read proficiently by 3rd grade are four times likelier to drop out of school than students who can. 75% of food stamp recipients score poorly on simple literacy exams. Low literacy is also directly related to crime. 85% of juveniles caught up in the justice system are functionally illiterate as are 60-70% of inmates (most of whom cannot read above a 4th grade level) while 2/3 of students who cannot read proficiently by 4th grade wind up in prison.

When I grew up, I had all kinds of books to read. My parents made sure we kids had books. I had read most of the Sherlock Holmes stories by the time I was 10 and read the entire set of works by 14. My mother is an artist and she had a lot of art books which I also read and became familiar with Picasso, Chagall, Klee, Magritte, Ernst, Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, Van Gogh, Japanese shunga art, religious art, you name it. I loved still lifes. I knew all the classics--Huck Finn, Arabian Nights, Greek myths, Faust--because I had all these books to read as a child. Most people, for example, don't know that Aladdin was Chinese. I had a storybook as a boy that depicted him as Chinese. Most people don't realize Little Black Sambo was Indian not African but I had a book that depicted him in a turban and robe with curl-toed shoes. Besides, there are no tigers in Africa. Plus I had books on nature so I read about animals and insects and marine life and spiders and worms and trees.

But I know people who do not have books or they have really shitty ones. I know a guy who has no books other than a single dictionary. Shit, I have several dictionaries and I have one loaded on my computer so I can always look something up quickly. You could sit in my house and read books for the rest of your life and never read them all. But I had many books as a boy and I was encouraged to read, read, read. If it doesn't start there, it doesn't start.

8 Ways to Read (a Lot) More Books This Year
https://hbr.org/2017/02/8-ways-to-read- ... -this-year

I'd say that DB Roy is an unusually productive reader. I don't know how many books I read per year, maybe 30-40? Of course, it shouldn't be about the numbers. The type of books read, as well as the length of the books, are factors. I can't say that reading many by Danielle Steele or like authors is necessarily superior to watching TV or movies. People may say that dissing such writers is snobbish. The article Landroid found states the essential fact that reading won't compete well with other media that require less effort of us and are designed to appeal to our "fun" centers. I know for me there is a good deal of dribbling away time with the newspaper and several magazines, plus during the colder months I'm pretty into televised basketball. Maybe more than anything else, I'm aware that reading is sedentary, and I like to to be standing or moving quite a bit. How about all those television series that are constantly being made, many of them high-quality, that suck people in so easily? You want to avoid most of those if you intend to make headway in reading.

Whatever good there may be to say about our education system, it doesn't seem to produce that many students who then become committed readers. But it would be unfair to blame the system when there are so many distractions it has to fight against.

By getting them to spend less and less time on the social media.