For me personally I blame school.
It went from reading in the library for fun to breaking down texts and trying to make-up some deep meaning for a grade. It destroyed the fun of reading and made it a slog, I've never recovered the passion since.
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It competes with other entertainment forms, takes time, energy and focus. Seems natural to me.
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That's a pretty concerning trend IMO, particularly when the article mentions 44% of Australians have issues with literacy.
A lot of comments saying why they think reading has declined (boo evil school... They made me critically analyse stuff...) but not even touching on why that's evidently having more effect on boys than girls?
That's odd.
Compare to the other post asking why Tate bro manosphere brainrot is on the rise. The kind of garbage that specifically discourages boys from higher order thinking because that's not "alpha". Some of the comments there basically boiled down to " not my problem, shut up".
Interetsing juxtaposition.
Misogyny holds men back, but as long as that won't be acknowledged, nothing will improve.
I didn't read in school. I read sporadically as an adult, mostly science fiction. I completely dropped the ball during the pandemic when I got hooked on reddit. I think that, and working in tech has addled my brain. Now I just listen to audiobooks but it feels like cheating. The only books I look forward to buying.and reading is whatever Greg Egan puts out.
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Probably because books cost like twice as much here. Use your local library.
From an interview with Ron H. Barassi (not to be confused with Ron Barassi):
Art Income Dialectic, on the B side of the single, is a delightful soliloquy of yours Ron. May I ask you which Shakespearian character's soliloquy do you feel most comfortable with; that of Hamlet -
"Drown the Stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech
Make mad the guilty, and appal the free";
or that of Macbeth?
"I am in blood
steeped in so far that, should I walk no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er."
RHB: Blood haunts Macbeth. It becomes synonymous with the gradual flooding of his wife's subconscious sense, or morality, and the destruction of his own. My copy of that play is still marked by the notes I made in my HSC year. I can remember sitting at 11.30pm, when the rest of the family had gone to bed, with the lights just on enough to read and making lists of the references to blood in the play. With growing surprise, as the scent from my father's flower-beds drifted in, I realised blood was a cohesive pervasive symbol throughout the play. It was a warm night because that was only four weeks or so before the exam. I realised that Shakespeare could be read as poetry, with the compression of language that the word poetry implies, as well as a drama. In fact it was this poetic notion of Shakespeare that attracted me the most because I'm yet to see a production of his which doesn't bore the shit out of me.
Honestly, I analyse and satirise literature in my spare time, and I've read a few nonfiction theory texts that are well above high-school level, but I don't think I have ever read an entire assigned text in its entirety. Every addition material I selected for exams was a film.
Funny that the retirees read a lot. Their friends are dead and they don't have a steam account
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