Will reading ever be cool again?

As surprising as this may sound, I listened in on an interesting conversation during a school board meeting recently. The middle school language arts teachers at BCLUW were giving a curriculum report, and they had all reached an unsettling conclusion about their students: they hate reading.
           
Is this surprising? No, not really. But is it concerning? Absolutely. There are a million reasons why people don’t read anymore, and the most common culprit is technology. Social media, tablets and Youtube have all taken the place of books, but even so, does that fully explain the phenomenon?
           
The real reason we’ve stopped reading is that it’s hard, and we’re afraid of what we might learn. This isn’t just an issue confined to the younger generations, either: if you surveyed 10 random adults on the street, how many do you think would tell you they read a book in the last month that wasn’t work related? I’m placing bets on three, and that might be generous. On the other hand, if you asked them who watched Sean Hannity/Jake Tapper/whichever cable news anchor fits their political agenda the night before or checked Donald Trump’s Twitter feed (full disclosure: I’m guilty of this), that number would more than likely double.
           
I made a strange decision when I first moved to Grundy Center alone out of college in 2013: I was going to start reading, just to read. The weird guy sitting in his backyard devouring The Grapes of Wrath and As I Lay Dying was me. I didn’t have a particular reason or end goal in mind when I started other than wanting to gain a firmer grasp on history and increase my vocabulary. Four years later, it’s one of the best choices I’ve ever made (and I’ve made plenty of bad ones), and I commenced my second foray into Hemingway a few days ago.
           
The thing that turns so many people off about reading is that unlike TV, radio or a tablet, it requires active mental participation and actually makes you think. In school, books are put in front of us, and we have no say in the matter. You may not like The Scarlet Letter or Of Mice and Men, but you’d better have it finished with a three-page book report completed by next week.
           
But as we get older, these constraints no longer weigh us down. We can read whatever we want about any topic that interests us, and whether you prefer classics or the Twilight series, that’s your prerogative. One of my dad’s favorite authors is Jane Austen, and he doesn’t care if you think that’s girly of him (it probably helps that my father is a former English teacher and an “aspiring” novelist—better late than never).
 
The book and author that turned me back on to literature was actually Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, which was written 20 years before I was born about an era that I never experienced personally. Thompson, however, lit a fuse in me: he wrote like a cathartic madman on the verge of self-implosion at any moment, and for a cynical journalist trying to find his place in the world, it connected on a visceral level. Along with Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy and John Steinbeck, he’s on my Mount Rushmore of favorite authors.
 
You don’t have to like Shakespeare or Charles Dickens to be an enlightened reader. There are great novels about cars, horror, the mundane nature of middle class small town life, animals and aimless road trips across America, to name a few topics. But whether you’re a kindergartener trying to learn or a college graduate trying to read for fun again, it takes work and patience—two traits that many critics would argue are increasingly absent in today’s society.
 
Of course, it starts at the top, and for the first time in modern American history, a president who hates reading is leading the country. Trump, in many ways, is a metaphor for the modern American: an ever dwindling attention span, obsessed with his phone, more worried about himself than anyone around him and severely lacking in critical thinking skills. His bestseller The Art of the Deal was almost certainly ghostwritten, and the Donald’s claim that The Bible is his favorite book would probably come as a shock to anyone who’s actually read it.
 
Alas, the president’s conduct is probably never going to change. He is who he is, and we’re stuck with him. But the larger question still looms: what can we do to make reading cool again? Is such an endeavor even remotely realistic? I’m open to suggestions, and I’d love to hear from anyone who’s interested. In light of the firestorm over the banning of To Kill a Mockingbird at a school district in Mississippi, this discussion is more important than ever.
 
I have a feeling that if we all spent a little less time checking our Facebook feeds for the latest viral cat video and more time dissecting the history of the planet we inhabit and how we can learn from our mistakes (and reading The Grundy Register, of course), we’d be better off as a result.
 
“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers”- Harry S. Truman