Photo of the Day: “Reading Together” Sculpture, Teaneck Public Library, NJ

I’m a sucker for statues of kids falling in love with books, maybe because I was like that so long ago.

A few weeks ago, with winter still holding Bergen County in its icy grip, I wrote a post about such a sculpture in front of the Maywood Public Library.

Then, in late March, I came across one with the same idea, which I’ve photographed here: “Reading Together,” in the Children’s Reading Garden in the lawn outside the Teaneck Public Library.

This bronze sculpture was created by New Jersey artist Judith Peck. It’s a charming centerpiece of the garden, which was dedicated 30 years ago this coming July.

Photo of the Day: Young Readers Sculptures, Maywood Public Library, NJ

I took the image accompanying this post more than a week ago, when snow from the late February blizzard was not only still on the ground but obstructing walkways. That meant that I couldn’t get close enough to read whatever inscription appears on the base of these outdoor sculptures, so I don’t know the name of the artist or the date when this was installed. The next time I return to the library, I’ll see if these exist.

But I couldn’t help but smile when I saw these figures. They evoke what so many of us—including current and former librarians like me—know: that the best time to foster a love of reading is when children are young.

Nowadays, it’s even more urgent that we realize this, as so many digital distractions exist, far beyond what our parents and grandparents feared with the rise of television.

Quote of the Day (Trevor Noah, on Books, the ‘Rocket Fuel’)

“If imagination is the rocket, then books are the rocket fuel. They supercharge the mind and help it see beyond what it can conceive on its own.”— South African actor, writer, producer, comedian, political commentator, and television host Trevor Noah, Into the Uncut Grass (2024)

The image accompanying this post, of Trevor Noah on Centre Stage during the opening night of Web Summit Qatar 2024 at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center in Doha, Qatar, was taken Feb. 26, 2024, by Stephen McCarthy/Web Summit Qatar via Sportsfile.

Quote of the Day (Rose Horowitch, on College Students’ Fewer, and Slimmer, Books)

“Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.”—American journalist Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” The Atlantic, December 2024

I well remember the shock all over an English teacher’s face in my parochial high school in the mid-1970s when one of her students confessed that he’d never read a book all the way through. When she was finally able to recover her composure, she demanded to know how he’d managed to get through 11 years of elementary and secondary school without accomplishing what she saw as a basic educational task.

My high school classmate would have plenty of company these days. Rose Horowitch’s report from the current groves of academe begins with a student telling a teacher in the literary humanities course at my college alma mater, Columbia University—an institution considerably more selective than my high school way back when—that she, too, had never read a book cover to cover.

Columbia is hardly the only college facing this dilemma. Most of the 33 academics contacted by Horowitch related similar experiences.

So, what gives? The article offers several reasons for this, including:

*Electronic devices that compete for attention with apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

*New educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core that led to short informational passages that mimic standardized tests, rather than longer texts.

*Shifts in values rather than skill sets—i.e., students can still read long books, but they don’t want to.

*Jobs and extracurricular activities that sap the time they need to read in depth.

*Identity politics that makes young readers less inclined to tackle the thinking of writers far away in place and time.

*Grade inflation that doesn’t penalize students for failing to keep up with the course load.

I read with particular interest an admission by Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American Studies professor at the school, that, in now teaching a seminar on short works in American literature rather than a full survey course, he had dispensed with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in favor of the author’s Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

For my American lit survey course back in the day, my class had to read these shorter works and the epic novel. Our professor urged us, if we had time, to get a jump on Melville’s stab at the Great American Novel: “It’s a long whaling expedition,” he joked.

I finished reading this article right after listening to a podcast on the English novelist Anthony Powell, who created a 12-novel sequence chronicling more than four decades in 20^th-century life, A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell’s style is not daunting, and believe it or not, readers years ago managed to plow through most, if not all, of this work.

But it’s inconceivable to me that many readers today will make it through just one of his novels, let alone all of it.

It should also be said courses in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) have made the appeal of humanities course offering mass immersion in reading less lucrative.

That high school classmate of mine, for instance? He entered the armed forces, where he learned computer sciences—and ended up making considerably more money, after he left the military, than fellow high school graduates who took the time to make it through one long book after another.

(The image accompanying this post, if you haven't guessed it from the guy with the long hair, is a relic from a bygone era, in more ways than one. It shows a Shimer College student reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty under a tree on the school's original campus in Mount Carroll, IL. The photograph was published in the school's 1973-1974 catalog. I hope that this seminal work of political science, at any rate, continues to be read in its entirety, but I’m not betting on it.)

Quote of the Day (Poet Tracy K. Smith, on Whether Books ‘Serve a Moral Function’)

“It’s a mistake to expect literature to teach us how to live our lives. But the practice of reading does, to my mind, serve a moral function. On its most basic level, literature instills in us the capacity to be rapt and beholden to a stranger’s voice, to do everything possible to hear and heed that voice in such a way that it is permitted to illuminate something. Sometimes what it illuminates are facets of ourselves — even our former or future selves. This to me feels like a very vital moral exercise.”—Former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, “By the Book: Tracy K. Smith,” The New York Times Book Review, Nov. 19, 2023

The image accompanying this post was derived from a photo of Tracy K. Smith with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, taken Sept. 25, 2017, by the Library of Congress.

Quote of the Day (Barbara Kingsolver, on a Motive for Learning to Read)

“You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist of history rather than a spectator.” — American novelist, essayist and poet Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (1990) 

Quote of the Day (Joseph Epstein, on Self-Improvement and Encyclopedias)

“Self-improvement is at the heart of the encyclopedic enterprise. People certified with degrees from what the world considers the best universities and colleges sometimes forget that we are all autodidacts, on our own in the endless attempt to patch over the extraordinary gaps in our knowledge. Doing so in an efficient way is the promise held out by an encyclopedia, which claims to provide all the world's pertinent knowledge, right there in 24, 29, 32 volumes, usually with a bookcase thrown in at no extra charge.” —American essayist and editor Joseph Epstein, “Wisdom on the Installment Plan,” Wall Street Journal, June 18-19, 2016

As a youngster, my “self-improvement,” such as it was, came courtesy of a more modest encyclopedia set than the one Epstein posits: the 10-volume New Wonder World Encyclopedia.

My family couldn’t afford a 10-volume set, let alone one double or triple in size, so I believe this one came as a gift from a neighbor who worked for the publisher, Parents’ Institute.

What I know is that, while ignoring some volumes in the set (e.g., Agriculture and Industry), I positively tore through several others: Masterpieces of the Arts, Treasures of Literature, Highlights of American History, Great Events of World History, The Nations of the World, and most of all, Famous People of All Time, foreshadowing my lifelong interest in biographies.

The volumes were liberally filled with photos and illustrations, increasing its appeal for a child. They whetted my interest enough so that several years later, I was ready for the three-volume Columbia Encyclopedia, Third Edition, with denser type but no eye-catching graphics.

It’s impossible to imagine for someone growing up in the digital age, but for a reader with endless curiosity decades ago, minutes could fly by with print volumes—and it was not time the least bit wasted.

Quote of the Day (Andrew Ferguson, on Notes Made by Famous Readers in Their Favorite Books)

“The task of a marginalia maven is at right angles to the task of reading a book: It is an attempt to read the reader rather than to read the writer. For several decades now, scholars have been swarming the margins of books in dead people's libraries. Those margins are among the most promising sites of ‘textual activity,’ to use the scholar's clinical phrase—a place to explore, analyze, and, it is hoped, find new raw material for the writing of dissertations. Famous readers whose libraries have fallen under such scrutiny include Melville and Montaigne, Machiavelli and Mark Twain.”— American journalist and author Andrew Ferguson, “Nixon Between the Lines,” The Atlantic, October 2023

I came upon this article several weeks ago and set it aside for future reference. Early last night, I became intrigued by Ferguson’s opening paragraphs: his discovery of Richard Nixon’s books in the late President’s library and museum in Yorba Linda, CA.

An inveterate reader, Nixon engaged heavily in these materials, becoming a counterpart to the famous authors that Ferguson mentioned as scribbling in margins. One book the disgraced ex-President digested in his unwanted retirement deeply annoyed him with its revelation that in 1969, his then-National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, had ridiculed him “in private conversation with liberal friends.”

Irony of ironies: even as Ferguson was researching his biography of Nixon among these previously unsampled books, Kissinger himself was appearing at the Nixon Library to promote his own latest book, Leadership, in which he had praised his old boss.

A further irony of ironies: only a few hours after reading about this conjunction of events, I found on the Internet that the man Ferguson called “the 20^th century’s only celebrity diplomat” had passed away, at age 100.

Somewhere in the afterlife, I suspect, Nixon and Henry the K are going to have a very long conversation.

Quote of the Day (Graham Greene, on Why Books Excite Us So Much in Childhood)

“Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what it is in our minds already; as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back. But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?...It is in those early years that I would look for the crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its journey towards death.”—English novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, playwright, and journalist Graham Greene (1904-1991), The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1951)

Quote of the Day (Brenda Cronin, on Reading and Writing as Worthwhile Commitments)

“Reading is a commitment, and…writing is even more so. Most writing is solitary and painstaking. But both efforts are worthwhile. Books pay dividends—memorable characters and scenes built of words—unlike those of any podcast, film or series.”—Arts and culture writer and editor Brenda Cronin, “Books Resist Digital Domination,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 11, 2023

Quote of the Day (Poet Billy Collins, on Being Read to as a Child)

“I have a secret theory that people who are addicted to reading are almost trying to recreate the joy, the comfortable joy of being read to as a child by a parent or a friendly uncle or an older sibling.”—Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, “The Art of Poetry No. 83” (interview by George Plimpton), The Paris Review, Issue 159 (Fall 2001)

The photo of Billy Collins accompanying this post was taken May 13, 2007, by Marcelo Noah.

Quote of the Day (Martin Amis, on the Reader and the Author)

“When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.”— English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter Martin Amis (1949-2023), “Don’t Call Him Mellow Bellow,” originally published in The Guardian (UK), Aug. 17, 1997, republished in The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (2001)

(The image accompanying this post, of Martin Amis in a hotel suite in Cologne, Germany, was taken Mar. 17, 2012 by Maximilian Schonherr.)

Quote of the Day (Claire Tomalin, on Her Mother’s Good Advice About Books)

“My mother told me early that whatever happens to you, however unhappy you may be, you can escape into a book.”— English editor and biographer Claire Tomalin, A Life of My Own: A Memoir (2018)

The image accompanying this post, of Claire Tomalin signing a copy of her Charles Dickens biography at the Hexham Book Festival, was taken Apr. 27, 2013, by summonedbyfells.

Quote of the Day (Amor Towles, on What’s Beautiful to an Author)

“There are few things more beautiful to an author's eye…than a well-read copy of one of his books.”— American novelist Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway (2021)

The attached photo of Amor Towles was taken Aug. 9, 2018, by librairie mollat.

Quote of the Day (Alan Bennett, on ‘The Best Moments in Reading’)

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” —English actor, author, playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett, The History Boys: A Play (2004)

(The accompanying photo of Alan Bennett was taken in London in 1973 by Allan Warren.)

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, on His Great Reading Intentions)

“So every summer I truly intend
My intellectual sloth to end
And every summer for years and years
I’ve read Sherlock Holmes and The Three Musketeers.”—American light-verse poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “Have You Read Any Good Books Tomorrow?” in Everyone But Thee And Me (1962)

For many of us now, it was going to be during the pandemic that the “intellectual sloth” would end. But even Arthur Conan Doyle and Alexander Dumas might be a stretch—in these days of distraction, passivity and enervation, they’d be simply too long to read.

Quote of the Day (Vladimir Nabokov, on Reading a Book for the First Time)

“When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.”—Russian-born American novelist-critic-poet-memoirist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Lectures on Literature (1980)

Quote of the Day (David Ulin, on Reading as ‘An Act of Resistance’ Amid Distraction)

"Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise." ―Book critic and editor David Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time (2010)

Quote of the Day (Pat Conroy, on How ‘Books Are Living Things’)

“Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.”—Novelist Pat Conroy (1945-2016), My Reading Life (2010)

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ As Barney Recalls Reading in Childhood)

Deputy Barney Fife [played by Don Knotts]: “I read all them childish classics. I was an avaricious reader.” —The Andy Griffith Show, Season 4, Episode 12, “Opie and His Merry Men,” original air date Dec. 30, 1963, teleplay by John Whedon, directed by Richard Crenna