What makes people not read books?

I wish I knew. At my last job, I worked with a guy (33 years old) who seemed to actually take some pride in saying that he hadn't read a book since university. I don't understand that at all, I feel like a mental slug if I don't read a book a month.

I’ve never had this issue myself, in fact growing up I read so many books I would give myself headaches! Books for me are a wonderful thing because your imagination fills in the gaps on the page. Reading is a very personal and intimate experience where you create whole worlds inside your mind using the words on the page as your guide, and everyone who has read the same books as you has slightly different picture in their mind!

Having said that I can (unfortunately) see why people don’t read books. There are a number of reasons why:
1. Tv, movies, and YouTube are more quick and easy entertainment for people that depending on what it is can be far less work for the brain than books.
2. The association with books and school. Sometimes people subconsciously or consciously think of books as a chore due to associating them with loads of school work, where they were asked to read certain books and had to interpret them a certain way. People may genuinely not (sadly) realize that there are other different kinds of books than the ones they were asked to read in school.
3.Different personality types may be less inclined to read. For example, I am an introvert, who loves the concentrated introspective nature of sitting down and reading. My Dad on the other hand is a workaholic extrovert who barely sits down let alone long enough to read a book.
4.Some people unfortunately just struggle to read into adulthood, for understandable and sympathetic reasons: Such as lack of education, struggle with it due conditions like dyslexia, or just lack of time and resources to read books.
5. Anti-intellectualism (and in my opinion the very worst reason people don’t read books), the idiots who pride themselves on never opening a book!

I wish everyone would read more books though because I think we would have a much more intelligent, more creative, and compassionate world!

Sometimes people just don’t connect with books. Loads of kids I teach don’t read on a regular basis, largely because they have loads of other things to do: sport, gaming, playing. Mostly, though, they live in homes that don’t value reading. Some of them value education, but they don’t value the art of reading for pleasure. I love reading (according to Goodreads I read over 100 books a year and I’m on track to get there again this year) but I will have times when I just don’t want to pick up a book or I’m not interested in the book I have on the go. Often, people just can’t find pleasure in reading because it was, as Timegirl said, presented as a chore in school. I’ve grown to love looking at a text for symbols and themes, and getting deeper into the construction of a good book, but it really did feel like it was sucking all the joy out of it for a little while and I felt like a moron simply because I read for fun rather than meaning. A lot of people don’t get over that: which I totally get because it was completely the same as my experience with organised sport. Only the athletic, talented types got a regular spot on the field: those of us who were less gifted spent the season working hard at training but not getting anywhere. So I just stopped being interested in playing sport for a decade. Reading is seen in some areas of society as something that is the field of smart, cultured elites. Which it so isn’t.

 
I think plenty of teachers do their best, and a passionate one can make a difference. I had a history teacher like that, where it was a pleasure just listening to him speak for an hour.

I just think our school system in general needs an overhaul. I don't know about everywhere in the world, obviously, but the selection of texts from my experience was horrendous. In elementary school, the big thing seemed to be books about A) beloved pets dying tragic deaths or B) the plight of indigenous people. In high school, the fixation shifted over to endless dystopias - 1984, Brave New World, Handmaid's Tale, The Giver, on and on and on. If you were lucky you might get some Shakespeare once in a while.

There's nothing wrong with those books, necessarily. I like many of them. But where's adventure? Where's romance? If you want to get an uninterested classroom engaged with reading, why not something fun every once in a while?

Tom Sawyer? Sherlock Holmes? Dr Jekyll? The Time Machine? All of these books are easy to read, well known stories with plenty of deeper themes to discuss. I was always tremendously disappointed by how many of the classics got passed over in favor of another go-around with The Chrysalids.

If it were up to me, I'd like more variety and more free choice, but like you said, the system isn't always able to accommodate that.

I think that circles back around to what you mentioned earlier as reading being misbranded something for the cultured elites and this idea of Literature (with a capital 'L'). Examining complex themes, motifs, structure, metatext, paratext, authorial intent... All of that isn't exclusively the purview of the Western literary canon, but it gets treated that way in academia. This belief that you couldn't explore any of those subjects in genre or so-called "lowbrow" fiction, which is strange because much of what is taught in university examines stories that do not fit into that bracket of literature. I did a paper on Neuromancer, despite it being deeply pulpy cyberpunk, as that was one texts discussed and The Hunger Games was likewise considered just as viable an examination of the medium for differing reasons. The former was taught alongside literary works like Frankenstein and The Castle of Otranto (what's considered the originating text for the term "Gothic fiction").

So, it's strange... I can understand the mentality behind it, but if the idea is to prepare the student for tertiary education, it doesn't work because the universities themselves don't have as acute margins. And one of the strongest reasons why schools skim it over, having spent three and a half years studying for an English Major, is a prevailing legacy of snobbery. Something I don't think the schools do on purpose, but nevertheless, the reach of that elitism is still there in what's considered "good literature" for study. Regardless of what will actually engage the students in the subject matter.

That was the problem I had with the curriculum going through the system myself. It felt like it was transplanted from a university-level course without any adaptation for the demographic. Many schoolchildren were expected to comprehend what themes, motifs, metatext, etc; were without being told, which was enormously frustrating for everyone involved because it made people feel stupid for no reason (not that there ever is a good reason...).

(Part two)

I’m going to be referring to my own experiences of studying literature because that’s the case study I know best.

In my first go at Year 12 my English Lit class studied Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders. I read the first 6 chapters and relied on the footnotes and the introduction. When I got my first essay back from my teacher, her comment read “Ian, this is the best essay that I have ever read by someone who clearly didn’t read the book.” For several years I though that was a compliment. I went on my merry way of reading the bits that were necessary for class and reading with extreme care and devotion things that I really enjoyed.

At the end of the school year, I was stuck for something to read and I picked up The Woodlanders and thought, “well, why not?” I got about 150 pages in before I stopped for a break, then I read the rest of it in a few more hours. It was brilliant. I sought out more of Hardy because I loved what he could do.

A few weeks after that, I found a very cheap copy of Les Miserables. I’d recently started carrying the cassettes from the musical with me everywhere because it was that kind of show (and I was that kind of kid) so buying it was a bit of a no-brainer. I read all 1462 pages over Christmas of 1987 (I only skimmed the Waterloo section, though). I loved it. A door had opened for me into understanding why classical literature was good. Most of it was storytelling.

About 10 years after that, I was in a book club and we were studying Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs. As it was loosely based on Great Expectations, I thought I’d best read that as well (I was still that kind of kid even with three of my own kids). I loved it a lot more than Jack Maggs. Over the years I’ve read most of Dickens (largely in the editions won as school prizes by my great grandfather and great-great uncle that were passed down to me).

I was lucky. However, there a load of similar stories to me that my friends can relate but to do with music, sport, cooking, building, any other kind of field: someone has an interest but it doesn’t crystallise into a passion/ vocation until a particular moment when they realise that they’ve spent a lot of time doing it. It’s like falling in love at first sight. A lot of people never have it at all, unfortunately, and just view a lot of things as “stuff that other people do.” Most people don’t worry about and lead perfectly happy and fulfilling lives.

Schools teach a lot of things really well. Many teachers teach a lot of things really well. What we can’t do is get people inspired if their heart isn’t ready for it. I’ve had a couple of teachers who inspired me but nobody else. I’ve also suffered through classes that everyone else liked a lot more than me. What this has to do with people not reading much any more is that reading for pleasure is a skill that can be suppressed through poor training and negative experiences, just like anything else. But I hate when people say, “No, I didn’t like reading at school so I don’t do it now.” I hated Maths at school but I still have to teach it and I have come to love it, like I love all the subjects I teach (yeah, I really do).

Part the Second. *stretches* After a night's rest.

And that engagement is the crux of the issue, really. You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink (*the horse stares dubiously at your wild gesticulations*). It's a universal problem. There's no silver bullet inside or outside of education that gets the sum total of your demographic every single time. Everyone is affected by their own personalities, their own upbringing, the values they hold, the values they rail against and so on. It's even more difficult, I think, for children and teenagers because all of the aforementioned is still being figured out. You're not going to anticipate that a student is going to go out of their way to get Maus on loan to read (I think that was one of my first graphic novels, actually), while finding To Kill a Mockingbird a compelling subject, but a chore to read (more fool me).

Which begs an interesting question... Is engagement something that can be learned? *nods carefully* Yeah, it would seem so... Can it be taught? No clue there. It's like that fabulous quote from Dune:
Really cool. Really brilliant. But how to do that...? How to teach people that they can learn? Moreover, how to do that well and for so many, at the same time? The answer for how to apply that to a book always feels like it's right there, just out of reach. But it does feel like something for a case-by-case basis as the draw of one novel isn't necessarily going to be in the same shade as another.

Another thing which I find really interesting is also the consideration of what exactly we mean by "read" nowadays. Particularly with things like audiobooks. It's an old, old, ooooold debate, but I think a lot more people are taking to narrated works to compensate for what they consider to be a rushed commute or downtime. It creates a curious ambiguity in that word "reader" as -- for all intents and purposes -- they've absorbed the unabridged text with one caveat. It was read to them, rather than by them directly. That's its own experience and I don't consider it lesser (you do you), I've experienced heady mix of both, but I do know people who exclude themselves as readers because of that different method. They don't feel as though they've earned the ability to say they've read it, despite only really two degrees of separation, so there's also this perceived element of challenge or contest to the process of reading itself.

That could tie into the fact of why the process of writing is seen to be so difficult when attempted. Typically, you're not writing as you speak in conversation, you're learning a dialect that's applied almost exclusively to how we compose fiction (with varying degrees based on the author).