Friday, August 04, 2006

Heavy readers? Nowhere near enough

Following up the Penguin Classics range rebranding the Independent has a story in today (sorry can't seem to get a link) that has at the very end a rather sad piece of commentary on the state of reading. The Indy quotes research cited by Penguin that claims that even a heavy reader in the UK reads only four books a year (that’s a shocking one every three months) and a light reader only manages to get through one title.
I thought Harry Potter had got us all reading again, along with these horrible celebrity biographies? Presumably those four books are made up of those types of books, which deepens the tragedy even more.
Let’s hope the Penguin rebranding can do something to address those poor reading figures but against such apathy maybe its time for another national campaign by the government to encourage people to broaden their minds with books. If four a year is a heavy reader then we really have something to worry about.