I am a big reader, but I am a even bigger "listener". I love audio books, got a lot of them...mostly Christies and Harry Potters. And there's nothing like not been able to sleep, popping a cassette on and nodding off with your favourite story

I just found this site by chance, so this is my first post.

I've always been a reader. We didn't have a TV until I was three years old, and by then I was already more interested in books than TV.

My Mother was a big reader, as were her parents and grandparents. That was unusual in those days, as they were farmers in the west of Ireland, and there wasn't a lot of time left over for reading.

My grandparents' house was known in the area as a place 'with books'.

I remember my Aunt giving me seven books for my seventh birthday, and my Mom tells me how my friends would show up at the front door begging her to pry me loose from them for the next week or so.

I used to spend the summers at my grandparents' house, and remember reading books printed in the 1800s, with esses still looking like effs. I'm sure some of those books are worth a lot of money now.

When I first moved to the US, I didn't realize how good the libraries were, and continued to buy many new books. Tuesday would see me at Barnes & Noble checking out the week's new offerings.

Having accumulated at least 5,000 books, I now borrow most of them from our local library.

I still read at least five books a week, and sometimes more.

One of my brothers never read as a child or teenager. After college, he ended up working as a Geosurveyor on a North Sea oil rig. Once he'd watched all the movies on board, he got so bored he decided to read a book.

He now reads all the time, which is great, and a good example for his kids.

I notice my 21-month old daughter picks up books all the time now, just because she likes to copy what I'm doing.

I think there will always be new readers coming along, as long as we encourage it.

Firstly, welcome Dave, I hope you look around and contribute more

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I think there will always be new readers coming along, as long as we encourage it.

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YES! You have to start them as young as possible and like your daughter they will just pick it up. Alas is seems it's almost too easy to sit them in front of the TV instead of putting the work in yourself. (And I admit to doing that sometimes myself )

I think people read a lot less as they get to high school. In primary school I used to read 2-3 books a week. Now I'm in high school and I'm reading about 1 every 2 weeks. Im also reading longer books though . still, there are very few people in my class who read in school time, and those who do, are branded nerds.

This subject comes up quite a bit for me as my library is viewable when you first come into my home. It hosts a few thousand books plus DVDs and CD's of a measurable amount. I see them as friends but so many come in and have asked" have you read all of those/" , well actually not have I only read all of them but this isn't all of them! I live in Israel now in the north and it amazes people that anyone other than a library can own so many books. But even before I came to Israel my friends in America simply did not read. Some hated it others found no reason too but it always made me wonder how Barnes & Noble and Border's books to name two could stay in business in a nation that doesn't read. I have no idea.

Well, I'm still at highschool, and there could be about two others in my main classes who could be considered readers, and only one other who reads as much as I do. If we go across the whole year (intermediate) you might find another half dozen readers out of enough of us to fill five classrooms. In fact my reading is often commented on its so strange. It's extremely sad but then we cant force them to now can we?

In, fact, we were asked to read and report on six books for a wide reading unit (Im already doing the next one up)and 90% of my class reckoned they couldn't do it in a year. Thats only six shortish books- I've finished and i have got to do nine, which isn't hard for me.

I don't think it's the school's fault. Sometimes if you can't see the value of something at first, you just have to keep trying. If kids find something boring, that's their loss. "Oh, it's hard to do." Well, tough!

I still read quite a bit, but much less than before I discovered the wonders of Internet. However, I think this probably has to do with the fact that I just leaped from normal kids books to deeper ones with nothng in between.

A lot of people don't read mch because the books we read in school give them the impression that every book is mind-numbingly boring.

Our family is really into reading and we have an extensive library in our house. There's hardly a room in the house which doesn't have a bookcase and even the bathroom has a magazine rack. So with two avid readers for parents, our daughter couldn't help but become a reader. And thank goodness for that, because she certainly doesn't get encouraged to read at school.

My daughter is in Year 12, her last year of high school. Last year, in Year 11, she read one book in her English class - just one.

When I was her age, we read dozens of them in Years 11 and 12. We read plays - we did a Shakespeare play every year. We read George Bernard Shaw's and Oscar Wilde's plays. We read books of poetry by Robert Frost, Judith Wright, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. We read novels by Harper Lee, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, to name but a few.

In my daughter's so-called English class, they do everything BUT read books. They analyse CD covers (I'm not kidding) and watch videos, activities I would have considered more appropriate to the Media class.

In fact, I have an appointment at my daughter's school tomorrow to see the teacher in charge of the curriculum to find out what the heck is going on!

No wonder people think kids don't read any more.

Oh MG I wish it were so in our house. My husband and I are both avid readers and we too have books everywhere, including Bathroom readers and magazines in the bathrooms.
My daughter is becoming more of a reader, but still doesn't read half of what either her father or I read, but my son only reads when he's grounded and isn't allowed electronics.
Every now and then he'll get into a book that he can't put down, but then it will be months until he voluntarily touches another. We have done our best to find books that we think he'll like, but he seldom does.

I'm 17, and have been a big reader for most of my life. My mother read to me even so far back as to when she was still pregnant with me...I started learning to read at 2 and caught on fast...apparently it was a good thing, I was home schooled and the books they had me reading in grade school were choices like Lorna Doon, Around the World in 80 Days, The Swiss Family Robinson, and others of that sort. I didn't always like them, but I understood them and I could 'handle' them...these days people think kids in high schools are unable to 'handle' books like that.

People may say that the Internet has had an influence in the decline of reading...personally I use it to my advantage, we have a wide but very limited variety of books at the library, so I use the Internet to look up a lot more than what they carry. Speaking of the library...I don't consider myself to be too fast a reader except when it's the Fear Street series by R.L. Stine...those books I can go through 3 in a day...but when I go to the library, I usually pick up about 7 or 10 books at a time, and the librarians can't believe how many I check out.

Actually, I don't really see too many teenagers at the library, or the ones I do, they go straight for the computers to do who knows what there. I read several sorts of books, sci-fi, horror, mystery, comedy, western, also biographies, novelizations of movies, books on true crime, ghosts and hauntings, entertainment...one of the things I definately will not pick up are romance novels.

My mother has a theory about those books, she says they make the women who read them depressed because their lives aren't like the books...well that's her opinion but I can say where my grandmother is concerned, her opinion is right.

Bottom line is I like to read and I do, a lot...and I guess I should be more thankful that I was home schooled because we actually had to work. We had to read books and give reports on them, and write compositions and essays...you had to know your stuff, there was no faking your way through it. Now everybody seems to have gotten all mamby pamby and don't believe in making kids actually work in school. I have a neighbor, who just turned 13, and if he had it his way, he wouldn't have to read anything beyond a 2nd grade reading level.

I'm not kidding...it blows my mind, he spells history 'histy' and pickle 'pikl' and parade 'prade' and Confederate 'konfedret' and the school tells him he's right. And if not that, they know he's getting them wrong, but they just move on, they don't stop to correct him. And those kids read aloud in class every day, and nobody is catching this stuff.

And at 13 he can't read 'revolution' or 'allegiance' or anything like that, and it blows my mind it really does...13 and he can't read allegiance...I found that out when I took over one of the Little Golden Books, one titled "Our Flag", a brief history on the American flag and how it came to be...he was 12 when he read that...I was 7 when I first read it, and I knew every word in the book except 'colonies'.

I don't get this...my mother had to balance a job and home schooling my brother and myself, and doing all the cooking and cleaning and helping manage my dad's business, and she did not get paid for teaching us...teachers get paid thousands of dollars a year, and they can't even make sure kids learn the basics. That doesn't make any sense.

And now, it seems that homework has become so optional, either the teachers don't bother giving it out, or they tell the kids to only do as much as they think they can do. Whatever happened to 'do your homework or you'll be staying with me after class'?

It just doesn't make sense...if teachers would actually do their jobs and teach the kids to read, and made sure that the kids were actually learning it...well maybe then there'd be a bit more interest with kids in reading. Granted it's also the parents' responsibilities to teach them as well, but what's that say for the kids whose parents can't read?

All I can say is that by the time I'm a mother, I'm going to read to my kids all the time, and I'm going to make sure they learn how to read.