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Originally Posted by Harmon
I think that Steve Jobs is right - the majority - vast majority - of people don't read. Of those who do, probably the majority read for the story, not the writing. A story can be good without being well written. So those who understand and appreciate good writing are a small minority, even of those who read.
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It might help to define what you mean by "reading". If you mean it as "read
books for pleasure", Jobs is likely right. Most folks
don't read. I think of the comment a VP at a bank I used to work for made: "I haven't read a book since I got out of college!" He wasn't stupid or ignorant - you don't get an MBA from the Wharton School if you are - but his reading wasn't books for pleasure. I suspect it was less a case of lack of interest than lack of time. He was a future Captain of Industry, who wound up as a CEO at a Fortune 500 company, and I suspect he read very little he didn't see as directly related to his career.
But pretty much
everybody reads for pleasure, if you expand you definition of reading. I think of a friend who is a web and print designer and a content producer. He reads incessantly, but most of it in online, in the form of blogs and articles. The shorter forms are more easily digested when he has a few minutes here and there, and he's dyslexic, so while he can and does read books, it takes additional effort.
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But your fear is a cogent one - I don't think there ever was a time, before this time, when adults read adolescent books for pleasure in any great numbers. (Which is not quite the same thing as adolescent books like that Code thing being written for adults...) But maybe I'm wrong - the audience for Horatio Alger books must have included a lot of adults. Same for the Tarzan novels. The more things change...
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Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote for adults. His work was published in the pulp magazines, beginning in a period when if you were a kid, you might just try to hide the pulp so people didn't
know you were reading it.
And Burroughs is still popular today. (Take a look at the download count for Burroughs titles in the MR Library as one bit of evidence.) You can make arguments about how well it's written, but the stories are still compelling.
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On the other hand, there are some good books targeted for adolescents here & there. True Grit comes to mind immediately, because I just saw the new movie (good, but gory.) I read the book about ten years ago, and was surprised at how good it was. I'm not even sure how I wound up reading it - I think it was a recommendation by some writer.
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Lots of stuff intended for kids became popular with adults. Consider C. S. Lewis's Narnia books back when, or Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" now.
Being written for Juvenile/YA audiences doesn't mean adults can't enjoy them, and the best such work transcends age brackets, like Lloyd Alexander's _The Chronicles of Prydain_.
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Dennis