[elizilla]

I was a reader growing up, pretty much to the exclusion of all else. Thing is, there just wasn't that much else to do. I spent most of my free time reading, and probably would have read even more if there wasn't a chronic shortage of books - as it was I would read them over and over. I also spent most of my school hours reading. Every fall, you got new textbooks, and I slurped them right up, since they were at least new.

Then I went away to college. And suddenly I had a hundred choices of things to do, in any given moment. I read a whole lot less. In fact it became hard just to complete the reading for my classes, let alone extra reading. It was pretty awesome, actually, to have this smorgasboard of cool things to do.

Nowadays I am back to reading a fair bit. But I think I'm a better person, for having learned to not just spend every waking hour reading, and for having experienced more of a life outside of books.

And the whole point of this, is to say, maybe these non-readers have always had enough interesting things (good or bad) around them, that they never learned the habit. I suspect I wouldn't read as much today, as I do, if I hadn't developed the habit when my life was far more circumscribed.