Americans Have No Time to Read, I Apparently Have No Time to Blog

I know, I know, I've been horribly lazy and haven't written, but I swear I'm starting my new life of productivity today! My friend C. and I have decided to meet on Monday evenings to MAKE EACH OTHER WRITE, YOUNG LADY!! And while I hope to work mainly on fiction (you know, stuff I have hardly touched since college), I also hope that it will push me to keep this thing up to date. It's simply difficult with one full-time (er, full-time freelance) job plus dozens of other side projects to pay the bills. I did nothing on Sunday except lie around following a Saturday night holiday party, and Sunday was my first day of doing absolutely nothing in I don't know how many weeks. It was boring, but nice. Sounds like a bad date.

Another reason I've put off writing is that I've moved and realize I have to change my anti-LIC heading to something new and appropriate, since I've left Queens and don't plan to go back (ever!) with the exception of Mets games at Shea Stadium.

So! What prompted me to write again this morning was Salon's link to the National Endowment for the Arts' "To Read or Not to Read" report; Salon notes that the survey says one in four Americans have not read a book in the last year. Sad, right?

Other sad stats:

• Nearly half of all Americans aged 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure.
  
• 65 percent of college freshmen read for pleasure less than an hour per week or not at all.
• Slightly more than 1/3 of high school seniors in American can read proficiently.
  
• One in five employees reads at a skill level lower than his job requires. (Large corporate employers collectively spend $3.1 billion a year on remedial writing classes!)

Also check out Salon's list of 2007's best books. I'd like to get to a couple of them soon, but right now I'm the slowpoke who's still working on things I forgot to read in 2005 and 2006.

(You can find the amazing photo above, which I like to think of as a reading rainbow, er, sorry, here.)