newsminer.com

When Albert Einstein said "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts," he could have been talking about the surveys of American reading issued last year.

For example, the National Endowment for the Arts' study "Reading at Risk" described the decline in reading among young adults, and a report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress found 65 percent of graduating high school seniors and 71 percent of eighth-graders are unable to read at their grade level.

Over the past few years, however, there's been an explosion in nontraditional reading of iPhones, text-messages, blogs, MySpace and wikis. Moreover, booksellers have experienced a 25 percent upswing in books being purchased by teens, and Harry Potter's certainly spurred that trend.

A 2006 Yankelovich-Scholastic survey "reported that 51 percent of the 15- to 17-year-olds polled said they hadn't read books for fun until they started reading the J.K. Rowling series." Perhaps we should re-evaluate how time spent reading is measured, and instead of telling kids they aren't readers, learn what and how they read and find ways to encourage it.

Many of us who read during our early teen years feasted on books found around the house. I was lucky to have reading parents with well-read friends who liked to share books.

Best of all were Jack and Bettie, lifelong college friends of my folks. Through Jack, I met luminaries like Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, J.R.R. Tolkein and Robert Howard. Jack's science fiction and fantasy novels opened my mind to the myriad possibilities of the future. Some of them were classics, and others were pure dross, but they fired my imagination so it glows to this day.

Bettie shared more weighty books with my mom, along with countless mysteries. Bruce Catton's nonfiction Civil War books were personal favorites, particularly since this was during that nasty conflict's 100th anniversary. Southern boys played Yanks and Rebs at recess daily, but the Yankee forces always consisted of me and another boy.

Despite alternating as Grant and Lincoln, we lost every skirmish, but reading Catton's accounts of my side winning was especially gratifying. I skipped the boring political parts to find descriptions of the battles that ultimately made the awful reality of it tangible for the first time. I also learned I could handle grown-up books.

Bettie also liked light, humorous novels, especially those by Jean Shepard and Max Shulman, and so did I. It was a happy surprise decades later when one of Shepard's tales of growing up in the '30s turned into the movie "A Christmas Story."

Shulman, who created Dobie Gillis, specialized in college humor. The Dictionary of Literary Biography, says Shulman, who was very funny, presented "a world without either risk or menace, a reassuring context that allows his stories to take up current social issues without having to take them seriously." With its racy cartoon cover by William Crawford of a happily dissolute couple dancing, it was perfect bait for a lad curious about all manner of college high jinks.

I was reminded of reading my parents' books by Bill Bryson's "Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," his memoir of growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. Bryson described his own forays into his parents' bookshelves, how it informed his awareness of the adult world, and the strangeness of becoming conversant with a recently bygone slice of literary culture.

You owe it to yourself to try Bryson's book, especially if you're a child of the '50s. The San Francisco Examiner review said, "A cross between de Tocqueville and Dave Barry, Bryson writes about … America in a way that's both trenchantly observant and pound-on-the-floor, snort-root-beer-out-of-your-nose funny."

Bryson's a phenomenal writer, and his stroll through the '50s is guaranteed to evoke memories aplenty from the target audience.

My children are strong readers, but they and everyone who grew up several decades later will never find "Thunderbolt Kid" as beguiling. Their generation's equivalent memoir will doubtlessly emerge someday, but with communications technology moving so fast, who's to say what form it will take?

I'm not about to speculate, for as Einstein stated, "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe."