Reading, Virtue and Citizenship

article posted Jan 12, 08:55

As some of you no doubt know, the big Reading Summit is being held in my hometown of Montreal next week. It’s a significant event that is likely to look at a whole range of issues around reading and books, and in the lead up to it the Globe has published this interesting article .

I’m not surprised at the reported benefits associated with good, old-fashioned solitary reading, of course, and I’m pleased to see this discussion move beyond the baseline metric of literacy. (It’s certainly about time!) But I can’t help but hesitate at how we’re still caught up in a discourse of simple instrumentality, of whether or not reading is “useful” in some way… it just feels so reductive.

Anyway, hope you find the article interesting. And since this is my first post since the holiday season — Happy New Year to you all!