Buy A Book or Two.

“What should we buy him for his birthday?” My wife asks as we walk, arbitrarily, up and down the toy aisles shopping for our eight-year-old nephew.

“How about a book,” I reply. Disconcertingly, my wife disagrees with my feeble suggestion and instead we purchase him a National Geographic Deep Sea Jellyfish Aquarium for $34.99. Maybe we should have bought him a book instead?

According to the 99-page study, “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of Nation Consequence,” released on November 26, 2007, and reported on by CBS news on November 30, 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts has found an increasing number of adult Americans are not even reading one book a year.

It gets worse.

* Only 54% of nine-year-olds read every day for “fun.”

* 72% of employers deem high school GRADUATES as “deficient” in writing English.

* On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.

* Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

* In 2002, only 52 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24, the college years, read a book voluntarily, down from 59 percent in 1992.

* American 15-year-olds ranked fifteenth in average reading scores for 31 industrialized nations, behind Poland, Korea, France, and Canada, among others.

* Money spent on books, adjusted for inflation, dropped 14 percent from 1985 to 2005 and has fallen dramatically since the mid-1990s.

* The number of adults with bachelor's degrees and "proficient in reading prose" dropped from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2003.

What should we be buying our friends for Christmas? How about a book; or two?

(Thanks for the link Rob!)