Topic 12: Books

Why has Holmes continued to (1) _________________ generation after generation when other fictional detectives of the Victorian period are forgotten? One can break the answers down into a mix of elements. But first it will be useful to summarize the life of Holmes’s (2)____________. Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859, one of nine children of an alcoholic Irish artist who was consigned, in later life, to a lunatic asylum. Young Arthur Doyle was educated at the fee-paying Jesuit college, Stony Hurst. (3)___________ 16 he spent a year in Austria before enrolling at Edinburgh University’s medical school. In 1880 he spent seven months in the Arctic as ship’s doctor on a whaler. The following year he graduated with a (4)__________ degree, and made another trip to Africa before setting up, less adventurously, in medical practice near Portsmouth, in July 1882. His income had reached £300 a year by 1885, enabling him to marry the sister of one of his patients. Doyle had long written on the side and in 1886 he played around with stories (5)____________ on an ‘amateur private detec-tive’, called ‘J. Sherrinford Holmes’. The outcome was the Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet (1887). No top-drawer publisher would take it and it was eventually serialized as a Christmas giveaway in a magazine and then as what was called a ‘shilling shocker’ – pulp fiction for the masses.

Leisure reading, also known as recreational reading, pleasure reading, free voluntary reading, and independent reading, is independent, self-selected reading of a continuous text for a wide range of personal and social (1)__________. It can take place in and out of school, at any time. Readers (2)__________from a wide range of extended texts, including but not exclusive to narrative fiction, nonfiction, picture books, e-books, magazines, social media, blogs, websites, newspapers, comic books, and graphic novels. Leisure reading is (3)_______intrinsically or socially motivated and a pleasurable activity for the reader.

Students’ home environment, where parents/caregivers encourage reading and model their enjoyment of reading, has a substantial (4)___________impact on children’s performance in reading. In classrooms, leisure reading often takes place during times designated as SSR (sustained silent reading), DEAR (drop everything and read), LTR (love to read), or POWER (providing opportunities with everyday reading), which are the most common terms for classroom leisure reading. It may take place (5) _____individual classrooms or be part of a school-wide activity.

At a time when the younger generation, hooked to the mobiles, TV and internet, is fast-moving away from books, Sundargarh Collector Nikhil Pasan Kalyan has taken it upon himself this particular sacred responsibility. Kalyan on Thursday launched a campaign ‘Sundargarh Bahi Padha’ to promote reading by distributing books among the people in Sundargarh town. He reached out to the people at roadside stalls and engaged with them over cups of tea. While motivating them to read, he gifted books to them.

The district administration plans to extend the initiative to schools and villages in the coming six months with focus on improving school and public libraries, and equipping all offices and waiting rooms with books. Further, reading sessions have been scheduled to be conducted every week at the Collector’s residence campus and other places involving people of all ages including students.

“Books are the best teachers. To improve morality and openness in the society, everyone has to read. They could be in any genre. Reading is the starting point,” said Kalyan.

Chief District Medical and Public Health Officer (CDM-PHO) Dr SK Mishra commented on the present situation: “Youths and students confine themselves to prescribed courses of study and refuse to go beyond that,” he said. Undoubtedly, internet connection and electronic gadgets like computers, laptops and mobile phones provide a sea of information and ready-made knowledge but simultaneously decrease the creativity in individuals, Mishra added.

“Social media kills time, creativity and the urge to pick up a book. It may be noted that people with reading habits have lesser chances of suffering from Alzheimer’s,” he said. Presently, of the four Government-run public libraries in the district three are functional, albeit with few readers. Kalyan has sought collective participation to make the initiative a success.

A new report by the Pew Research Center has provided more documentation on the growing popularity of audiobooks. In a survey of 1,502 American adults conducted from January 8 to February 7 this year, Pew found that 20% of adults listened to an audiobook in the 12 months prior to the period in which the survey was conducted. In 2011, only 11% of them said they listened to an audiobook.

The strongest gains have come since 2016—the dawning of the digital audiobooks age. The percentage of adults listening to audiobooks rose six percentage points between 2016 and the 2019 survey, after rising only three percentage points between 2011 and 2016. According to Pew, since 2018, college students and adults with household incomes over $75,000 are the two groups who have adopted listening to audiobooks the quickest. The Pew survey also found that while listening to audiobooks has risen steadily since the 2016 survey, reading e-books had declined. Twenty-eight percent of adults reported reading an e-book in 2016—double the number who listen to audiobooks that year. By the most recent survey, e-books had only a 5% edge over audiobook usage.

Overall, the Pew survey found a gradual reduction in the percentage of Americans who are reading. In 2011, 79% of those surveyed said they had read a book in the previous 12 months, a number that fell to 72% in early 2019. Print remained by far the book format of choice, with 65% or adults surveyed reporting that had read a print book within the last year, down from 71% in 2011. The percentage of adult who read a book in any format fell from 79% in 2011 to 72% in 2019.