Garth George: Rest time should be brought to book

Television, the internet, video games and all sorts of electronic wizardry are all pervasive these days and I suppose that takes up most, if not all, of most folks' spare time. I grieve for them, I really do. I WAS astonished to read in the results of a survey published last week that 23 per cent of the men - nearly one in four - and 9 per cent of the women surveyed had not read a book in the past 12 months.

The survey was commissioned by New Zealand Book Month and asked 505 people about their reading habits. It found, too, that a mere 4 per cent of men and 13 per cent of women had read more than 50 books in the past year - most of them were aged over 65 - and a huge 84 per cent had read only "at least one book" in the past year.

To a man who reads more than 150 books a year, or at least three a week, this Research NZ survey result was almost incomprehensible.

I shouldn't, of course, be surprised. Television, the internet, video games and all sorts of electronic wizardry are all pervasive these days and I suppose that takes up most, if not all, of most folks' spare time. I grieve for them, I really do.

There are those who will say that, since I am retired, I have all the time in the world to lose myself in reading books. That is so. But even when I worked fulltime I read the same number of books. It helps, of course, that my TV viewing is confined to sporting events and the odd news report.

I think the last time I watched anything but sport on TV was the coverage of the second major Christchurch earthquake more than a year ago. The shallowness and superficiality of TV programmes leave me cold; and the disruptive advertisements drive me nuts.

I get my news from reputable sources - I read three newspapers a day, except Sunday, and follow their websites - and my entertainment, as you may have gathered, comes from reading. I read almost exclusively fiction; my non-fiction reading is confined to the Bible, and now and again to expositions thereon.

I have held a library card of one sort or another since I was 5 years old and I reckon that as long as local authorities provide libraries, I will pay my rates without complaint. All the other things councils provide - water, sewerage, streets, footpaths and so on are merely a bonus.

Mind you, our Rotorua library is barely adequate for a city of this size. It is short on space, its stock is ageing and some of its "new" books I read years ago.

It is, of course, not surprising there is not one single mention of the library in the Rotorua's District Council's draft long-term plan for the next 10 years. It makes me wonder whether the peasants who run the affairs of this city can even read. Tauranga, on the other hand, has ideas for a new multi-million dollar library in Greerton.

One of the things that also surprised me about the survey result is that 77 per cent of those surveyed said they preferred a "real" book to an electronic book. I can only surmise that those folk have never owned an e-book, which, as I have written, is a magical piece of equipment. My Kindle reader continues to fascinate and, in a sense, makes libraries irrelevant.

Just today I finished the second novel of a trilogy and, without leaving my armchair, had the third volume delivered through cyberspace from the United States into my reader within a minute.

What a shame all my favourite authors' books are not yet available electronically. I'll just have to keep going to the library; and buying "real" books from amazon.com, then giving them to the library.

garth.george@hotmail.com