My mom told me often that I taught myself to read at age 3 by sounding out stuff on cereal boxes, mayonnaise jars, etc. And to this day, I read packaging, ads, tracts…whatever is lying around. She also told me that I was extremely frustrated that I couldn’t get a New York Public Library (NYPL) card until I could write my name, which took another two years after I learned to read. She had to take books out for me on her card. I have no memory of either of these things. But I do remember that I was reading fluently by the beginning of first grade. At age 60, I’m still grateful to my first grade teacher, who sat me in the back of the room with a 4th grade geography textbook while she inflicted Sally, Dick, and Jane on the rest of the class (and I still love geography).

A child reading. Photo by Julia Freeman-Woolpert, freeimages.com
A child reading. Photo by Julia Freeman-Woolpert, freeimages.com

Much later, I met my wife, novelist and poet D. Dina Friedman, at a poetry reading in Greenwich Village

I was skeptical of Mom’s claims about me until we discovered when my son was 2 and some months that he could tell words like wax, fax, and max apart, visually, because my daughter had sat him down and taught him. He was not an early reader but obviously could have been if it had been a priority. He was (and still is at 25) focused on music. We started reading to our kids when they were infants. My daughter, gluten-free/vegetarian gourmet food blogger Alana Horowitz Friedman and her husband are both avid readers, too.

Mom was like that too. Once they lifted the old limit of eight books at a time, she would go to the local NYPL branch every two weeks with a SHOPPING CART, fill it with books, and wheel it the mile back to our house. She had a long commute to Manhattan via express bus and that’s where she did much of her reading.

I’m still a voracious reader. Books have opened up my mind to such incredible richness of thought and emotion. Much of my thinking on everything from nonviolent social change to green business success comes from processing and extrapolating on what I read to come up with something new. The world is a much more interesting place to me because of writers like Dave Dellinger, Gandhi, and Gene Sharp’s writings about nonviolence, and Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, and William McDonough on the green business side.

But a few years ago, I realized that while I made time in my busy life for nonfiction, I didn’t do enough pleasure reading. I started making sure I read at least five minutes a day of a book that had nothing to do with work.

Of course, five minutes was nowhere near enough if I was into a good book. I found all sorts of nooks and crannies in my day to read. And then I decided to get a lot more exercise. Much of that is on an indoor stationary bicycle: a perfect place to read! Typically, I start my first shift of the day with a poem, then ten minutes of nonfiction and ten minutes of fiction or memoir. If I’m biking 20 minutes, that’s my whole shift. If (more typically) I’m doing 30 minutes, I often spend the remaining 10 checking Facebook from my phone, because I have to make time in my life for social media, too.

With most of it on the exercise bike, I’m actually reading more than 80 books a year!

Some vast number of people never read another book after college. They’re cheating themselves. Make time in your own life for this great pleasure!

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I wanted to share my response in a LinkedIn discussion around ethics (I don’t know if that link will work if you’re not a member of the group). It started when someone asked participants to list a few ethics books they’d found helpful. I posted several titles, culled from the archives of my Positive Power of Principled Profit newsletter, where I review one book per month on ethics, Green business, or service (scroll down).

One of the group members, Professor Allan Elder, wrote back with a long comment; here’s a piece of it:

The concern I have with all the books you recommend is they espouse a certain set of behaviors without explaining the reasoning behind them. For the casual reader (which is nearly all), this leads to prescription without understanding.

This is my response:

It’s true that my list focuses heavily on books that talk more about the behavior than the philosophy behind them. A book like The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid is based on a simple economic construct: there is money to be made helping the world’s poorest improve their lives. Yet several of the authors I mention would, I’m quite sure, be very comfortable showing their roots in Kant and John Stuart Mill.

I don’t see this as a problem; I actually see it as a strength. Self-interest can motivate positive changes in behavior, and thus in society, that more abstract thinking cannot. Those who would never voluntarily expose themselves to deep philosophical thinking start to create changes in the culture–and those who find their curiosity engaged will go deeper.

A practical example from my own life: as a teenager, I got involved with food co-ops, not because I had any particular consciousness at that time about the problems caused by our society’s choices in food policy, but because I was a starving student and it was a way to get good cheap food. But from that beginning based purely in narrow self-interest, I grew to understand some of the very complex web of policy, philosophy, and culture that have caused our food system to be the way it is. Thirty-five years later, I can talk about food issues on a much deeper level–but I still recruit people to eat better by engaging in their own self-interest: better health, better taste, etc. If they seem open to it, I start bringing in issues like the positive impact of supporting the local economy (which can then, in turn, open the door to a larger discussion of ethics issues).

In short, I think the literature has ample place for books rooted in either the philosophical or the practical, because different people will be drawn to the different schemes, and either one is a starting point for understanding the other 🙂

Of course philosophers pay attention to practical matters first, only they use a fancy word: “Praxis.” I didn’t mention that in my response.

What do YOU think?

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