Mini Blog about Twilight of the Books and Notation System

In reading the text, Twilight of the Books by Caleb Crain, a couple questions and opinions arose. First of all, the Census Bureau and National Endowment for the Arts throw out stats that supposedly point towards the decline of book readers at a ridiculous pace which causes me to wonder how accurate they actually are. Thousands of Americans were asked questions about their reading habits but how many Americans are there. Do these thousands of people accurately represent the reading hobbies of the entire population?
I also had another question: why did the largest improvement of reading skills among fourth and fifth graders occur just before the No Child Left Behind Act too effect? Isn’t that “act” in place to improve the reading skills of students? I found the statements by Maryanne Wolf to be pretty interesting when she spoke of the act of reading. She says that “humans started reading far too recently for any of our genes to code it for specifically.” I found that taking a look back and observing the act of reading, it actually is not natural. Looking at a bunch of lines while our brains interpret them simultaneously is crazy to me. And according to Wolf, our brains shouldn’t even be able to do so. Her basis for determining this is due to the tests that she did on squid, which have similar optic-nerve cells, which I also find interesting. Another aspect of the reading that was interesting was the way in which the illiterate thought. Instead of describing items with colors they used metaphorical names such as “peach”, “liver”, and “decayed teeth”. Also when asked which of the four items did not belong (a saw, axe, log, and hammer) they chose the hammer because it was not used in the wood cutting process while most people would choose the log because it is not a tool.
I read this book and made notations using a notation system, and when I came back to discuss the book I found that I could pick up my thoughts right where they left off yesterday. It was really cool, like I had just read the article when usually I forget a lot of the stuff I read in texts. So I definitely approve of using a notation system while reading.