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I blame the TV and video games.
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If TV and video games were responsible for not enjoying the activity of reading, I'd be a virtual illiterate. I am TV obsessed, I watch many hours when I have the time. I love video games (but only play massively multi-player types) and have followed their development with utter fascination since I first sat down to an Atari games machine.
I can relate to the 'anti-social' thing. When me and J were together, very early on before he calmed the fuck down, it would drive him mad when I went into a reading mood. He got over it. But he didn't read for pleasure much himself, except for the odd political memoir, for a long time. He still wouldn't turn to a book as his first choice of entertainment now. But that doesn't mean he isn't 'literate'. He has a very deep understanding of narrative structure (son of a playwrite, it's in his veins :P) and a brilliant mind. he chooses to apply that to the narrative form of computer games, and to an academic analysis of what narrative means in computer gaming, and how it relates to the gamer's experience.
I find it a fascinating subject, the changing form of narrative and how we interact with that. I do not consider books tobe inherently superior to games, television, movies, theatre, or any other medium of expression.
Juniper, I know exactly what you mean about going back to college
It's a wonderful experience isn't it? I enrolled at university in 2006 for a History degree and the last two years have been the happiest of my life. One more year to go and then on to postgrad, I hope.
To return to the reading theme: it can feel isolating to be amongst people who don't understand your love of reading. With my old circle of friends, before I moved away in my 20s, one of my defining characteristics was that I read books. One or two of the girls read magazines, and the lads would read computer manuals and glance at the sports news and the topless chicks in the tabloids. They all thought it was hysterically funny that I liked reading. I do not know why. We'd have the gang round, the lads playing Grand Prix, the girls kicking around and talking, occasional bursts of computer maintenance spilling out across the living room. This would go on for hours. I could handle it for a couple of hours, but I can only talk about banal shite for a limited amount of time before I run screaming to the bookshelves.
The lads I could talk to. I liked computer games, I could relate to them. The girls didn't appear to like anything. I am sat here now, desperately trying to recall what kinds of things we all talked about and I am drawing a virtual blank. A regular soap opera (Brookside) seemed to be their favourite topic. That and who was shagging whom.
Every group has roles within it. We fall into our place in the greater whole. My role within our little gang was to be the weird bird who inexplicably reads books:P (I don't count J in that description. He always understood what I got from reading and was as bemused by our friends attitude as I was). I just played up to it, fully embraced the eccentricity:P