Why aren’t we reading more, asks Carlin Romano? Our media encourages us not to. “We’re left with a general media environment in which the readerly commit a kind of cultural suicide in pursuit of the less readerly. In magazine and newspaper offices across the country, well-educated editors stuff their publications with pieces about trash movies, hip-hop hotties, reality-TV spinoffs, and ingénue profiles — then go home and read a book. As print people drive their hordes toward nonprint media, TV folks — supposedly a dimmer breed — cleverly ignore the competition, rarely acknowledging what’s in the local papers and almost never devoting a minute to a nonpresidential book.”