The title above, as you may have noticed, is in the past tense. When I first started teaching, students would read between classes. You’d see them sitting on benches on campus reading. In the last few years I taught this had changed. Instead of reading they were looking at or talking on their phones.
I know that old people are always decrying how bad things are now compared to the past, but I do think people in the past were more serious about their reading. I recently came across a compilation of stories, articles, and poems from Good Housekeeping Magazine. This was a so-called “women’s magazine” which started publishing in 1885. The compilation was put together in 1960. It included the following authors: Sara Teasdale, Amy Lowell, W. Somerset Maugham, Ring Lardner, Gertrude Atherton, Sinclair Lewis, Ogden Nash, Thomas Mann, James Thurber, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Cheever, Evelyn Waugh, Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and so many many more.
If you think that list is impressive, you should see the one from a similar compilation of 1956 from the Ladies’ Home Journal.
Both magazines are still published, although the Ladies’ Home Journal is now a quarterly. While I don’t know for sure, I doubt if either one is up to earlier standards.
(I really do think many things were better in the past. When I was born, FDR was president. The first Republican president I knew was Ike. Now we have Trump. Case closed.)
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