I read a lot of science fiction, and a younger friends at work frequently asked me for recommendations, and he liked talking about the books after reading them. At some point I found out that he exclusively consumes them as audiobooks, which is fine and I didn't think much about it. Some years down the line, when I was getting ready to retire, I had to pass on things to him. There was enough of it that, in addition to working elbow-to-elbow with him, I documented all the details in some long emails. When we meet, I'd say "The details are in the email," and focus on explaining the big picture.

It became obvious that he never read the emails. When I talked to him about it, he admitted that he really struggles with any long block of text. The guy is really smart, and he knows a lot about a lot of things, but he gets all his info from audio and video because struggles to consume text. There's clearly some kind of learning/mental issue going on there. It's going to make the job tough for him, but I hope he works it out.

I've known several men that were proud that they didn't read books. (Not that they read manga or anything, either.)

One of them, in particuular, was a grown up version of a stereotypical highschool bully. Willfully ignorant doesn't begin to describe him. I ever meet him in a dark alley, I'd fucking gut him.

Anyhow, this behaviour (pride in ignorance) among women is rare enough that I've never seen it. When I was doing online dating, I had great success asking what they're reading and using decent grammar and vocabulary.

Anti-intellectualism and willfull ignorance have a lot to do with the situation here in the US. I think it's mostly a male problem as well.

wtf is a "chapter book"?

Do note: The US public education system has raised a significant number of younger millennials, genZ, and gen-α (especially in impoverished areas) to be functionally illiterate due to both profiteering and desire to destroy education. Effectively, they switched to literacy programs meant to help people with cognitive disabilities somewhat function in a world that has writing everywhere. This does not teach people how to read or comprehend. It also robs them of capacity to self-learn from texts.

So, there's a massive cohort of people whose parents and/or caregivers were not able to be spend time teaching this extremely important skill who are likely below 6th grade reading level.

The problem with comic books is that they're all about this big flashy pictures and they never have any words in them. Oh well, anyway, off to read some more Chainsaw Man and One Punch...

No one’s talking about anon’s weird assumption that authors go from idea directly to manga, and not that most authors start by writing a novel to attract a sponsor.

Fuck by chapter book I thought they're talking about Warhammer 40k novel about a specific Space Marine chapter and they're disappointed because they don't want to read 40k novels.

I had to search it to understand the post. Well, that's a weird name to describe a normal book for children.

I can't read without pictures!

Anon has aphantasia

Chapter books belong in the Chapter House (Dune)

you guys do realise the poster is making a joke I hope, no need to actually get upset about this

what the fuck is a "chapter book"? does he mean a novel

comic books are fucking stupid