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Readers are leaders.

"A survey released on Thursday reports that reading for pleasure is way down in America among every group — old and young, wealthy and poor, educated and uneducated, men and women, Hispanic, black and white. The survey, by the National Endowment for the Arts, also indicates that people who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don't to visit museums and attend musical performances, almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events. Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders — more than half the population — have settled into apathy. There is a basic social divide between those for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and knowledge, and those for whom maturity is a process of mental atrophy. The shift toward the latter category is frightening." Andrew Solomon in The New York Times.

"It's not clear which is sadder: The fact that George W. Bush hates to read because he never took book-learning seriously, or the fact that [National Security Advisor Condoleezza] Rice doesn't read for pleasure because her parents made her read so much growing up that reading is a chore." Fiona Morgan in Salon.

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