Bookish Diversions: Pretending to Read

Lying About our Ignorance, Rereading Children’s Books as Adults, the Perils of Proper Citation, More

¶ Pretending to read. There are so many books: a deluge of titles deluged by still more, mounting like the waves of a tsunami, always growing and never cresting.

“In any given year, hundreds of publishers in the United States release around 60,000 books,” according to the New York Times. We know from YouGov polling that only 12 percent of U.S. adults re…