An intellectual crisis?

The decline of book reading is real.
Is this an intellectual crisis?

Marc Friedman assures me that 23% of American adults had not read a single book in any form in the past year, and only about half reported reading even one. A recent UK survey found that 40% of British adults had not read or listened to a book in the past year. Germany, France, and Japan have also report decreasing reading rates.

Data from Pew Research Center confirms that book readership in the United States has been consistently declining over the past decade. Gallup polling further reveals that the average number of books read per year has dropped to its lowest level in decades.
Younger generations increasingly favour short-form content—social media posts, videos, and algorithm-driven news feeds—over the depth and complexity offered by books.
Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death, "Americans no longer talk to each other; they... exchange images."

 
A democracy depends on an informed electorate, yet surveys indicate that many Americans struggle with basic civic knowledge. A National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) study found that only 24% of US high school seniors were proficient in civics. Without the ability to engage with complex ideas, citizens become more vulnerable to propaganda, demagoguery, and simplistic solutions to nuanced problems.

Many Americans spend more time consuming passive entertainment than engaging in intellectual effort. The rise of social media has worsened the problem, rewarding emotional reactions over reasoned analysis. If this trend continues, the consequences will extend beyond individual knowledge gaps—society itself will become more polarized, less informed, and more easily manipulated.

(My comment: Perhaps this explains the drop-off in Kindle ebook reads and sales...Perhaps I'm wasting my time writing another book? Also apologies to the author for picking out bits of his very articulate article. Click on his name to read the whole thing.)

(Marc Friedman received a B.A. degree in Philosophy from The Johns Hopkins University and a Juris Doctor degree, with Honors, from The George Washington University Law School. He reads about 30 books annually.)

Wasp stings!

 Wasp stings! Anyone got a remedy?

It must be a week ago now I was out with my dog in the woods and saw a  bucket sized hole in the ground. Something was moving, I peered in for a closer look and got attacked by wasps.  Got 9 stings in 9 seconds before I got the hell out of there. Tried witch hazel, then vinegar and both worked, the vinegar better than the witch hazel. The thing is the sting sites simmer down, I forget about them and then they surge up again.

How long does it take before they finally disappear?

Needless to say I did not stay to take photographs or identify the type of wasp. The incident and the after effects have made me extremely wary of venturing into woods again. No doubt I'll get over it but I won't be so careless again.

Sorry  but FB is refusing to "upload media" this morning.

PS In case anyone else needs to know - antihistamine worked even better than the witch hazel and vinegar.

warmer shirts, big sweaters and gloves!

 Reading a good book for a change. 

I had thought it was me. Thought my brain power was diminishing because the books I have selected to read lately have not held my interest. After a chapter or two I have put the book down, gone to sleep (I usually read in bed last thing) and forgotten it. 

But three cheers! I have read a book in the last week which kept my interest all the way through, and I am now on a second title by a different author and thoroughly hooked. Both authors, one male, one female, have been writing for years. That's all I will say about who they are. But I think it says something about books these days. How many have you begun and never finished? How many plots can you actually remember?

Looks like the wonderful summer days are gone now. Our heating was on this morning, the field in the pic has been harvested, ploughed, seeded and the new crop is five inches high. I'm looking at my wardrobe and thinking of warmer shirts, big sweaters and gloves!

Thinking All the Time

 

I was surprised the other day to read a chunk of one of my first books and discovered I'd head-hopped.  I groaned and immediately decided I should read the whole lot and correct everything. How could I have done that? I know the rules. 

It suddenly struck me that I don't concentrate much on villains or bad guys either. I always focus on the heroine. Now that I've noticed, I worry that my stories may be one-dimensional. I'm currently writing a modern romance and there is going to be a bad guy. A villain. So now I'm sitting back for a day or two and wondering why my villain is doing what he's doing. What are the usual motivations? Greed? Jealousy? Envy? or just plain hatred?

I 'll have to decide soon.

My heroine can't go blithely on without casting a few thoughts in the way of whoever is obstructing her progress. So now, it's Autumn and I'm about to go for a walk with my dog. While she is carousing around (usually on the path) the recently-ploughed fields and looking out for a deer to chase, I shall be brain-storming my villain. I won't be on the lonely seashore feeling poetic. I'll be dodging piles of horse shit because early every morning the local livery stables sends its  horses out for exercise around their fields, and why should they not? I'm lucky I can walk there too.

I'll be watching my dog, noting the huge amount of apples growing wild this year and keeping an eye out for those deer. And thinking all the time.

Midnight Moll's dinner parties

 

What do I remember of my first visit to Caithness? The flatness, the stone fences, and the wind. Gorse in bloom. Warm, friendly people who claim to be Wickers, which means they come from Wick, and have no truck with Gaelic and Jacobite woes. These people claim their heritage from the Norsemen and are proud not to be of any clan.

We hit lucky with our visit to the Castle of Mey on 10th April. Recently widowed Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother saw it during a visit to the area in 1952, fell in love with it and decided it must be saved as part of Scotland's heritage. She bought it for £100 and spent her summers there, gradually restoring it. She set up a trust before she died, and it went to her grandson, now Charles III.

It was Easter Weekend when we were there and the Castle was open to visitors. The huge wall protects the castle from the worst of the winds off the sea, and shelters the walled garden. The castle seems a huddle of chimneys and odd little towers, a delight, almost a child's idea of a castle. Once through the gates, we walked round to the front of the house, which faces south across the fields.


Surprisingly, the day I was there the wind shrieked in from the south! and we were glad to get inside those huge doors. Once the nine-inch key had safely been turned in the foot square lock to keep out unwelcome visitors, we enjoyed our tour with Mr Jackson. Just the three of us, through the drawing room, the equerry's room, the sitting room, then up the spiral stairs to view the bedrooms. One housed a romantic four poster bed in a room designated as Princess Margaret's room though she never slept there because she thought the castle far too cold and always went back to her quarters on board Britannia in Scrabster harbour fifteen miles away.

Down a set of stairs so steep the Duke of Edinburgh claimed they reminded him of being aboard ship, (and I wondered how the aged Queen Mother managed them) and into the dining room, the pantry and then down again to the kitchen with the 1950s fridge, still in use. Anecdotes and reminiscence all the way.

 
The Queen Mother had fifty years of widowhood and we heard stories of Dinner parties in the castle that went on so late that she earned the nickname Midnight Moll. Menu reminders, handwritten in French, were propped up at her place at the dinner table, a kitsch Nessie toured the top of the sixteenth century tapestry in the drawing room. Yes, I'd love the castle to be mine - but could I afford the central heating? Probably not.

 
It was built for the earls of Caithness between 1560-1580 and stayed in the family for 300 years. Though it is only 200 yards from the sea, I saw no beach but my dogs would have loved it.- acres of space and no one about! I recommend the castle of Mey for your delight if you are ever that far north though I cannot guarantee Mr Jackson will still be there.

A thunderous noise on the stairs

Can't remember when I last painted my study and when I look around, the walls are scuffed where people (and that includes the dog!) brush against the walls on their way in and out. Right now I have one wall cleared in expectation of Painting. Everything is pushed into the middle of the room and  one bookcase has been emptied into another bedroom. But the wall behind me is clear and ready for work.

Oh! The dust! You wouldn't believe the dust. And a toy car from when the grandkids were here, a white leather bookmark from Jorvik Viking museum... the finds were surprising.

What it means and why I'm documenting it here is that until this room is back to rights, I won't be doing much on my computer. 

To add to the day being memorable, we had a visitor in the shape of black cat. The first I knew of it was the thunderous noise of Nala racing downstairs , back up and down again. At first I thought she'd fallen, and ran out to see  - she was pursuing a black cat upstairs, past me into the bedrooms. Cat dived under the bed, ran for the windows, scrabbled to try and reach the curtain rail - which we don't have as we have blinds - and ran out. We all three of us ran into every bedroom and out again. I got each door shut and she  (I think it was a she) ran down stairs and shot through the hall, the kitchen and out into the garden still with Nala in hot pursuit. I just hope she didn't pee on Bill's pillow as she ran across it, or under any of the other beds! 

Where my book wanted to be

 Just pushed the PUBLISH button on a new book!

Not 100% new, but 95% new. The general storyline has not altered but oh! I've spent so much time on  re-writing, improving and slanting it in a new direction, too - Romantasy.

I was never happy with my first attempt and when I started reading Romantasy, well  Wow! I thought, that was where my book wanted to be all the time.  So now it is there, and unashamedly promoted as that. Let's hope it does well. 

This is the first time I've deliberately aimed at one of the more niche genres and I can say it makes Promos a whole lot easier than trying to excite someone with a commonplace historical romance. It may take KDP 72 hours to have a book ready for a reader but I shall be watching all progress with an interested eye. One or two facts about Trust No Maid -

Setting: Ireland and north west Scotland

Period: around turn of 11th century

Characters: New heroine  appears but Olli, Flane, Emer and Skeggi featured in Far After Gold, as they did in Viking Bride and Viking Summer.