I’m a pretty voracious reader.  When I wasn’t working on my school’s accreditation, I’d plough through 5-8 books a month.  Even when accreditation was in full swing, I was slogging through 2-4 titles a month.

The iPad has changed that.  As of tomorrow, I’ll have owned an iPad for two months… April 3 to June 3.  And let’s see how many books I’ve read:

1. Alice in Wonderland (a re-read)
2. Winnie-the-Pooh (a re-read)
3. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
4. Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius Pollio (a re-read)
5. Driven by Data, by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo
6. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
7. The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Benjamin Foster (a re-read)
8. Rework by Jason Fried
9. Yoga for Men by Bruce VanHorn
10. The Long Descent by John Michael Greer
11. Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov
12. Living Organized: by Sandra Felton
13. The Terror by Dan Simmons
14. Sex, Time and Power by Leonard Shalain
15. Mind Maps
16. Real Men Do Yoga by John Capouya
17. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (a re-read)
18. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gowande
19. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (a re-read)
20. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
21. The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
22. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
23. Neuromancer by William Gibson (another re-read)

…And another fourteen titles, mostly young adult fiction, from my old school’s and my new school’s summer reading lists, things like Pieces of Georgia, Hate that Cat, Love that Dog, The Hatchet, and so on.

Some of you may envy my speedy reading abilities, some of you may think I’m lying.  That’s OK.  I know what I’ve read.  Almost forty titles.

Part of it is that reading is my entertainment — I don’t watch DVDs or go to the movies much, I don’t play (many) video games, I don’t go clubbing or to wild parties.  This was definitely the product of needing to be on a dormitory floor, and up at 5am to take care of the dog and in bed at midnight to keep my students in bed.

I was already a voracious reader, as I said.  I read a lot.  But I think my reading abilities took a serious jump upward in the last two months.  I can’t recall another time in my life post-high-school where I could get through almost forty books in 60 days.

Will it change the reading habits of students today? Maybe.  But they’ve spent most of the last two decades in thrall to movies, television and video. There’s no telling whether or not digital books will bring them back to print literacy.

What do you think?

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