I take neither credit nor blame for how my reading/writing mind works. Nature? Nurture? Who knows? For example, the recipe for this week's column includes the following ingredients: World Book Night, reluctant readers, oil fields, "fracking" (hydraulic fracturing), frak (Battlestar Galactica), A Sand County Almanac, Desert Solitaire and book recommendations that alter reading lives. 
I spent no small part of Tuesday monitoring Twitter and Facebook for reports from the World Book Night front. Though my eyes eventually turned into charcoal briquettes from excessive on-screen time, it was also fun witnessing "live" the enthusiasm and irrepressible bookish energy of all the amazing book givers.
World Book Night's goal is to help volunteers distribute "a total of half a million books within their communities to those who don't regularly read." While the word "non-readers" appeared regularly in the posts and comments, gradually I began to pay closer attention to the phrase "reluctant readers" and its variations:
Gave out 20 copies at a book&cupcake soirée for reluctant readers!
I took some books to the gym with me as well--lots of people who said they don't really read anymore.
I thought going in to #wbn2013 tonight that I'd give copies to teen girls. Gave to mostly adults who miss reading. Many men.
Gave out copies of The Lightning Thief to a group of reluctant readers/students with learning disabilities!
Many people I met tonight said "I don't remember when I last read a book" & were excited about reading Connecticut Yankee.
When I asked if he read much, he said "no," but when I told him it was World Book Night and asked if he would read a book if I gave it to him, he said, "I would absolutely read it!" When I handed it to him, he said with such excitement, "Thank you ma'am, no one's ever given me a book before!"
Saved one for a man who told me he got back to reading after receiving a book from me last year, and had asked if he could have one this year!
Although we should never give up hope for the non-readers, WBN's volunteers reminded us once again that the "reluctant reader" category, especially among adults, is like an untapped oil field under our own backyard. Monumental efforts are underway to inspire reading among young people (Google "reluctant reader" and you'll see what I mean), but what if we could reach those reluctant adult readers more consistently? Consider the financial impact on our industry if even a small percentage of them bought just one or two or three books a year?
It would be fraking amazing, wouldn't it?
What words can do: Battlestar Galactica managed to turn fraking into the quintessential safe-for-work (SFW) obscenity. Then there's its homophone, "fracking," which is a political and environmental hot potato. This calls to mind Promised Land, a fraking fracking movie I watched recently that portrayed how easily distorted our perceptions, not to mention our preconceptions, can be of others (fracking opponents vs. proponents; readers, non-readers, reluctant readers, etc.). Reading, as you already know, is one of the best ways ever invented to see the world through disparate eyes.
Two such reading moments tidily bookend my adult life thus far. When I was student teaching in a high school many years ago, we were supposed to assign Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. One boy flat-out refused to read it. On a whim, I handed him a copy of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire and asked that he just check out the first chapter. Abbey's cranky voice worked. A decade later, I ran into this former student at a softball game and the first thing he said was how much he'd loved that--to use an updated and safer term--"fraking book." Still had his ragged copy.
More recently, a man having dinner at our house said he didn't like poetry because it made no sense to him. I grabbed a couple of books by Gary Snyder and David Budbill, asked him to just give them a chance. "This," he said after sampling, "I like."
It's what booksellers and librarians do every day; it's what hundreds of volunteer book givers were doing Tuesday. As WBN has once again shown us, there is a deep reserve of reluctant yet potential readers and customers out there. Isn't that the best fraking news ever? Even if we could lower their reluctance threshold just a bit, it would be a great victory. Are they worth the effort? WBN shows they are. And I think we fraking need them. --Robert Gray, contributing editor (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now).
