We all have our prejudices. The very word, however, is such a pejorative, I prefer to substitute it with the word 'biases'. And I certainly have mine. Chief among them is that I cannot take people who don't find it within themselves to be moved toward reading, seriously.

Seriously, if someone blithely states they have no interest in reading, I interpret that to mean they have no deep interest in life itself. They, on the other hand, would expostulate otherwise. And invariably if it's someone of the male gender, their interests revolve around sports and mechanics; more specifically, cars. Which needn't necessarily preclude reading.

Women, for their part, tend to gravitate around fashion, marketing and celebrity. Whoever it happens to be expressing a total disinterest in reading, my estimation of their intelligence does a fairly swift plummet.

There has been no time in my life when I was not deeply invested in reading, and any reading material would suffice. It took many years for reading preferences to develop as I indulged in all manner of reading genres through the years. My husband and I met when we were both fourteen, and we were both equally fascinated with books and both of us were omnivorous readers.

When our children were small; three children with 1-1/2 years separating each; quite a bit of the reading I indulged in throughout their growing and impressionable years was my reading to them. Beginning with the early childhood classics like Babar the Elephant, which both their parents recalled with fondness, on to the novels of Mark Twain. I stopped reading to them when they became old enough to do their own reading.

Life has many pleasures, some taken for granted, some guilty ones, but few match the anticipatory expectation of a new book waiting to be read. Those people who have no interest in reading, it seems to me, betray through that disinterest a lack of curiosity, intelligence and solid values.

A day ago my Twitter account reflected the presence of a new follower. As I usually do, I perused her site, assessing her tweets to determine whether they had anything in common with my own interests. The second tweet reflected on a sentence that immediately caught my eye: "When people ask me what I'm reading I get really embarrassed because I just don't have tim…" 

Informing me succinctly that we had nothing in common, which a continued perusal of following tweets affirmed, since they were all fashion, celebrity and marketing oriented observations and postings. She is not unique in her focus and orientation. I see many such accounts, some with an astonishing number of followers, and all of which reflect the same shallow values.

So that's a summary of my biases. For the record.