Editor's Note: Why, in a developing society like Vietnam, has reading not yet become a widespread habit? This series of articles by author Pham Quang Vinh suggests a different approach: Reading is not a single individual choice but a product of an ecosystem – where policies, education , the market, and social values ​​all come together to shape it.

VietNamNet presents this series as an open forum, hoping to receive diverse perspectives from readers, managers, educators, and publishers: How to build a reading society in the context of a knowledge-based economy ?

When I was about to turn six, my father taught me to read. Near my birthday, he took me to Cau Bung, to a small bookstore by the highway. I don't remember exactly which books we chose, but I always remember the low tiled house, now called a single-story house, and the feeling of stepping inside, standing in front of the bookshelves, as if entering another world , separated from the dusty road outside.

My father bought me many books, not only on my birthdays. I remember when I was seven, he bought me *The Temple in the Sea*, *Tsiolkovsky's Story*, and a book whose author I no longer remember, only that it was called *The Eldest Brother and the Youngest Brother*, a story about young soldiers. It was in that not-so-famous book that I read a sentence that later stayed with me throughout my life: "There is gold and jewels in books."[1] That sentence was said by an older soldier to a younger one, when telling stories about the countryside and mentioning the teachings of a teacher. It wasn't a lesson from school, just a saying of a character in a story. But it has stayed with me ever since.

From a young age, I read everything I could get my hands on. As a child, it was every book I could get my hands on. As I grew older, curiosity led me to other, broader, and more challenging things. Looking back, I think I learned many important things not from school, but from those books I read so haphazardly.

But if the saying "books contain treasures" was once true, guiding a child's upbringing, the question today is, is it still true for modern Vietnamese society? Or, to put it another way, why, in a society where almost everyone receives an education, has reading not become a widespread habit? And more broadly, is the problem that Vietnamese people are "lazy readers," or that society no longer provides strong enough reasons for people to read?

Reading, I think, is not primarily a personal choice; it's a result of how a society defines the value of knowledge, understanding, and the act of reading itself.

reading books, drinking tea and coffee, using free wifi in the heart of Hanoi 11.jpg