Unlike other kids, my fondest childhood memories don't involve jungle gyms, kickball games or jumping rope.

Mine involve books.

My bibliophilic behavior started around the time I stammered my first words "Momma" and "Dada." In our living room, I sat on my parents' laps and listened to them as they read The Very Quiet Cricket and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie multiple times.

To this day, I remember the books I read all throughout my grade school years.

I devoured the American Girl series in second grade.

I borrowed most of the Boxcar Children series from my third-grade teacher Mrs. Cotter, and a year later, I admired the common sense and detective skills of Encyclopedia Brown.

In grade school, kids bickered over the classroom copies of Goosebumps books.

But as I got older, my peers' enthusiasm for reading books began to dwindle.

In high school, my soccer teammates glanced at my thick copy of A Tale of Two Cities and declared me insane.

"Can't you just read Spark Notes?" they asked.

Even my college friends find reading difficult, tedious, unnecessary and just plain boring.

And they're not the only ones. Reading declines as Americans get older, according to a recent study by Scholastic Books.

People read significantly less after age 8, and only 44 percent of high school-aged kids read on a regular basis.

More people stop reading as adults; more than two-thirds of grown-ups don't read frequently.

On several occasions, I've been surprised when someone doesn't recognize a common literary reference. Just the other day, my friend told a story about a boat trip, and in response, I joked about him reeling in the big fish like Captain Ahab from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

He stared at me. "Like who?" he asked.

But he's not the only ignorant college student I've encountered.

In my college classes, the majority of students never read an assigned novel.

Many simply grab Cliffs Notes (or the online version Spark Notes) or watch films based on the books.

But this doesn't always work, as one of my friend's classmates discovered after writing about the eating of Piggy in Lord of the Flies. (Cannibalistic kids devour Piggy in the movie version; his body falls in the ocean in the book).

Oops, he thought, after getting his grade.

The main problem: Americans aren't interested in reading just any books.

The public seemed to devour best-sellers such as J.K. Rowlings' Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code and Hillary Clinton's personal memoir. But the year of these books' release, overall sales fell by 23 million copies, reported CBS News.

For book lovers, the lowered interest in reading has created challenges for publishers, readers and bookstores.

When publishers began selling fewer books, they raised book prices to compensate for lost revenue.

On a recent trip to Barnes and Noble, I found almost no books, even soft cover, for $10 or $12.

And from my observation as I walked through the bookstore, $15 seemed to be the lowest book price and most cost closer to $20.

With my limited budget, I can no longer afford to buy several books at one time.

Most of my purchases remain limited to one or two books, and I can't afford to buy as frequently either.

So, on a regular basis, I visit the Spalding Memorial Library in my hometown of Athens, Pa.

However, public libraries have strayed from the classic novels, books generally regarded as the standard of quality reading.

On the library's bottom floor, I walk among the stacks and am nearly blinded by the glossy covers of the latest James Patterson novel, Britney Spears' autobiography or John Grisham's newest tale of being chased by the mob.

But finding Macbeth or The Great Gatsby requires climbing to the second floor and digging among the tattered, faded literature tomes.

After reading Pride and Prejudice, I discovered the library carried no other Jane Austen novels, but they do possess scores of Danielle Steel novels.

If you're an avid romance fan and have borrowed all of Steel's books, I applaud your efforts.

But some literature lovers, myself included, still crave the drama of Sense and Sensibility without paying for the book.

With that said, I'm going to curl up with my copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula, just as I did as a kid and as I'll continue doing no matter how many Americans stop reading.