"Ow, what is this? My head...is this what learning feels like?"
As a dude that deals with young people a lot, I know that people aren’t reading as much as they used to. Let me change that. People aren’t reading at all. Yes, you might be reading this blog right now, but, really? You’ll be done with this before you finish stirring the sugar into your coffee. Reading means holding a BOOK and reading the stuff inside it until it makes sense. It takes a few days. Maybe even a week. And sorry, no, there aren’t any links to all your extremity needs in books. At least, no yet. Katha Pollit has a good write-up on the Nation expressing these key concerns:
Newspapers are crashing all around us, and one of the things they are doing, in a desperate bid to save money, is cutting back their Sunday book review sections: the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Hartford Courant have all reduced their book sections. Recent rumblings from the Washington Post suggest that new executive editor Marcus Brauchli may close down Book World, leaving The New York Times Book Review as the last remaining stand-alone section devoted to books. Before long you won’t even know about the books that you can’t afford to buy and that the library can’t afford to stock.
There are a number of things that can help with this situation: funding for libraries, a cheap bailout for the print media and a public-awareness program for new written works. I constantly have the conversation that people aren’t reading either because of evolution or laziness. I can’t tell if we are evolving into a higher level of being, or if we are desolving into uncurious, deformed, fat slobs. Thankfully, I’ll be good and dead before I see the end result.
Update: I misspelled “Stimulus” cause I’m a moron.
Jarvis, I’m giving you a bailout for spelling. It’s “stimulus.” As in “stimulus package.” As in “I’ve got your stimulus package right here.” **Grabs crotch.**
It’s ironic that newspapers, which should encourage reading at every opportunity, find it so easy to eliminate book coverage. Guess that’s what we’ve lost now that the bean-counters have replaced the journalist-editors. Sure, not as many of us can spend $30 every time our favorite author has a new book out, but we have low-cost options such as libraries and online book-swap sites like http://www.bookins.com, bookmooch, paperbackswap, etc. Seems like discouraging reading is cutting their own throats!
Sorry about that misspell. Too much coffee + lack of proper high school education = barf.
“According to a recent report from the National Endowment for the Arts, our Nashville library is bearing out a national trend. For the first time in more than 25 years, the number of people reading fiction is on the rise.” – WSJ By ANN PATCHETT
unfortunately i think your confusion as to why people don’t read (books) is inextricably linked to your love of the internets.
why read a whole book to achieve some sort of higher, deeper understanding, when you can type a few keywords into google and get a good ol’ instant answer.
however, i am also under the impression people don’t read more because they still don’t know that SHORT STORIES EXIST.
which is, of course, because they don’t have you as a teacher.
True, Richie. Very true. And, yeah right. Like my mom even knows what the internet is…
I read books sir but something tells me that I do not think that you were talking about you or I.