Thoughts on Reading

two books next to a plate of sushi and two glasses of wine

I find myself particularly intrigued by younger people who have heard their cohort called “The Dumbest Generation,” who are continually told that their addiction to multiple simultaneous stimuli renders them incapable of the seriously focused and singleminded attention that the reading of big thick books requires. Some of them are defiant in response to such charges, but most at least half-believe them. Told over and over again that they can’t read, they begin to wonder why they should even try.

– Excerpt from Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

I once heard someone make the comment that we spend most of our lives  staring at glowing rectangles.

I have a list of books that I want to have read. Sometimes I want to have read a book so badly that it sucks the joy out of the actual process of reading. I cram. Then, when someone wants to talk about the book, I can’t remember a thing about it. I can’t even tell them what I liked or disliked about it.

As a child I read voraciously. Now I find it difficult to sit still in silence and JUST read. There are occasions when I am overcome with the desire to sit and read, and it usually happens during the most inopportune times. When I’m shelving books in the fiction section of the library, for example, all of a sudden my legs start to give the moment I find an interesting book and I have to fight not to sit down in the middle of the aisle, propped against a book cart. It helps to think about how disgusting public library carpets are. But I wish those moments would happen when I’m in my room, staring at my own bookshelves.

Advertisements

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s
https://bookfriend.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/thoughts-on-reading/
bookfriend.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-30
110192
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:RMM6H76LMNN3YGZVI7BYDXWCDV7734GC
<urn:uuid:1ca847e0-0830-4356-8e24-2ac3aa55cec6>
2017-07-21T16:37:08Z
192.0.78.13
text/html
sha1:7EJ6M7WBW5Q533GUYPMQ6ZJLKMNLKCBS
<urn:uuid:f1f723c9-11d3-4a2b-afec-40efc09594cf>
https://bookfriend.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/thoughts-on-reading/
length
response
<urn:uuid:62789e5f-1aed-4eb9-8062-c830e84a88c6>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-143-26-145.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-30
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf