My friend Steve at Deep Background has posted on the sad fact that careful and thoughtful reading is on a downhill slide. He's right, people don't read much, but a lot of the reason for that is that reading takes time, and no one thinks they have any. (That's one thing I've noticed absolutely everyone thinks: they're busy, busy, busy. The other thing is that no one can believe how old they have suddenly gotten to be. "I can't believe I'm 75/50/30/18/7 already! It seems like just yesterday that I retired/didn't need reading glasses/ got old enough to drink in a bar/was in junior high/thought that the Teletubbies were fabulous.")
And reading, when you're doing it to engage rather than disengage your brain, also takes focus. I often think about all the much more interesting things I could be doing if I didn't have to work, and one of them is reading, specifically, reading when I'm not totally exhausted and eye-strained from staring at a computer all day. I'm now at a stage in life where I bet I spend more time watching tv than reading because of the limits of my ocular physiology. And isn't that a pathetic comment on modern life.
Three words: books on tape.
:-)
Posted by: Vicki in MIchigan | May 17, 2007 at 11:36 AM
Three more words: not the same.
I like books on tape. But they are definitely a different experience of text--more linear, for one thing, and about the sounds rather than the shapes of words.
Posted by: Elizabeth | May 21, 2007 at 10:29 AM