A good column by Johann Hari on the distractions – many of them wonderful but distractions nonetheless – of the wired age and how that has changed his ability to just sit down and read a bloody book:
In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating – but then, a few years ago, he “became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read”. He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. “What I’m struggling with,” he writes, “is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there’s something out there that merits my attention.”
I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That’s getting harder to find.
I agree. The online whirlpool is always churning and like Hari I find it increasingly difficult to escape it to find time for reading. So much of my reading is now done on a screen that I sometimes wonder if I now need a Kindle to be able to read books properly. (Nor does it help that much online reading is often skimming, whereas good books demand rather more than that.) But Hari makes a good point about this too:
I’m not against e-books in principle – I’m tempted by the Kindle – but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words – offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person’s internal life – can sing.
Again, I agree. If I get an e-reader I want it to be a library and nothing else. At this rate I’m going to have to start taking unnecessary bus trips simply to escape the clutches of the online frenzy – a place where even if nothing is happening at any given moment something could always be just about to happen – and find the peace to read properly. This is ridiculous, I know, but there you have it.
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