- It’s no accident that the click-happy online universe can sap our focus and make it harder for us to read a full-length book with rapt attention. But old-fashioned reading is still essential, because it teaches lessons about human identity that we can’t get anywhere else.
I see this claim every day. Serious question, has anyone made sure it's true? It's like, speak for your fucking self New York Times. I probably read ten or fifteen thousand words a day, maybe more, a good bit of it in hard print. So do all of the most interesting people I know. This doesn't even make sense to me. If I'm reading and I get a text, I answer the text and go back to reading. What do other people do?It’s no accident that the click-happy online universe can sap our focus and make it harder for us to read a full-length book with rapt attention.
What I've found is when I do finish a book and I do not dive directly into the next one, my consumption of media on the Internet tends to widen the length of time I spend between books. This has led me to essentially read in spurts, where I'll devour 3-5 books in a quick span and then "catch up" on all the media I've been missing on the Internet. This is in sharp contrast to my younger days when all I would do is read, and I do find myself missing the time when I didn't feel the urge to know what is happening on the internet at all times, i.e. "missing out on pop culture." I've been working on diminishing that though, the internet will never replace books for me.
This absolutely happens to me as well, though the media I consume online is probably 98% written word (excluding music, which I also devoured as a youth and continue to). I don't read less as a result, -just fewer books and more short-form. I do believe the quality of what I read overall has declined significantly, although to be fair, I could go months reading books years ago before finding one that was transformative and blew me away. I may be looking back with rose tinted glasses to some degree.
There are different views on the attention span thing. A quick google search turned up The Gaurdian: mixed results on attention span from March 2013 and The Gaurdian again, Definitely reduced attention span from March 2012 I googled "does the internet affect attention span" A link to the results On the other question, if I'm sitting, enjoying a good book, I will either respond quickly, ignore the text, or just not hear my phone go off, and I'm generally none the worse.
Haha, I could have done some googling I guess, but I didn't, because what I actually meant was "I think these sorts of articles are generalizing, assumption-making crocks of shit." Fact is, we don't know yet whether the internet is messing with our attention spans. And what if we're misunderstanding the causes? I was trying to watch the BCS football thing on tv but it bored me and the article on my laptop was extremely interesting -- so now I'm sitting on my laptop reading instead of watching football. Did the internet evilly steal my attention? I give my attention to the most interesting thing in my vicinity and always will, no matter where it comes from. That's just human.
Long-form reading might just be the last thing the Internet helped us filter. People would sit through a long, dull book in the 1950s because there wasn't much else to do. Why suffer through that when someone's written this 15,000 word account of their life in a dictatorship?
Love project Gutenberg :) You mentioned you read a lot of books secondhand. That's an avenue that e-books come up far short. Where you could pick up an analog book for 5 or 10 percent of the retail price used, the same cannot be said of the digital equivalent. Unless the book you want is in the public domain, e-books are all sorts of terrible as far as DRM and passing them on. Don't get me wrong, -I do love e-books though. I especially enjoy reading any book that often references geographic locations or words I'm not familiar with. Having Google Earth and a dictionary at my fingertips right there is invaluable.
Yes that's true now I come to think of it - no second hand ebooks. I just love older books, they are easier to read, and I also love books from older eras. Sometimes I've enjoyed the Gutenberg copies so much I've bought the real things. Right now it is so easy and so cheap to pick up second hand books from anywhere in the world via Abebooks.com and others. Except there's one book I really want, and there only seems to be one copy for sale in the entire world, and it's $80. I'm just not sure if it will be worth it. A friend recommended it to me so I may try to borrow her copy instead.
I love Abebooks as well and use it a lot. My problem with actual books is that I have no room to keep them. Did you see our posts about pictures of book shelves? But still, I wish I had more bookshelves. Regarding the one book in the world -- looking for missing books is great adventure. Would you mind sharing what book you are searching for?
You know, I am a tad jealous of your problem. From the very beginning I have always been the sort of reader that did not re-read books. As a result, I never prioritized keeping them. I give them away, loan them away, donate them to charity. As a result, of the thousands I've read in my lifetime, I have a comparatively little amount in my possession. Now, it's important to note that I don't view this as a bad thing, -I actually like it that way for a number of reasons. The only exception is the fact that I find few things more enjoyable to look at in a living space than a bookshelf packed to the gills. I LOVE them, and I don't have one, though I could have many many many times over :) I got 99 problems but too many books ain't one. I do actually have quite a few on hand...maybe I'll put a modest shelf together. I think I could rock two or three of your shelves worth of space.
The presence of more than one book is all about potential -- like romantic partners that you don't know too well yet. And like romantic partners -- there just isn't room for them all, and we can't have them all at the same time. Having them on the shelf is nice, but it can also create longing that there is no time to fulfil. (Hi Eddy!!)
Poet Matthew Arnold... interesting guy. In other words, the universe is indifferent. All we really have is one another. A poem much debated and satirized.
from Dover Beach, 1851 Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night
One of my favorite poems in the entire world. Do you have Spotify? There is a particular version of that poem set to music, and opening with a beautiful reading of the first verses. It is by The Fugs, a music and poetry group in NYC from the 60's onward. At any rate, they have this one haunting version that is much better than their other versions because of the reading in the beginning, -it's from their best of album, and the only place I've been able to find it online is Spotify. Dover Beach from their best of. Worth searching out. I read it as essentially an existential love poem, where the "individual starting point" is two people instead of the one, while the world remains just as indifferent and absurd.
Lovely photo! It's this book: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=574163628&#... A friend here (Australia) mentioned the author to me - June Boland. I think she must have been an Australian writer, because there seems to be no trace of her in UK libraries. She also appears to have written a tonne of wonderful sounding books that I am sure I would love, but I don't even know where or how I would get my hands on them. I've ordered one more affordable one - Kirsty at the Manse - to see if I like her. I'll probably borrow my friend's Snow and ask if she has others. Then if I like that I might try signing up with libraries here. There was some amazing guy who digitised masses of older books for Gutenberg, which is how I discovered some of my now-favourites, like Mrs George de Horne Vaizey. He used to list loads of writers on his site as well as bios, but nearly all the pages are gone (some are in Google Archive): http://www.athelstane.co.uk I would love to contact him but there's no email, to find out if he's doing any more female authors. Some of these authors are literally going to be wiped from memory, and they often wrote dozens of lovely books. See this author which I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amélie_Claire_Leroy - I created the Wikipedia page for her, and that is all the info I have been able to find out about her. She also hasn't been digitised sadly, except for one or two works. Anyway that went on a bit, sorry, but I feel so passionate about these former writers and all their work being so inaccessible and potentially always so.