There's reading, and then there's reading as a way of life. This is me. Reading as a way life is pretty much over today, but not for me.
David Ulin is an editor and writer. He was or is if he is still at it the book critic at the LA Times.
Reading is a revolutionary act. It is not natural. The siren calls of email, Twitter, smart phones, and iPods pull us away from the long- form writing of books. Does reading even matter anymore?
In this easy, a ruminative blend of memoir and criticism he explores the efforts of a life of reading and the price we have to pay for the effort. He finds the digital world to be illusory and oddly demanding that we disengage---particularly from the rapturous immersion that a good book requires of its reader. Can we afford to forgo the memory, cognition, and sense of narrative derived from books?
It's immersion that matters whether ink on paper or digital type. We can no longer take the simple act of reading for granted. Here is a call to pages!
Not everyone today understands The Great Gatsby and that1 it stands for, an entire decade, the decade of the 1920's.
Literature will never have the same influence it once had. Common Sense will never happen again.
Too much screen staring can hinder our print concentration.
Referencing Joan Didion and "Slouching Toward Bethlehem."
Everyone wants to tell their story and be heard these days, but what does that mean anymore.
Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried blurs the line between fact and fiction.
Ulin is a minimalist on marginalia. I am a maximilist.
Denby says we need a coherent world-view.
Society has lost the ability to present a logical argument.
It's all sentence fragments with no coherence or framework.
Checking our electronic devices is mostly a matter of thoughtless, mindless habit.
The paradox of technology is that in the name of connectivity it distances us from each other.
My attention is more and more selective; otherwise, the world is chaos.
People today try to process too much, which is why I focus. Trying to process too much will make you lose your capacity to think and feel. And most of what I try to process is totally superficial.
A sobering thought: We exist at the mercy of the past.
Screens mess with my mind, warp my mind, change me, mess with my equilibrium, and I do not like it.
Silent reading is learned behavior. Do not ever take it for granted.
Point is silent reading is an unnatural act.
The author likes the book as object, and so do I.
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