The kind of reading discussed in this article used to account for the majority of my reading. It doesn't anymore, unfortunately. I am trying to rediscover the reader I once was, but it is hard. I find it difficult to shift from the fast-paced, scanning type of reading I primarily do online to the chew-and-digest-every-word type of reading I used to do all the time as lover of literature. These days when I do the latter type of reading, I have to consciously work at not skipping chunks of text and at soaking in the words the way I once did rather than merely extracting meaning from them. One of the nice things about a book, as pointed out in the article, is that there are no hyperlinks to turn your attention away from the page you're on (and no ads or Facebook notifications). It's just that page and nothing else. And if you turn off your phone and step away from your computer you might even get through that one page without a real world interruption. At the very least, the probability of doing so will increase. And as the link suggests, you will likely walk away a better human being.
Speaking of which, I think I'll close the laptop and read another chapter of The Little Prince.
2 comments:
I beg to differ about the hyperlink issue when reading books. One of the historical authors I read uses tons of footnotes, and occasionally translations of quoted sentences in a foreign language are at the back of the book in said footnote.
:)
Good point, BTEG!
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