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Beverley Wigney's avatar

Very interesting! I occasionally ponder over the direction that my reading habits have taken over the past 30 or so years. For me, it has probably had less to do with technology, the internet, and society, and more to do with studying to do an MA in English Lit. In the course of fast-tracking through an Hon BA and the MA, I crammed a heck of a lot of reading into a few short years, doing as many course overloads as it was possible to do. My bedside table was constantly stacked high with novels to be read through. I was a very diligent student and came to every class prepared to discuss our required readings (soon realizing that many fellow students did not). My coursework was doing in the early 1990s when deconstructionist discourse was all the rage - and perhaps still is to this day. In any case, all of that to say that, by the time I tore through dozens of novels, picking them apart, identifying literary devices, narrative techniques, etc.. I was left with very little interest in recreational reading. To this day, if I pick up a fiction novel and begin reading, I'm soon picking it to pieces. The only type of fiction I've continued to find of interest are novels that were written in such a way that they appeal to those who like to pick things apart -- I'd put Peter Ackroyd and Julian Barnes into that category.

So, I know that doesn't actually jive much with a discussion on being able to enjoy and focus on longer form fiction, but it does explain where I'm coming from, or where I was at before becoming an even more erratic reader. On any given day, I read through a ton of different texts, pretty much all online, and most of it to do with environmental stuff, or ecology. I guess that it might be accurate to say that a lot of my mental energy is spent online, moderating environmental or ecology groups, native plant groups, etc.. on facebook. I read complicated research papers, listen to certain speakers on video podcasts, and sometimes audio. I do read from actual books -- all non-fiction books having to do with natural history or the environment. However, I don't actually like reading on paper anymore. I do it, but I can't say I enjoy it very much as it feels *slow* to me -- I can't read from a book nearly as fast as I can read on a large computer screen. I know, this probably all sounds rather weird, especially coming from someone who spends a lot of time poking around outside in the garden, or back in my woodlot photographing birds, or hacking away at invasive weeds. But reading has become something I do to absorb and internalize information so that I can use that information to, say, battle with the provincial government for not consulting watershed intakes when they issue aerial herbicide spraying permits (that was last week's battle).

This might seem like a digression, but this morning, my brother sent me a video recording of Steve Jobs speaking at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, Co. He was certainly a visionary and excellent communicator. It was interesting to hear him speaking about how we may adopt new technologies, but there's a lag that happens, when we use the technology to do what we used to do in a certain way, but that given about 5 years, we change how we will make use of that technology. He gave several examples like the switch to electric motors, and of moving from radio to television (early television was actually like radio but with moving images). Also, that computers are really sort of stupid things -- they aren't really (or weren't) all that smart, but could do operations hundreds, now thousands, of times faster than we can, but they enable us to do things at lightning speed, from anywhere, and so on. He asked how old people in the room were, and whether they were under or over 36 years old - and if you were under, you were probably growing up with computers. He asked how many had a personal computer and very few did. I actually did have one by then and began editing magazines on one by late 1984. Anyhow, just listening to Jobs got me thinking about how our ways of interacting were already beginning to change by the time of his presentation, but also how much more we would change over the next 30 years. It wasn't just the computers that changed, but how we interact with them, and how they have changed our communication (he gets into this in his talk). I realize this doesn't actually explain why many of us may find it difficult to settle down and lose ourselves within a novel, but it does help to explain how many of us have become sort of "wired in" to the whole web thing. Sometimes I think of how complicated things seem and how much multi-tasking I do in a day -- like maybe stopping to download some photos just taken of a bird and upload them into iNaturalist, then jumping to send an email, or write a comment somewhere on FB, or watch a video on forest ecology while peeling potatoes for dinner, blah blah blah. I don't know if any of the above is making much sense in explaining why it's so hard to wind down and read a book anymore. These days, if I need to get to sleep, I grab a book and read two or three pages and that knocks me right out. I suspect a lot of this has to do with something "brain" related. It's probably all kind of bad, or would be, if one didn't push away from the computer screen, grab the pruning shears and head out to the woodlot to chop down some non-native honeysuckle vines. Speaking of which, I should be getting out there -- so I'm not taking time to proofread the above --- it is what it is. :)

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John Simons's avatar

Thank you for this, Beth. It gave me a new perspective on the public reading of scripture at the daily office. I no longer have a community to share the readings with, but I have found reading out loud (and imagining I larger community) helps to focus my attention. I should also say that Catherine and I have a regular daily discipline of reading a novel to one another. We will take up your list!

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