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. :)
Fascinating comment, Bev, and it's good to hear from you. Yeah. Our educations do affect us forever, don't they? I totally hear you about multi-tasking and being very wired-into this online world, which is where I do much of my reading too. It feels pretty seamless, the back-and-forth between regular life and online life, but maybe doesn't for a lot of people. I too rarely read a paper book now. I don't want to hold it, I can't bookmark it in the same way, the print is often small -- and I definitely try not to add more books to my already twice-culled library. So that adjustment not only hasn't been difficult, it feels like an improvement, just like access to so much information on the internet is a huge improvement. Thanks for your story about Steve Jobs. We got our first computers in 1981. Looking back, they were so rudimentary! But still, a better way of doing things immediately, and an opening to the world. So much has changed. I don't find what you say about your reading or computer use vs your outdoor life weird at all. Thanks!
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!
Delighted to hear from you, John, as always! Maybe we Anglicans are fortunate to have heard scripture read aloud throughout our lives. I wonder if it makes us more attuned to hearing the spoken word than people who have seldom had this. When I was in elementary school, reading aloud was part of the weekly curriculum, so even kids whose parents didn't read to them were explosed to language in this way - I think that's a positive thing. All the best to you both and happy reading!
Interesting... I don't have a problem with concentration on books, though I am finding it hard to settle into novels at the moment. The vast majority of books I have read this year have been non-fiction. However, I do feel an aversion to reading longer posts on my phone. I get restless halfway through and my already fast reading pace accelerates, as if there's an urgency in getting to the end. The psychology behind that is disturbing and fascinating, isn't it ... I feel Substack compounds this by stating an estimated reading time on every post. I suspect that deters many people...
Thanks, Lizzie. I read very fast too, and have to remind myself to slow down. I stopped reading book son my phone, unless I'm really stuck somewhere -- it's one reason I bought a tablet. My reasons were headaches and eyestrain, mainly, but I also found I wasn't retaining the content as well when I read on my phone. Like you, I don't think the reading times posted on Substack are helpful!
I remember that aspect of the pandemic as a source of intense frustration that I couldn't participate in much of the live Zoom stuff due to shitty rural internet, after having been so much a part of things during the blogging era. As for reading, though, it remains one of my few sources of real pleasure. Occasionally I'll even read a novel, LOL. I keep thinking I should blog more about what I'm reading, but it's just so time-consuming to compose anything in prose anymore., and I'm no longer willing to spend the majority of my waking hours sitting down. But this year has been amazing. I've found so many great, new-to-me poets! And I'm really enjoying a slow re-read of Neruda.
Haha, you and novels! I wouldn't ever think you'd have trouble reading, since it's been such a lifelong habit for you, but I'm curious about your statement that it's time-consuming to write prose now -- why do you think that is? And the sitting-down thing is important too. My urban existence doesn't call to me to go outside, but I make myself do it. I really miss being in the countryside and at the lake. Hope you will write something about Neruda, though!
I dunno. Loss of mental agility with age? Or possibly just that I ingest way less caffeine these days, and also have become more of a perfectionist than I used to be. Regardless, getting my brain out of poetry mode and into the more logical and organized frame that prose requires isn't fun... and nobody's paying me.
Thank you for this post. Have given what you wrote much thought, along with the comments. My attention span for reading online is shorter than my attention span for reading books. My attention span for reading books is good and has has increased exponentially since I purchased a good pair of prescription reading glasses recently.
Almost all of my book reading is done in bed. This is a lifelong practice. I used to read in bed during the day when I was a child and teenager and then go outside and take long solitary walks. Now the only times I read books are before I go to sleep at night, occasionally in the middle of the night if I can't sleep, and sometimes in the early morning if there is a book I need to finish and return to the public library. The public library is my source for books, many of which require the assistance of interlibrary loan and which have the added benefit that I can keep the book for a month. I'm not a slow reader but not a fast reader either.
Ever since buying an iBook in 2006, I do a substantial amount of reading online at blogs and reading links from blogs. Blogs have been a steady source of book recommendations.
From childhood on, I was always reading a novel, finishing one and immediately beginning another. Starting in my late 30s, my focus shifted to books from all the religious and spiritual traditions throughout the world, with a novel now and then. Toni Morrison in particular.
Most recently I discovered Richard Wagamese through his novel Dream Wheels which spoke to me much in the way Toni Morrison's novels do.
Talk of reading has reminded me of my mother, a lifetime reader, who took me and my sisters to the library from an early age. When she was a child, she spoke these words, "Books is my friends. I will stick by their sides until I die." Just before she died, she was reading The Satanic Verses. The place where she stopped reading was marked with a bookmark. I've yet to read that book but may read it someday. The last book she gave me, two months before she died, was a birthday gift of Haroun and the Sea of Stories -- a book I have read again and again and the only book by Salman Rushdie that I have read.
Enjoyed seeing the list of books you've read in recent years. I re-read Moby Dick in 2021, having first read it in my 20s when it became one of my favorite books. What a revelation to read it in my early 70s and find that I liked it even more on reading it again.
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. :)
Fascinating comment, Bev, and it's good to hear from you. Yeah. Our educations do affect us forever, don't they? I totally hear you about multi-tasking and being very wired-into this online world, which is where I do much of my reading too. It feels pretty seamless, the back-and-forth between regular life and online life, but maybe doesn't for a lot of people. I too rarely read a paper book now. I don't want to hold it, I can't bookmark it in the same way, the print is often small -- and I definitely try not to add more books to my already twice-culled library. So that adjustment not only hasn't been difficult, it feels like an improvement, just like access to so much information on the internet is a huge improvement. Thanks for your story about Steve Jobs. We got our first computers in 1981. Looking back, they were so rudimentary! But still, a better way of doing things immediately, and an opening to the world. So much has changed. I don't find what you say about your reading or computer use vs your outdoor life weird at all. Thanks!
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!
Delighted to hear from you, John, as always! Maybe we Anglicans are fortunate to have heard scripture read aloud throughout our lives. I wonder if it makes us more attuned to hearing the spoken word than people who have seldom had this. When I was in elementary school, reading aloud was part of the weekly curriculum, so even kids whose parents didn't read to them were explosed to language in this way - I think that's a positive thing. All the best to you both and happy reading!
Interesting... I don't have a problem with concentration on books, though I am finding it hard to settle into novels at the moment. The vast majority of books I have read this year have been non-fiction. However, I do feel an aversion to reading longer posts on my phone. I get restless halfway through and my already fast reading pace accelerates, as if there's an urgency in getting to the end. The psychology behind that is disturbing and fascinating, isn't it ... I feel Substack compounds this by stating an estimated reading time on every post. I suspect that deters many people...
Thanks, Lizzie. I read very fast too, and have to remind myself to slow down. I stopped reading book son my phone, unless I'm really stuck somewhere -- it's one reason I bought a tablet. My reasons were headaches and eyestrain, mainly, but I also found I wasn't retaining the content as well when I read on my phone. Like you, I don't think the reading times posted on Substack are helpful!
I remember that aspect of the pandemic as a source of intense frustration that I couldn't participate in much of the live Zoom stuff due to shitty rural internet, after having been so much a part of things during the blogging era. As for reading, though, it remains one of my few sources of real pleasure. Occasionally I'll even read a novel, LOL. I keep thinking I should blog more about what I'm reading, but it's just so time-consuming to compose anything in prose anymore., and I'm no longer willing to spend the majority of my waking hours sitting down. But this year has been amazing. I've found so many great, new-to-me poets! And I'm really enjoying a slow re-read of Neruda.
Haha, you and novels! I wouldn't ever think you'd have trouble reading, since it's been such a lifelong habit for you, but I'm curious about your statement that it's time-consuming to write prose now -- why do you think that is? And the sitting-down thing is important too. My urban existence doesn't call to me to go outside, but I make myself do it. I really miss being in the countryside and at the lake. Hope you will write something about Neruda, though!
I dunno. Loss of mental agility with age? Or possibly just that I ingest way less caffeine these days, and also have become more of a perfectionist than I used to be. Regardless, getting my brain out of poetry mode and into the more logical and organized frame that prose requires isn't fun... and nobody's paying me.
Thank you for this post. Have given what you wrote much thought, along with the comments. My attention span for reading online is shorter than my attention span for reading books. My attention span for reading books is good and has has increased exponentially since I purchased a good pair of prescription reading glasses recently.
Almost all of my book reading is done in bed. This is a lifelong practice. I used to read in bed during the day when I was a child and teenager and then go outside and take long solitary walks. Now the only times I read books are before I go to sleep at night, occasionally in the middle of the night if I can't sleep, and sometimes in the early morning if there is a book I need to finish and return to the public library. The public library is my source for books, many of which require the assistance of interlibrary loan and which have the added benefit that I can keep the book for a month. I'm not a slow reader but not a fast reader either.
Ever since buying an iBook in 2006, I do a substantial amount of reading online at blogs and reading links from blogs. Blogs have been a steady source of book recommendations.
From childhood on, I was always reading a novel, finishing one and immediately beginning another. Starting in my late 30s, my focus shifted to books from all the religious and spiritual traditions throughout the world, with a novel now and then. Toni Morrison in particular.
Most recently I discovered Richard Wagamese through his novel Dream Wheels which spoke to me much in the way Toni Morrison's novels do.
Talk of reading has reminded me of my mother, a lifetime reader, who took me and my sisters to the library from an early age. When she was a child, she spoke these words, "Books is my friends. I will stick by their sides until I die." Just before she died, she was reading The Satanic Verses. The place where she stopped reading was marked with a bookmark. I've yet to read that book but may read it someday. The last book she gave me, two months before she died, was a birthday gift of Haroun and the Sea of Stories -- a book I have read again and again and the only book by Salman Rushdie that I have read.
Enjoyed seeing the list of books you've read in recent years. I re-read Moby Dick in 2021, having first read it in my 20s when it became one of my favorite books. What a revelation to read it in my early 70s and find that I liked it even more on reading it again.