“After spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don't. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I'm reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.”
So writes David L. Ulin, Book Editor for the Los Angeles Times, in an August 9, 2009 column entitled “The Lost Art of Reading.” Count Ulin among the growing number of discerning voices concerned about the effects of “our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged or tweeted.”
Ulin is wise to make the distinction between reading books on the one hand in order to know, that which enlarges our understanding of self and the world, and on the other hand checking email, the blogs, or tracking stories across the internet in or to be in the know, the primary effect of which is to be distracted. Ulin shares this insight from his own experience, reminding us that reading requires an act of will and focus as much as desire.
This is an article worthy of some time and thought: