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Tim Gray, writing in the New York Reviews of Books, has a very interesting article that asks whether it has become impossible to find the uninterrupted blocks of time that are needed to read serious works of literature, and whether the change in the reading environment is also changing how books are written.
Ordinarily I ignore the "Computer Bad! Destroy Society!" arguments, but I have to say that what he describes seems all too familiar. I can't recall the last time that I actually sat down for two or three hours just to read.
I grew up spending hours each day, every day devouring books of all sorts. Is this a thing that's lost to people raised with Internet, Game Consoles, and Smartphones? Pardon me if I sound like an old fart.
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Is Always On Tech Destroying Our Ability To Read?
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You feel a whole lot more like you do now than you did when you used to.
(Score: 1) by Crosscompiler on Sunday June 15 2014, @06:57AM
"Children today are tyrants...".
The article is worthless; he whinges that popular fiction is less popular while noting that he still sees people reading books of quality, meanders off to do some name dropping, then finishes by ascribing fanboiesqe qualities to some good-but-not-nearly-that-good older books.
In the last eighty years, popular modern fiction has aped movies and TV which have aped popular modern fiction. There is only so much time and money, and movies/TV are currently very inexpensive in both time and money relative to modern fiction.
Long before movies and TV most new popular fiction books sucked, most suck today, and there is no indication they will improve in the future. Critics have always been worse than chance at recognizing quality or what will endure.
My solution has been to avoid modern fiction, TV and modern movies; I would recommend everyone do likewise.
coda: I don't think it's significant, but for classics the situation reverses; e.g., Seven Samurai is $40 and can't be streamed (last I checked), but the entire catalogs of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Melville and hundreds of others total $0.