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posted by n1 on Sunday June 15 2014, @03:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the tl;dr dept.

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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 15 2014, @03:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 15 2014, @03:39PM (#55615)

    I remember when I was growing up in the 80s, the fact that I read entire books made me seem like some alien and strange thing to people who couldn't even comprehend that I did it. So it's not like there was ever a time when most people read serious books. I don't think the number of readers has changed, it's just that now there's a 24/7 news cycle that needs endless filler articles during the Memorial Day to Labor Day slow news cycle, so we see filler like this.

    There may be fewer book readers, but not all books are equal, and I think YouTube and so on has taken over fluff fiction reading. What I see in the bookstore is tables piled up with unsold fiction. I rarely see any quality books that don't sell (history, mathematics, etc). Fluff fiction seems to be in sharp decline.