A recent article at The Independent by Johann Hari takes a close look at the familiar phenomenon of the difficulty of focused reading in the age of instant gratification email, facebook, and twitter interaction. Finding the mental quietude to properly read is becoming harder and harder, and Hari observes that the double meaning of the word ‘wired’ certainly applies to how we consume information in the modern world — we’re both connected, and frantic.

Hari lays out exactly why we need books — specifically paper books — now more than ever, as an antidote for our times:

And here’s the function that the book – the paper book that doesn’t beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once – does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: “Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…. It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.”

A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent of data and laying down on an object that will still look the same a hundred years from now.

He also posits the idea that the ‘digital diet,’ ie. taking a break from electronics or rationing their use, will become more and more common as we cope with our new toys. Having been tempted to go ‘off grid’ many times, I can only agree with him. In regards to the book, the more wizz bang stuff the ereader can do, the worse for concentration — which is one reason why I’m happy to have gotten a Kindle, which basically only does one thing (and does it well).

Hari’s piece doesn’t really say anything that hasn’t been said before — but it is a message that bears repeating by as many voices as possible.

Over at Black Gate I’ve put up a post that provides links to many of my reading related posts from the last year, including the recent ‘Ramp Up Your Reading’ three-parter over at Grasping For the Wind, and some of my old favorites from BG itself, such as my posts on book lists, bookmarks, and the joy of browsing brick-and-mortar stores. For anyone that reads BG regularly, or has followed some of the links in my ‘Reading & Writing’ section, there isn’t anything new here. But I thought it would be nice to get links to many of these posts in one spot, especially as they pertain to the subject of setting reading goals.

And, what would New Years Day be without some goal-setting and resolutions? Have a look at Reading Goals in the New Year and see if there is anything over there that might help and inspire you to take a stab at doing things bigger and better in 2010.

This week I’ve had the honor of guest posting over at John Ottinger’s science fiction and fantasy review blog, Grasping For the Wind. My posts appeared Monday, Tuesday, and today, and take the form of a three-part article entitled ‘Ramp Up Your Reading.’ Those of you who have read my posts at Black Gate will find some of the material in ‘Ramp Up Your Reading’ familiar, such as my recommendations to use a list and my musings on specialists and generalist readers, but it is an all new article and something of a synthesis of many of the reading related themes I’ve been blogging about over the last year.

Each part of ‘Ramp Up Your Reading’ looks at how to improve your reading in one or more ways. In part one, More and Faster, I talk about ways to get more reading done over the course of a year, both from a practical and an inspirational perspective. In Do It Better, I dial the speed knob back a bit on quantity and talk about close and immersive reading. In the final part, Expand Your Horizons, I propose a few strategies for breaking out of reading ruts and challenging yourself  do something different, like the Five Book Challenge I’ll be doing in 2010.

What’s with people that only read one kind of thing? Ever roll your eyes when you get to talking about reading with one of them and they tell you how many times they’ve reread Harry Potter or Jane Austen, but they’ve never tried a mystery, or a historical adventure, or something by a non-English-speaking writer? They’ll rave about Stephen King, but they’ve never read Poe. Or maybe they are experts on Napoleonic history with a non-fiction bias that prevents them even considering a novel by Cornwell or O’Brian. They are the specialists, and I don’t understand them — I’m not even sure, really, if they are ‘readers’ by my definition:

To me, a real reader is a voracious omnivore; metaphorically a gaunt, hollow-eyed ghoul with ink-stained fingers and sharpened teeth who knows an insatiable hunger so keenly painful it has in fact become a pleasure of sublime proportions. Our ghoul/reader will eat and eat and eat to the point of dieing, and ask for more with his last breath. Real readers are all a little bit insane — and they hope that no one ever finds the cure for their condition.

But, lest you think mine is an argument founded on some sort of smug exclusivity, mosey over to Black Gate to read my full article on Specialist and Generalist Readers and notice that I’m legitimately perplexed. Are the two broad camps of reading styles the result of childhood experiences, or marketing? Are some people wired to be generalists or specialists? Are there even really two primary categories of reading types, or more of a continuous scale? You’ll find more questions than answers in my essay — but, generally speaking, that is what we generalists are generally known for.

The first thing I have for you today is my story Davy’s Toy Box, which is Every Day Fiction’s story of the day. You should read it, for not only is it enjoyable in story-terms, but I have it on good authority that reading Davy’s Toy Box is good for your overall cardio-vascular health. So, if you’ve been skipping the gym lately, I think my story can help.

Heading in the direction of Blog Gate today you may notice the way is littered with an odd assortment of paper products — playing cards, matchbook covers, old receipts and envelopes and sticky-notes. That’s because I’m expounding on the overlooked phenomenon of bookmarks, how they accumulate, how they disappear, and how some of them rise to become sentimental favorites and others — well, others are just bits of paper.

Get more than one of these unfinished books together — I have a shelf for this — and you’ll see a different pictures. Depending on what you use as a bookmark, of course, your unfinished collection with all its sprouting bookmark-ends may resemble a thicket of trees, or a perhaps a flotilla of sailing vessels jostling in harbor. But what I see are protuberant, taunting tongues — a grand razzberry emanating from each volume, salvoed in contempt of my lack of perseverance.

Oh, and how about the circle of Hell reserved for book offenders?

And, given that so many of the world’s small, flat objects function adequately as bookmarks, I’m always confounded by dogears. Marginalia I can understand, though it is not my practice, as it can create a second and sometimes interesting dialogue between book and reader(s), but dogears are pure defacement. I suspect there is a circle of hell populated by turners of book corners — perhaps they busy themselves getting the crease out of a zillion pages while their fellow offenders, book store employees, spend their eons of torment trying to scrape the price label sticky gum off of a trillion dust jackets. It’s a pleasant thought.

Click here for Davy’s Toy Box

And click here for ‘On Bookmarks’

I haven’t blogged much this week, or written much, or done much of anything truly productive. But I did read. Over at the Blog Gate (as James Enge calls it) this week I wrote about just that very subject — how to read more books. Last week you’ll no doubt recall the superhero who read 462 books in one year, well, this week’s post is about how the rest of us mere mortals can come to grips with the reading bear and squeeze its burly, bushy body into a tutu and make it dance for us.

But this kind of faster reading is only part of the solution to reading more books a year. Since speedreading emphasizes information assimilation, is is better suited to only certain kinds of material — the things you want to know, but not necessarily experience. Sometimes this may be fiction of a certain kind, more often it will be non-fiction, but what it most certainly won’t be is a complex novel from a challenging author, or rhythmic verse, or even that big fat fantasy you want to curl up with while the world gets on without you. While I do think speedreading is a great way to increase even your comfortable reading speed, it is not supposed to be the one tool for all tasks.

Of course, I’m not an actual expert at anything speedreading related, I’m just a monomaniacal autodidact. With a blog. But I have bootstrapped my reading rate up considerably in the last decade, and my theory as to how you can do that, too, is laid out in glorious, discursive detail over at BG.

Click here to read How to Read More Books