To imagine a different and better world

As a huge fan of short stories, I always look forward to the fiction in my favorite magazine.

Imagined worlds they are.  

As a kid, I read Enid Blyton's books, and I had to imagine pretty much everything that I read there.  Bacon, for one, about which I had no idea, and the kids in those books were always having bacon with breakfast.  After breakfast, they wandered about by the stream.  Imagine that!

Nonfiction essays, too, require imagination on my part.  Even now.  To read an essay like the one that masterfully describes the story of globalization via Chinese merchants selling sexy lingerie to Egyptian women wrapped up in niqabs, in a remote small town by the Nile, requires imagination on multiple dimensions.

Reading is, thus, more than mere reading:

When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.

There is no denying the fact that Enid Blyton's stories changed me. They informed me that there were people and cultures that were far removed from where I existed.  The local stories too, whether by Sujatha or Kalki or Jayakanthan, changed me.  So did the serious and gossipy reporting in Blitz, Illustrated Weekly, or India Today.  Words and sentences were like magical spells.

The power to imagine is also the power to create.  

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things. They daydreamed, they pondered, they made things that didn't quite work, they described things that didn't yet exist to people who laughed at them..

Whether a fictional world, or the real world with problems of real people, reading them developed in me a sense of empathy.  Empathy then leads to wondering how the world can become a better place for you and me, which is why I rant--to make a case for doing things differently.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this:
THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT.

Sometimes, I think that there are only two kinds of people on this planet--those who willingly read, and those who would way prefer not to read unless they were compelled to.  I have always believed that the world will be a better place if more people read on their own.  I am always shocked at how much even those who used to read quite a bit are so distracted by social media that they now do not spend some of their down-time reading.

    

Imagine if more of us read!

Reading the future ...

During the morning drive, I turned the radio on.  It was not about tRump.  Phew!

Source

What an interesting segment it was!  So interesting that I couldn't wait to return home and place an order for the book.  I added another book to the order.  The two books will reach my doorstep in a week, and just in time for the winter break.

I wonder, however, for how long books will continue to be printed.  Consider music, for instance.  It is mostly streamed.  When was the last time you bought music as a tangible CD or vinyl?  They don't even sell cassette tapes anymore, right?

Even now, quite a few purchase the e-version of books instead of the bound paper.  For how long will books continue to be printed on paper?

An even more troubling question is this: Will books be around?

Book maybe dead by 2039, the futuristic commentary argues.

How long did it take for vinyl to be replaced by tapes.  And then tapes by CDs.  How long did CDs continue to sell?

It is absolutely fascinating that printed books have survived this long.  Why 2039 for that commentary?

In 1439, an eccentric German goldsmith cast the Latin alphabet in lead, smeared the letters with oil-based ink and squashed them beneath a wine press. Johannes Gutenberg hadn’t invented the ink, the paper, the press or the alphabet, but by combining their powers, he built the first printing press and printed the first mass-produced book: a 1,200-page Bible printed on vellum and bound in pigskin.

The rest was history.

Soon, even books will become history in the coming "post-book world"?  Of course, rumors of books ending have been spread for a while.  "Until now. Or more accurately, until 2031, when the Verse arrived, and humanity discovered a new way to tell its stories."

As troubling as the commentary is, it seems entirely plausible.  If video killed the radio star, virtual reality (VR) killed the book authors:

By the mid-’20s, V.R. was sleeker and cheaper, but still posed no danger to Cinemark or Barnes & Noble (both of which declared bankruptcy in 2036). But the rise of cheap neural threads led to the first generation of V.R. implants, and in 2031 Google’s Daydreamer, Netflix’s ReelLife and Microsoft’s much-mocked Awegment were joined by Amazon’s Universal Experience, popularly known as the Verse.

What a clever piece of writing there, right?  Can't you already see those brand names?

The author makes an important point that it was never about the books per se.

"The stories." That's what the books were about.

And stories existed long before 1439. Stories are shape-shifters, infinite and immortal: They’ve been painted on the walls of Chauvet Cave and pressed into clay tablets; sung by griots in the streets of Old Mali and cut into the Peruvian desert; danced and drummed and whispered, spun like spider-silk across the Atlantic and painted on the undersides of overpasses. In the context of human history, the book was nothing but a format, a brief technological quirk in the history of human storytelling, younger than theater but older than soap operas.

Read the entire commentary. Maybe you will welcome that future.

As for me, 2039 neatly coincides with another landmark, and I hope to live with books as we know them!

Why read!

Whether it is a department meeting, or a session at an academic conference, there is always something to process, for which I need to be engaged.  For this, I take with me a notebook and a pen.  I occasionally jot things down--not merely those on which I need to follow up on later, but whatever comes across as new to me.  I don't transcribe the proceedings; what I note down are the ones that I want to make sure I commit to my understanding.

Blogging, and serious reading, are along the same lines.  Even if I were not an academic--oh, thank heavens I am one!--I suppose this would have been my MO. 

It was, therefore, exciting that my approach found at least one audience, who commented: "I have decided to read like you - making notes and keeping them for reference in a blog or a Word file - like signposts."  Yes, like signposts.

A few years ago, I blogged about the pleasure of slow reading and thinking, and I had included there this wonderful graphic:

Source

Treat reading like an exercise, even when it is for pleasure.  And, yes, choose a printed book.  A few years ago, my daughter thought she would help me out by gifting me a Kindle.  I gave it a try, but could barely read through even a few pages.  I abandoned it.

That post was six years ago, when distractions were fewer, compared to now.  Since then, I have abandoned Facebook, and made sure to never ever sign up for WhatsApp and all other apps.  Time extends before me, like how it used to in the past.  Reading is wonderfully possible even in this age of constant and annoying distractions, which are also designed to be addictive.

We know perfectly well—we remember, even if dimly, the inward state that satisfies more than our itching, clicking fingers—and we know it isn’t here. Here, on the internet, is a nowhere space, a shallow time. It is a flat and impenetrable surface. But with a book, we dive in; we are sucked in; we are immersed, body and soul.

When you do sit down to read, do not read them all at once.  If you do, then the chances are that you won't remember any damn thing later; all you will have done is kill time! 

Forget me now ... er, forget me not

Back in graduate school, there were a couple of classes where the instructors packed way too much reading materials every week.  There wasn't enough time to read them all and--more importantly--for me to think through them and to then break them down.  Soon, I started skipping the readings.

Over the years of teaching, I have learnt to ease up on the quantity of learning materials in my classes.  Especially in these modern times when studies confirm over and over again that most students read very little.  Even when they read, their eyes jump over words and paragraphs.

My worry is that even when students do read and discuss, the new ideas and arguments might not be retained in their memories.  I tell them to be engaged readers.  But, unlike the classroom where I can control the environment by banning digital devices, in their dorms and apartments they are on their own and interrupted by distractions.  Every distraction sets them back.

Not only students.  All of us too.  We read a lot these days, yes.  But, it is almost as if we read to forget!

People are binging on the written word, too. In 2009, the average American encountered 100,000 words a day, even if they didn’t “read” all of them. It’s hard to imagine that’s decreased in the nine years since. In “Binge-Reading Disorder,” an article for The Morning News, Nikkitha Bakshani analyzes the meaning of this statistic. “Reading is a nuanced word,” she writes, “but the most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption: where we read, especially on the internet, merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance of becoming knowledge unless it ‘sticks.’”
Or, as Horvath puts it: “It’s the momentary giggle and then you want another giggle. It’s not about actually learning anything. It’s about getting a momentary experience to feel as though you’ve learned something.”

Of course, in this age of access to information, one might wonder what the whole point of remembering is.  For one, this means that we are reduced to being drooling idiots when the access to Google is cut off, right?

Furthermore, as I remind students over and over again, information is not knowledge.  We make the mistake of equating them.  Googling to find something about Nabokov, for instance, is not the same as gaining an understanding of his work or about humanity that he writes about.  It is a false "feeling of fluency":

The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember.”

Yep.  Which is why I remind students to be actively engaged with the learning materials, and not to be passive readers or watchers.

I suspect that people always knew it.  Teachers, back when I was in school, told us to re-read the class materials.  Obviously they knew from experience that merely reading something once won't do it for most of us.  Nabokov himself noted this:

A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

Yep.

Now read this post all over again!

Now, that's love sitting down!

What a glorious paragraph from the immortal Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the time of cholera:

He was the first man that Fermina Daza heard urinate. She heard him on their wedding night, while she lay prostrate with seasickness in the stateroom on the ship that was carrying them to France, and the sound of his stallion's stream seemed so potent, so replete with authority, that it increased her terror of the devastation to come. That memory often returned to her as the years weakened the stream, for she never could resign herself to his wetting the rim of the toilet bowl each time he used it. Dr. Urbino tried to convince her, with arguments readily understandable to anyone who wished to understand them, that the mishap was not repeated every day through carelessness on his part, as she insisted, but because of organic reasons: as a young man his stream was so defined and so direct that when he was at school he won contests for marksmanship in filling bottles, but with the ravages of age it was not only decreasing, it was also becoming oblique and scattered, and had at last turned into a fantastic fountain, impossible to control despite his many efforts to direct it. He would say: "The toilet must have been invented by someone who knew nothing about men." He contributed to domestic peace with a quotidian act that was more humiliating than humble: he wiped the rim of the bowl with toilet paper each time he used it. She knew, but never said anything as long as the ammoniac fumes were not too strong in the bathroom, and then she proclaimed, as if she had uncovered a crime: "This stinks like a rabbit hutch." On the eve of old age this physical difficulty inspired Dr. Urbino with the ultimate solution: he urinated sitting down, as she did, which kept the bowl clean and him in a state of grace.

I suppose there is a time and a place for any book, too.  A few years ago, I started reading this novel and never was able to proceed beyond a few pages.  This time around, I find it to be riveting.

At 350 pages, Love in the time of cholera is not for those with attention spans that have been conditioned by Twitter or Facebook posts.  This is not one that can be forwarded via WhatsApp.  The reader has to take in the words slowly and let the imagery and the emotions sink in. The reader has to enter that world, familiarize oneself with the context and the characters, and then begin to feel like and for those characters.  The days of such books are numbered, bit by byte!

Nero to succeed Marcus Aurelius!

I know I have been harsh on Barack Obama the President.  As President, Obama always came across to me as a souped up combination of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.  He seemed to lack the inner drive to go out there and strike deals.  Sometimes,  I even think that this personality trait of his has also contributed to Democrats getting cleaned out not only from the White House and Congress, but--and more importantly--at the state level in the legislatures and governors offices all over the country.

As a person, Obama has been a model human being at the White House.  Like how Carter was, and continues to be after his presidency.  Kids all over the world can--and should--look up to the likes of Obama and Carter and tell themselves, "I want to grow up to be like them."

I am equally proud of the remarkable level of intelligence that Obama has always demonstrated.  An intelligence that is not abrasive nor audacious, but humble.  Kids all over the world can--and should--look up to him and tell themselves, "I want to grow up to be smart like him."

A reader, as much as he is a writer and an orator:

During his eight years in the White House — in a noisy era of information overload, extreme partisanship and knee-jerk reactions — books were a sustaining source of ideas and inspiration, and gave him a renewed appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.

Yes, the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.

What a contrast to the incoming president who has not for a nanosecond demonstrated anything about "the complexities and ambiguities"; in fact, he has taken to a whole new level the previous Republican president who made it clear that he did not do nuances and that he viewed the world as us-versus-them.

For Obama:

reading gave him the ability to occasionally “slow down and get perspective” and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.”

To get into somebody else's shoes is what empathy is all about.

Not even the incoming president's fanatical bootlickers will think of their Dear Leader as capable of empathy!

Obama reads widely, including fiction:

He points out, for instance, that the fiction of Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri speaks “to a very particular contemporary immigration experience,” but at the same time tell stories about “longing for this better place but also feeling displaced” — a theme central to much of American literature, and not unlike books by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow that are “steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you’re giving up.”

In contrast, can you imagine the demagogue having anything substantive to say about Diaz or Lahiri?!  As one reader phrased it in his comments to the NY Times piece:

Like Blunder Woman Sarah Palin, Trumpty Drumpty always struggles to name a single book he's ever read.

Oh, I owe to another commenter at the NY Times the title for this post.

Rewards-r-us

Could that really be the case?  Could my eyes be deceiving me?

I got closer. It really was what I thought I saw.

It was a thirtyish guy, with a neatly trimmed beard, reading a hardcover book while seated on the bench by the river, with his bicycle leaning against the bench.

A sight to behold!

"That is a rare sighting" I said.

He looked up, perhaps wondering what bird has such a strange accent.

"You are reading a book!!!" I hoped he got the multiple exclamations in my voice.  These are the situations when we really need Victor Borge's punctuation guide.  But then, we cannot be haphazard with exclamation points ;)

He smiled.  "Yeah, everybody has tablets."

"Oh, they may" I replied as I walked up to him.  "But, they are playing Pokemon, not reading."

"I think you are right" he said.

I wished him a good day and continued with my walk.

We live in strange times.  It could get even stranger.  We even have a presidential candidate, whose first name might as well be Adolf, who boasts that he does not read books.

As I have often lamented, reading books is seemingly rarely ever done anymore in the old country.  Movies and cricket, and now Facebook and WhatsApp, seem to have taken over people's down times.

A couple of years ago, when discussing market mechanisms and incentives, I briefed students about the "experiment" to reward students with a dollar for every book a student read.  They were almost unanimously against it.  The students argued that kids should not think that they would do something only if there is a reward.  "If this class were not required for your graduation, then you won't be here, right? Doesn't that mean you, too, are doing it only for the reward?" I asked them, and hastily chuckled to lighten it up.  

A recent gift that I gave was a book.  In the book, I inserted a twenty-dollar bill as well.  That was more than four months ago.  I suppose a few years down the road that book might even be dropped off at some used bookstore.  And then somebody else buys that for a quarter.  This new owner of the book keeps reading and all of a sudden a twenty-dollar bill falls out.  I would like to be there when that happens ;)

Reading books is how I got to be here.  Life itself has been a wonderful reward.  I am sure the bearded bicyclist has been collecting his rewards as well.

I am booked for the summer

Last summer was so good that I am getting a head-start this time around.  No, I am not referring to the high 90s that are forecast for this weekend.  Unseasonably warm, no doubt.  For a guy who grew up playing outdoors in the hot summer months of the old country, a thermometer reading that exceeds 75 now has become nightmarish! :(

The head-start that I am referring to is the summer reading list.  It does not matter to me whether or not I got wise after the summer of reading last time around.  I enjoyed it, while this guy, who played those long cricket matches under the intensely blistering sun and who now watches sports only from the comfort of his climate-controlled flat, couldn't wait for that summer to end ;)

Last summer, I didn't put together my list until the end of June.  This time, June is just about to begin, and I have placed my order.

You being a sharp, smart, attentive, and thinking person, immediately noticed something, right?
Yes, female authors.
And, yes, two of those will be in translation.
And, yes, all of them from different parts of the world.
And, yes, they are/were from societies that were going through intense internal struggles.
And, yes, all the three were awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

So, why these books and these authors?

It has always bothered me that while I have not read a great many books, most of what I read were authored by men.  Even the list from last summer: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and Steinbeck.  In the years past too.  I was badly in need of diversity in the form of female authors.  It is not that I have shied away from them; from Jane Austen to Jhumpa Lahiri, I have had my fill of female writers.  But, the scale was clearly tilted.  This summer reading will help straighten the scale--especially when the books are no slim volumes: 496, 560, and 272 pages, respectively.

The settings--the Soviet Union and Belarus, Romania under Ceausescu, and South Africa--will depress me through the 1,300 and more pages.  But, the human condition explored in those will, I am sure, help me understand not only my own existence but even the ongoing crises around the world, including the one that I blogged about yesterday.

There are only two things that I have to decide.  First, when do I get started.  The answer is simple--I don't know.  Second, what will be the order in which I read them?  The answer is simple--I don't know.  Hey, I am already wiser for knowing that I don't know ;)

Hey, my parents never read books to me!

Life in the adopted country means that I am simultaneously an outsider and one of them.  While some might fret about such an existence, I don't.  It is a fascinating way, a rare opportunity, that people have to understand the world and our existence.

One of the puzzling aspects has always been the hype about reading to the kids.  Especially when the kids are in bed getting ready to sleep.  Movie scenes and sitcoms routinely featured them, and continue to do so.  Academics, too, spend a great deal of time talking about the importance of reading to the kids.  Libraries organize events where books are read to kids with a great deal of theatrics as well.

I gave away what I think about this with the word that I used, right?  Hype ;)

I do not recall my parents or grandparents or anybody ever reading anything to me or any of us kids.  Not when I was sitting down. Not when I was lying down. Not when I was standing either.

But, the older folks did read.  They read the weekly magazines. They read novels. The environment of everybody reading, especially in those dark ages before the internet--heck, even before television--automatically infused in us kids the reading habit.  I can still recall my brother and I fighting over the latest issue of Ananda Vikatan that had arrived and, yes, we tore it up as we both grabbed the magazine to be the first ones to read it.  For which the elders yelled at us.  Yelling is all they did because there was no spanking the kids!

For the most part, kids are like monkeys that do what others do.  If the parents and older folks read, the kids also read.  If the parents and older folks watch television, then that is what kids also do.  Kids, I have always felt, cannot be easily fooled with advice from the older folks when that preaching is not practiced by the elder.

Thus, I had more than a chuckle when I read (get it? I read!) yet another article on the difference that reading to a child makes!

British researcher Don Holdaway was the first to point out the benefits of shared reading. He noted that children found these moments to be some of their happiest. He also found that children developed positive and strong associations with spoken language and the physical book itself, during these moments.
Since then a number of studies have been conducted showing the value of shared reading in children’s language development, especially in vocabulary and concept development.

You, with a sharp and critical mind, are thinking, "but, hey, haven't we moved past books now, in this digital age?"  Yes.  Which is why the research also spews bullshit like this:

While shared reading is often associated with print books, shared reading can be extended to digital texts such as blogs, podcasts, text messages, video and other complex combinations of print, image, sound, animation and so on.
Good video games, for example, incorporate many learning principles, such as interaction, problem-solving and risk-taking, among others.

Yes, now the kid and the parent can play "good video games" together ;)

I suppose the more "advanced" we get, the more easily we forget the simple, basic, aspects of life, such as if you want kids to do something, well, first make sure you do that yourself.  Practice what you damn preach!

Wishing for the Day “The Machine Stops”

Forrest Gump got it wrong.  It is not life that is like a box of chocolates where you never know what you gonna get.  A box of chocolates always makes it clear what kind of chocolates have been packed inside.  There is no surprise whatsoever.  It is, instead, in reading that we never know what we gonna get, which is a big reason why reading becomes so rewarding.  Of course, reading while eating chocolates is heavenly ;)

So, there I was reading Atul Gawande's homage to Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker, of course.  Gawande is a medical specialist like Sacks was, and a writer like Sacks was.  Gawande writing about Sacks is, thus, to be expected like knowing you are going to taste milk chocolate if the box said it contained milk chocolates.

But, I did not know what Gawande's comments might include. And therein lies the beauty of reading.  In his essay, Gawande writes "Sacks had asked me whether I’d read Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”  I remembered a reference to this, but in a different context.  It was more than four years ago in an interview with Jaron Lanier, which I watched after reading a lengthy profile of him in the New Yorker.

Lanier is often described as “visionary,” a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills. In the nineteen-eighties, he helped pioneer the field of virtual reality, and he is often credited with having coined the term. He has also dabbled in film. In 2001, he advised the writers of “Minority Report,” Steven Spielberg’s film about a dystopian future. Since 2006, he has worked as a consultant at Microsoft Research.
More recently, he has become the go-to pundit for people lamenting the social changes wrought by modern technology.

Lanier is a technology guru who worries about the dehumanizing effects of a rapidly evolving technology, and the profile essay highlighted our collective struggle on this issue:

[Part] of what Lanier finds most regrettable about Facebook—the way it mediates social contact—is precisely what makes it so appealing to most people. “We use technology this way all the time,” Andy van Dam, a professor of computer science at Brown University, notes. “To create a layer of insulation. We send an e-mail so we don’t have to call someone on the phone. Or we call someone so we don’t have to go over to their house.” Many of us also use technology, he might have added, when we’re too isolated: when someone wants to find a new friend just because he’s feeling alone—or because he’s living with his father in a freezing tent in the desert.

It was after reading that profile essay that I decided to watch an interview with Jaron Lanier, where he referred to Forster--the same reference that Sacks had made when talking with Gawande.  You se how reading makes life so fascinating?

Gawande ends his essay with a reference to Forster's "The Machine Stops":

It’s about a world in which individuals live isolated in cells, fearful of self-reliance and direct experience, dependent on plate screens, instant messages, and the ministrations of an all-competent Machine. Yet there is also a boy who, like Sacks, saw what was missing. The boy tells his mother, “The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

We live in a world that Forster wrote about back in 1909.  Screen time of all kinds.  Instant messages.  Tweets and Facebook status reports and blog posts like this all passing of as knowledge, just as Forster had feared.  We have replaced real human interactions with virtual ones.  So "satisfied" with the virtual interactions, and thinking that the virtual even eliminates the need for real interactions, we seem to believe that visiting with parents, children, friends, is not needed anymore.  We live in our own cells.

Through his writing and his own life Oliver Sacks reminded us all about us humans in the flesh, writes Gawande:

He was drawn to the homes of the sick, the institutions of the most frail and disabled, the company of the unusual and the “abnormal.” He wanted to see humanity in its many variants and to do so in his own, almost anachronistic way—face to face, over time, away from our burgeoning apparatus of computers and algorithms. And, through his writing, he showed us what he saw.

Like I said, you never know what you gonna get when you read.

Why am I stress-free? From slow food to slow reading to just being slow!!!

Way back, when I had hair on my head, and when it was black, and when my beard had nothing but a few strands of grey, there were quite a bit of discussions on the Slow Food movement.  Ok, quite a bit is an exaggeration because nobody in the real world that I interacted with had any freaking notion of the movement itself.  As with most other ideas, the skeptic that I am, I did not become any fanatical follower; even though I love creating tasty food in the kitchen, I don't always start at step one.

There is a lot to be said about slowing down.  Whether it is on the road, or in the kitchen, or even on the bike path, a slower and an observing approach that leads to introspection is a life that is immensely richer than rushing through life when the destination is all the same for the every single one of us.  But then,of course, this atheist also knows that there is nothing beyond that ultimate destination, which means, well, go ahead and live a life that suits you well--as long as you don't bug me about it ;)

For most of us, one of the pleasures in life, especially back when we were kids came from reading.  Reading for pleasure.  Reading for entertainment.  And serious reading too.  But, in the age of rushing around, even uninterrupted reading has become as rare as people cooking at home.  Ok, I am exaggerating, again, but, hey, what's life if we don't exaggerate!  Those who love fishing tell tall tales about their catch.  We men exaggerate about the size of the very thing that dangles freely from our bodies.  And women exaggerate about, well, every damn thing! ;)

But, seriously, how we read--and, therefore, think--is changing and changing rapidly.  How often do you read completely immersed in the content like how you used to as a young teenager?  Right?  It won't surprise you, therefore, to know that a few want to slow down in order to read slowly. Like the Slow Food movement with food.

Slow reading advocates seek a return to the focused reading habits of years gone by, before Google, smartphones and social media started fracturing our time and attention spans. Many of its advocates say they embraced the concept after realizing they couldn't make it through a book anymore.

The set of words at the end of that quote is the key issue: "after realizing they couldn't make it through a book anymore."  We are so distracted that we have pretty much lost the ability to make it through a book.  Heck, even making it through an article in the New Yorker.

Hey, you are still reading this?  Good for you.  Quite an achievement; congratulate yourself! ;)

You can, therefore, imagine the frustrations of a typical student in my classes, or in other classes too where students have to read a lot.  To read without distractions so that they can think about the issues.  To read and think so that they can then put together convincing arguments.

Did you read about the benefits of slow reading?  From my own life, I can attest to every one of those--except "enriches vocabulary."  Big and fancy words stump me for I am no sesquipedalian ;)

So, here is a weekend assignment for you.  Shut off the phone, computer, television, radio, and everything else that could interrupt you.  Pick up something you had always wanted to read, or would enjoy reading.   Head to your favorite spot at home.  Read uninterrupted for at least thirty minutes.

There is always a chance that you will begin to like that so much that you won't come back to this blog ever.  That is a risk I will gladly take.  Because, I know that you are one damn lazy reader who won't shut the devices off for even thirty minutes and read a damn book.  See you are still reading this, aren't you? ;)