Unlike some guy I know whose name I should not mention as it might get me sued what with all this EIT Law--his name is David--who wrote that the notes he wrote should not be taken seriously, this note should be taken seriously:
I read the other day, an article on reading. It talked of how people (yeah, people. Meaning you, people...) today have gotten more estranged with reading. We are living in an era where we are constantly bombarded with updates: on TVs, on radios (for those who still listen to them *snigger?*), newspapers, tabloids, Net.
Especially, Net.
You open your social network account, wherever your account it is: F********R, T*****R, P***K, M*****E, M**T, F****U, B**O, mm, what else?
... Okay, that's all of it.
And you'll see updates, updates and more updates: which football team lost, who lost a bet (and a house, and a wife) because that $*#Tt* football team lost, who won a bet because that d@#*ed football team lost, what meals this-and-that made today for this-and-that's loveliest, who sang better today, whose bombs exploded where bringing how many closer to wherever (PIT might laugh at this. Or not) etc, and so on, and so forth...
Of course, what I mean by reading here is not reading those updates consisting of no more than 160 characters (who decided on the number, anyway?!): I'm talking about reading books. I'm talking about delving into a world which may not be wholly similar, or acutely different than ours. I'm maybe talking about reading fictions, but you can also get a kick reading non-fiction books. I'm talking about leaving the present and going back ten, twenty, one hundred, thousands of years into the Earth's past to see the making of the civilization, to read about humans killing humans, strong nations straddling the weaker ones, loves bloom--lost--crushed--rega
You might argue those are things you get "reading" status updates, breaking news or latest gossips in tabloids, but I'm talking about world-shattering, nations-building ones, people, come on...
Or, you can jump to distant or not-too-distant future and see how the world of tomorrow unfurls. Though this kind of reading material belongs almost exclusively to fictions you can see the reflection of the past or present world in those worlds of tomorrow because that's where the authors draw their inspirations from anyway: Humans change but a little.
You might say that you don't have time to sit with a good book. I said that.
What I do now is reading on the train, on the bus, in bed, in the john.
What I read now are mostly e-books, either on my PDA or my NDS.
It is a luxury to sit down with a good book, real book I mean, and to smell the paper and feel weight of the book in your hands, but I don't stop reading.
No one should.
