just keep reading

Norm Geras, displaying the unfailing common sense to which his readers have become accustomed, suggests the obvious for those who worry that the internet is ruining their book habit:

Me, I don’t get it. It’s true that sometimes, if you have to switch rapidly from one type of activity to another, there can be a problem. For example, if you’ve been in charge of boisterous young children for some hours, and have to sit down immediately to something requiring intense mental concentration, you may find that you’d be better placed coming to it after a break. Switching from much online hopping and skipping about to serious reading is no different. The problem isn’t with the internet. And the solution is straightforward. Here’s one version of it: however much of your spare time you spend online, spend at least 50 percent of that reading (books and such). You’ll find you can do it just as well as ever. This is if you want to. And if you don’t, then you don’t. But that’s you, in that case, and not the internet. [e.a.]

Geras was responding to the hand-wringing of this guy.

The number of links I’d have to provide for previous hues and cries about the death of books and reading would fill all the space that WordPress offers, so I won’t even try. I have written about the supposed death of reading before, though: here.