The myth of the golden age of reading

Re:The myth of the golden age of reading by edgarvaldes on Monday September 30, 2019 @06:01PM (#21120093)

My personal experience: I no longer get absorbed for hours reading a book, as was the case when I was younger. The free time available is no excuse, because I spend a lot of time in HN and the like. Before, reading was almost inevitable, I did need to make an effort to put the books apart, nowadays I need a lot of will to put away the phone to grab the same books that I adored some years ago.

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Re:The myth of the golden age of reading by thaumasiotes on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @11:04AM (#21126085)

This is also true for me, except that I still put in the hours reading books by authors that I like. So to a large degree what's been lost is the willingness to go ahead and read iffy books.

It makes a large difference, but I think focusing on the presence of "additional distractions" misses something about what's going on.

(I'm not claiming that I spend the freed-up time doing valuable things, or that reading mediocre books wouldn't be valuable - I'm just saying that the fall in reading doesn't apply to the activity itself so much as to the majority of content to which it would apply.)

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Re:The myth of the golden age of reading by d883kd8 on Monday September 30, 2019 @06:29PM (#21120270)

I have experienced a similar dip in the level of, uh, retention and engagement that books can elicit from me. Recently I kind of feel it turning around, and there seem to be two main causes: using time on airplanes to get deep into a book, and intentionally seeking out books that would suit my taste.

The airplane thing is a small one and may or may not suit your lifestyle. But the bigger thing is that as a child or a teen, everything is new to you. There are some books that are just about guaranteed to suck you in and expand your worldview if you've never encountered them before. They are the low-hanging-fruit curriculum books that just about anyone will benefit from. Once you've exhausted the Catch-22s, the Mark Twains, the Tolkiens or Austens or Heinleins of the world, you'll have to spend more effort to find books that really resonate with you.

For me, this meant following sites like The Baffler and Electric Literature. I hope if you figure out where online people are reviewing and promoting the books you enjoy, you'll find yourself funneled toward books that are capable of drawing you in again.

As a concrete recommendation, I just finished The Overstory by Richard Wright, which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction this year, and absolutely could not put it down.

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Re:The myth of the golden age of reading by mikestew on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @11:18AM (#21126288)

Books not so much, maybe because there are many hundreds of years of output from which to choose. But, man, movies and TVs are that way for me (ignoring the obvious reboots from my childhood or teen years). A little from column A, a sprinkling of column B, and...yeah, I've seen this before, it just had a different title. What's the saying, nothing new has been written since Shakespeare?

I'll give the sites you recommend a whirl, thanks.

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Re:The myth of the golden age of reading by naravara on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @11:20AM (#21126313)

Part of it is just working the muscle. I've basically killed everything in my phone that notifies except for text messages and phone calls. And even those go quiet when I set it to Do Not Disturb.

From there it's about training. It's almost like meditation where the more you do it, the longer your stretches of focus can become and the more quickly you can click your brain into "reading more." To ease back in I found graphic novels were a great start. They accustom you to sitting still and getting absorbed into things.

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