As an English teacher/major and long time bibliophile, it might be strange to hear that I think reading is hard. (So is writing. That's a post for a different day.) But, yeah, I do. There's a reason why books aren't the engine of pop-culture entertainment the way it was in some old-timey good ole days. By reducing the amount of time we have to spend on necessities, we open up that time for improving our pursuits of recreation. Diversification of entertainment and technological changes has pushed aside older modes of diversion.
In other words, there's too much cool stuff to do and not enough time to do it.
But books are hard to read, even if they are--pound for pound--one of the cheapest forms of paid entertainment around. I mean, how much does a movie ticket cost? Here in Utah, it's $12 or so. That's about $6 an hour for the story you're enjoying--passively, at a controlled, non-interactive speed. A book might cost you $7 and last for over twenty hours--or longer, depending on the length. That's a great ROI. Even videogames struggle to hit even a "one-hour-equals-one-dollar" level of equivalent exchange, though that is, in part, because they can hit at about $60 a pop. While it's not unusual for games to give you dozens of hours of gameplay, they don't normally give you that much narrative--that much story.
But why is reading hard? I think it's because it's unnatural. Sure, we've all been trained on how to do it since we were little kids, but the actual process of reading is immensely complicated. There are plenty of people who have done research and can describe what goes on in the mind, but simply looking at the basics, there's a lot that we have to do to make meaning. And if the meaning we're trying to create is abstract--books on philosophy, for example--it becomes even more difficult.
Take, for example, a randomly selected segment from Slavoj Zizek's book The Parallax View.
I'm back in the school year, and my students and I are reading our excerpts of Dante's Divine Comedy, focusing on The Inferno right now. I'm enjoying it--as I always do--and am reading a new translation this year that I am enjoying a great deal more than some of the ones I've used in the past. But I was still looking at the bottom of the page to see how much further I had to go. Now, admittedly, there were a lot of things on my plate that I needed to do--lots of work for this evening--so I was trying to see how late I was going to be up. All that aside, I was struggling to read because it is a difficult thing to do.
The difficulty of reading, I think, is why people enjoy it, actually. Now, of course, there are additional aspects to this. Being in an immersive world, gaining insights into people in a way that only the novel can do, and other incentives surely bring people back to this centuries' old pastime. However, if I'm being honest, I'd have to say that part of why I like to read so much is because others choose not to make time for it. There's a smug satisfaction that I get by knowing that I have done what others only claim they wish they did ("I would love to read more, but I'm just so busy!"). Of course, that smugness is quickly tempered when I see what my friends at school read--and how much they read, and how frequently they finish their reading lists--but it gives me a little something.
Nevertheless, reading is a difficult process, one that doesn't necessarily grow easier with time. As additional responsibilities and pressures mount, it requires more effort to read anything.
And that's a shame.
In other words, there's too much cool stuff to do and not enough time to do it.
But books are hard to read, even if they are--pound for pound--one of the cheapest forms of paid entertainment around. I mean, how much does a movie ticket cost? Here in Utah, it's $12 or so. That's about $6 an hour for the story you're enjoying--passively, at a controlled, non-interactive speed. A book might cost you $7 and last for over twenty hours--or longer, depending on the length. That's a great ROI. Even videogames struggle to hit even a "one-hour-equals-one-dollar" level of equivalent exchange, though that is, in part, because they can hit at about $60 a pop. While it's not unusual for games to give you dozens of hours of gameplay, they don't normally give you that much narrative--that much story.
But why is reading hard? I think it's because it's unnatural. Sure, we've all been trained on how to do it since we were little kids, but the actual process of reading is immensely complicated. There are plenty of people who have done research and can describe what goes on in the mind, but simply looking at the basics, there's a lot that we have to do to make meaning. And if the meaning we're trying to create is abstract--books on philosophy, for example--it becomes even more difficult.
Take, for example, a randomly selected segment from Slavoj Zizek's book The Parallax View.
This also means that ontological difference is not "maximal", between all beings, the highest genus, and something else/more/beyond, but rather, "minimal", the bare minimum of a difference not between beings but between the minimum of an entity and the void, nothing.Aside from missing context, just look at how many commas are there! How's anyone supposed to get any intellectual momentum when there are so many pauses? It's ridiculous.
I'm back in the school year, and my students and I are reading our excerpts of Dante's Divine Comedy, focusing on The Inferno right now. I'm enjoying it--as I always do--and am reading a new translation this year that I am enjoying a great deal more than some of the ones I've used in the past. But I was still looking at the bottom of the page to see how much further I had to go. Now, admittedly, there were a lot of things on my plate that I needed to do--lots of work for this evening--so I was trying to see how late I was going to be up. All that aside, I was struggling to read because it is a difficult thing to do.
The difficulty of reading, I think, is why people enjoy it, actually. Now, of course, there are additional aspects to this. Being in an immersive world, gaining insights into people in a way that only the novel can do, and other incentives surely bring people back to this centuries' old pastime. However, if I'm being honest, I'd have to say that part of why I like to read so much is because others choose not to make time for it. There's a smug satisfaction that I get by knowing that I have done what others only claim they wish they did ("I would love to read more, but I'm just so busy!"). Of course, that smugness is quickly tempered when I see what my friends at school read--and how much they read, and how frequently they finish their reading lists--but it gives me a little something.
Nevertheless, reading is a difficult process, one that doesn't necessarily grow easier with time. As additional responsibilities and pressures mount, it requires more effort to read anything.
And that's a shame.
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