For reasons that escape me, I receive a copy of New York magazine every week. I've never subscribed to the magazine, I don't pay for it, and I live in suburban Los Angeles. But still, New York magazine arrives. I often spend a few minutes flipping through it, because it reminds me of just how diverse the world really is. In other words, it reminds me that I live in a sunny West Coast mother-bubble. The articles frequently shock me, sometimes horrify me. And it's not as if I'm a complete neophite; I lived in New York City for three yearsm and worked as an editorial assistant at a slick city magazine there.
Anyway, this week New York magazine arrives, and there are some year wrap-up pieces, and the one that caught my eye was called When Lit Blew Into Bits by Sam Anderson. I read it with fascination -- because, to be honest, I felt completely outside the experience Anderson was talking about. He was describing a world in which reading is so fragmented that few people have the desire or the ability of the time to read a long narrative. He was talking about the ways that technology (blogs, ipods, etc) has trained us to read "text fragments narrated by radically diverse voices."
I'm reading this piece, thinking, huh? I just finished reading the 1,000-plus- page Pillars of the Earth, and then started in on Kathryn Stocket's hefty, The Help. My 8th grader is reading Pride and Prejudice for fun, Lord of the Flies for school. My 12th grader is reading Hamlet for school, and re-reading the Twilight series for the third or fourth time, for fun (hey, she's under a lot of stress; she needs some mindless page-turning.) My husband just finished a Gore Vidal novel, and is thinking about reading that Grisham pirate book, even though the reviews haven't been great. Is my family completely alone in this?
There is nothing like sitting down to read a long narrative. I don't think anything will ever replace it. The format by which it is delivered may change, but not the human desire for the slow unfolding of story. Anderson talked about the coming "interactive hypertexts we'll all be neuroskimming on the mind screens of our Kortex-Kindles." We may indeed come to a place where reading happens via some super souped-up whiz-bang technology. But I don't believe for a second that we will move away from long narrative.
Do you? Read more: Sam Anderson on When the Meganovel Shrank - The 00's Issue -- New York Magazine http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62514/comments.html#ixzz0ZMG2WqWc
3 comments:
I hope he's wrong.
If this were true, why would there be so many people blogging about so many books? Why would anyone care about the Kindle if they weren't going to read anything anyway? Perhaps there's been a shift away from books, but they are by no means dead. People have been reading less since television came into their homes but the narrative has now survived over 50 years since the first television found itself in someone's living room.
Exactly!
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