I'm going to give those tragedies you suggested a try.
What's wrong with "instant entertainment"? Sometimes a book won't get good until the halfway point and depending on your reading speed that might take a few hours. The most interesting book I read last year was The Zombie Survival Guide. It's been a long time since I had that much fun reading a book.
My point wasn't that video games are or aren't literature. My point is that the ones doing the study of video games as an artistic narrative and film are the English departments, at least at the school I attended.Originally Posted by JCamilo
"You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too." - Herodotus
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Unless the departaments there are strange, this is absolutely natural, as the study of languages is bigger than literature itself (in the sense the language is not just found in books), and this of course would not qualify a video-game or movies as literature, but as their own medium.
I agree. I also don't like Harry Potter, don't consider it good literature. But for kids, it's okay and it does get them reading. It also blows the idea that it is other media that keeps them from reading--computers, movies, DVD's, etc. Obviously, they will read if it is something they find compelling. I have talked to kids who read a Harry Potter book in 2 or 3 days. Kids who balk at having to read a novel for school. The problem is the lack of what is to them compelling reading material and also how literature is presented to them in school. It's too much about it being good for you and not enough about enjoying it.
Well the answer to that be that whens they git their book, they be put fast asleep after the first page and a half.I live in California, and I know very few people here who actually enjoy reading, especially if they're high schoolers. Why? And I very rarely consider romance actual reading; mostly they're fluff, excluding classics like Jane Eyre or Austen. It's not that people can't read, it's just that they honestly don't enjoy it. One reason is, I daresay, that they don't think there would be material they like. I know for a fact that this is untrue, because I have a friend who didn't read a lot because she didn't know what to read. Between me and the library, she found a niche. What is behind it all? Is it really because of video games, cell phones, ipods, computers, etc.?
For me, to not like reading is unfathomable. There is sooooo much to be found in books, it is incomprehensible to dislike them, especially considering that there is something for everyone. If I with my notoriously eclectic tastes can find enough material, then so can anyone else.
I believe every generation asks this question .....
Why is there such a loss of interest in reading? When I went to high school in the early 50s, I certainly thought that reading was a lost enterprise. And we didn't have video games or much television to other wise occupy our time. None of my contemporaries read much of anything. I remember in my senior year, one semester we studied Macbeth and the final semester Hamlet. I was in an accelerated literature class for the best students, but everyone hated reading these plays. And so it goes. Reading has never been a popular pastime, but as kids grow older, some discover reading and the pleasure it brings.
Just look at the bookstores of today. There is such a plethora of literature available. When I was young, if the library didn't have the book you couldn't get it. I remember that about 1951 the movie of Scaramouche was made starring Stewart Granger. I saw the movie and wanted to read the book, but it just wasn't available. I don't think there is any worry about reading being a lost activity. Kids will go on hating the classics, but many will mature into avid readers. I absolutely detested Eliot's Silas Marner, but a few years out of school, I wodered how this book became so good in such a short space of time.
I agree, especially with the advent of amazon and the gutenburg project, people don't even need to leave their home to get books.
The classics probably will only ever appeal to a minority of people as something enjoyable to read, but reading as a past time is, if not spreading, at least becoming more accessible.
This is the information age, after all.
Sit on the London Underground some day and you will find people reading all around you, all ordinary people reading some very exrtra-ordinary books! You will find more people reading than listening to music (I listen to audio books while travelling so don't know how many of those with earphones actually 'read' instead of enjoy music.)
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
I have to disagree with you there. Yeah, a lot of people read on the underground, but the majority of the time they're reading the paper. I once spoke to a woman who was reading Moby Dick but I've never ever seen anyone reading any particularly 'serious' books. Also, pretty much everyone listens to music, all the time now. I think I'm the only person that doesn't but that's only because I have such big ears that headphones always fall out. That and my iPod being broken. But I'd say that far less people read than listen to music on the underground.
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
Books will survive and reading will not die as long as there are writers who can captivate and mesmerise readers. But it indeed is a fact that the number of writers who can make readers spell-bound and who can hold readers eager till the last page are dwindling. Those writers who know how to take-off do not know how to land and those who know how to land take-off awkwardly. Before going through one or two pages we learns that this writer has nothing to say and does not know how to say things. As one comes across more and more such books, his interest in reading dies, especially if he is young. If reading books seems to be rarer among people, it is due to bad authorship. It is true that more and more books are being printed nowadays. And it is equally true that lesser and lesser books are being read though being purchased. Though books are not for decoration, nothing more decorates a home than books. Because a writer is contemporary, his books needn't necessarily mean liked and popular. Books written by Robert Ludlum, Robin Cook, Frederich Forsyth, Alistaire Mac Lean, Arthur Hailey, Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, Michael Chrichton and Mario Puzo are sold in hundred thousands, because they have a thrilling story to tell. But many famous and fast selling authors are just boosted up who are the responsible for so many loathing reading. People like to think that if it is a printed book, it would be good and interesting to read. But when disappointed a number of times, the flame of his interest in reading dies out. Television, Video and Internet are not at all responsible for the dying out of reading, because they cannot be carried with some one like a book, opened anytime one pleases and read lying anywhere, even under a shaded tree. Paperbacks were what revolutionised the habit of reading, and the invension of India Paper by the Oxford University Press Manager. Not because they became cheap, but because they became easy and light to be carried. Hard cover editions have the risk of slipping from our hands and dilapidating our chest cavity if we try to read them lying somewhere. Change in book sizes to the larger also affected reading habits adversely. The universally liked and appreciated Demi 1/8 is disappearing, which suits the economy of the printers and publishers alone, not the taste and flavour of the universal reading public. To retain and rekindle the interest in reading, it is good to seek books by the time-tested old authors. Since their books stood the severe test of time, they would be good anyway. And they are many fortunately.
I personally have noticed that the kids around me don't read because they are only looking for entertainment. Why spend an hour reading a chapter of a book, when you can spend that time at the theater? Reading definitely requires more concentration and energy from the individual, while something like a movie or a video game does that for you. The kids who do read aren't interested in literature, because it's too long. So I guess my point is, kids just don't have the attention span required to read a book. They've been trained that way. I think that if children are read to by their parents, starting at a young age, and the time the spend playing video games and watching movies is limited, they'll start reading again...
Video killed the radio star.
True story.
"We look at the world, at governments, across the spectrum, some with more freedom, some with less. And we observe that the more repressive the State is, the closer life under it resembles Death. If dying is deliverance into a condition of total non-freedom, then the State tends, in the limit, to Death. The only way to address the problem of the State is with counter-Death, also known as Chemistry." -- Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
I am considered a weirdo because I take literature so seriously.
I absolutely love the diction of Spenser, Chaucer and Shakespeare .
The use of "-th" instead of an "-s" in "doth" , "hath" etc is just so lovely to the ear.
I love the use of archaisms to add humour.
I go out alot and people are much more interested in Jersey Shore and Charlie Sheen Tweets or what David Beckham has to say about global warming.
We cannot sweep under the rug that we have had a cultural dumming down of massive scale-not just reading.
The news itself it just a lot of shouting, sound bites, and sensational for the "sheeple".
There is hope though, I just do not know where to find it. I think our technology has far exceeded our humanity, perhaps it's a case of just too much information.
When was this literate and superior society that we are dumbed down from? In the UK at least, people were educated as factory fodder in the post war period, and this was hardly an education equivalent to today's. Literacy rates have gone up, not down, though they are by no means perfect.
Perhaps you are referring to what people choose to read and respond to at the moment, but this is a short term view. Not all, and probably most of those tweeters you mention won't be doing that in a few years time. Things move on, and perhaps on to better literature. In the long run, how interesting is celebrity culture? I don't think it can sustain a normal person for too long.
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