I've been thinking about my reading habits lately, primarily because after some reflection, I can't remember the last book I read cover to cover. I think it was Elaine Pagels and Karen King's Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. A good book. Pagels, more than just about any other writer on theological topics, is capable of distilling information on extremely complex topics and elucidating them in simple language. However, sometimes this asset can be a weakness. I definitely wanted to hear more about how Judas was special because of his mission to hand Jesus over to the authorities, as some Gnostics and other non-Orthodox groups in the second century believed. If Jesus had to die to atone for human sins, I feel like this makes an exegesis of Judas' mission essential, and in light of the newly discovered (relatively speaking) gospel, it makes sense that some early Christians would view Judas as special--after all, he had to die for the cause just as Jesus did. Unfortunately, Pagles concerns herself less with a literary/critical interpretation and focuses on the more the political and social arguments raging amongst Christians at during the second century: the role of martyrs and martyrdom, the reasons provided by Christian apologists for Christ's death, etc. Normally, I'd be more interested in these historical aspects, but I've read several other works detailing those issues, and very few scholars do exegesis better than Pagels. But I digress...
The point is that I think I finished that book in August or September 2008 and even though I've read a ton since then, I don't think I've started on page one and ended on the last page of any of the books I've picked up. When I was younger, this was intolerable. When I started reading a book, it was a point of personal pride or possibly even a mild obsession that I finish the book. I once told this to my high school librarian and she nodded knowingly, saying she too had once been a compulsive start-to-finish reader but learned over time that there were simply too many good books out there to waste any time on the bad ones. I resolved then to allow myself the pleasure of saying "no thanks" and closing the book forever. This was back when essentially all I read was fiction. Now, however, fiction makes up probably somewhere between 10 and 15% of my reading list as history, philosophy, and science have taken over the bulk of books in my "to read" pile. This makes it more difficult to read books all the way through since with non-fiction it's much less a necessity than with fiction.
But that's not really the whole story. The real change in my reading habits, and what tends to prevent me from finishing things, is (drum roll please) the internet. I sit online reading stuff all the time. News articles, wikipedia articles, silly internet joke sites, stuff from JSTOR, blogs, Facebook posts, you name it. The hypertextuality and structureless randomness of surfing means that I retain less of what I read and that finality, that sense of accomplishment that comes from finishing a book, is lacking. Has the instant gratification that comes with internet surfing turned even we voracious readers into mindless information consumers? I just started using Google Reader a few days ago and I think I read no fewer 25 articles yesterday. Maybe this will provide some semblance of structure but I doubt it. I don't begrudge the internet or feel that the medium is somehow less worthy than a book, but so far, nothing has replaced ink on dead trees for me. Unlike a book, you can't "finish the internet." Or can you? I'm currently reading Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and it seems a likely candidate to be the next book I read to the end. Maybe I'll blog about that next...
This is an interesting post. You said in your initial entry that you want conversations on here (whereas I just want people to tell me how smart I am), so let's see what I can do...
ReplyDeleteLet's start at the end...
I really appreciate what you say about the internet it's a trap I fall into as well. And there is a lack of retention that I don't really understand. I read something about evolution in National Geographic and I remember it pretty well. I read something about evolution online, and I hardly remember a thing. I do find, however, that there are some instances in which I do retain information from the internet.
I could be considered an expert (or at least something in the same solar system as an expert) in three different categories: fiction writing, baseball, and certain guitar-centered areas of the music world. I find when I am reading about one of these things that I retain what I read on the internet quite well. I think this is mostly because I fully understand the vocabulary involved. When I am reading about another interest, particularly a scientific one, I retain less. Again, I think this has to do with vocabulary. Take a book like "The Elegant Universe", which I read as part of my research for my last book. It is written specifically for general consumption and has been through several editors to make sure it works. This isn't really the case for most things on the internet. I recently all but gave up searching for information on physics on the internet. There's plenty of good stuff, I just can't understand 75% of it. I'll have to stick to books and magazines for now.
As for the joy of finishing a book, I feel your pain, I suppose, but the solution is probably to read more books that you can actually imagine wanting to finish (be they fiction or nonfiction).
Last, if I ever meet Sean Covey on the street, I will bunch him in the nose (he's all the rage among touchy-feely high school administrators right now).
I should have also mentioned that part of the problem isn't just the internet, it's also the fact that I also have gotten into the habit of putting down books I'm actually interested in, because I tend to read half a dozen books at once, and it's oftentimes difficult to keep track of all of them. Over the past few months, I've been doing some revising and extra research into the paper I'm turning in for my graduate school applications (it's a comparison of legal double standards for witches and for practitioners of proto-sciences like astrology), and I've picked up a ton of books on the subject, and I read like 50-75 pages out of all of them....probably upwards of a thousand pages all told but I didn't finish ANY of them. That's what bugs me.
ReplyDeleteWhen we worked at VMS, I felt like scanning and skimming words for 8 hours a day made it very difficult for me to want to go home and look at a book, whereas 8 hours of editing video did not spoil my interest in television. This has mostly gone away, but it set a trend of not finishing things that I feel I'm, unfortunately, still following...
I wouldn't beat yourself up over the books you've been looking at for this paper. That's just the nature of research. I will say that I can't read half a dozen books at a time. The best I can really do is three, and, frankly, that is pushing it for me. It is hard to try not to do more though because there is so much I am interested in.
ReplyDeleteVMS breaks you in strange ways. The further I get from it, the more I realize it. That place is weird and scary.
VMS does cause permanent cognitive impairment. I bet I could prove it, too, with just the right amount of research grant money ;-)
ReplyDeleteI don't find that Internet reading detracts from my being able to finish or enjoy a book. It does, however, keep me from writing when I should be writing. It's just as you said, you can never finish the Internet. There's always more information out there waiting to be discovered. If I get stuck in paragraph that I'm writing (poor Claire has been standing at the same crosswalk since before Christmas, and you'd know what I was talking about if you'd read my posted chapters), I'll go out on the web to Google up some inspiration only to find myself sucked into a time sink. I'll suddenly find that I've wasted two hours, having acquired dozens of useless facts that don't pertain in any way whatsoever to the paragraph I still haven't finished writing.
Just last night I was looking up some facts on those damnable chirping crosswalk signs for the blind and ended up watching about six Beyonce videos. It was a WTF moment. But after I shut down the computer, I fell happily into Wuthering Heights, intending to wade in for about 20 pages and ended up putting it down only after having read a good fourth of the book.
And, honestly, don't beat yourself up about it.