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Originally Posted by hermes
I admit it - I am ambivalent about the wisdom of reading as a past time. Especially as a past time - that very concept.I am reminded of a western monk, a Tibetan Buddhist monk I used to chat with sometimes on the street. We were talking about the habit of reading. He suggested that people read out of a neurosis, a nervous wish to busy their minds with useless information, ideas and mental images because they are afraid of the content of their own minds. 'Well, that's why I read", was my immediate reaction.
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Mine would be more along the lines of "You have a very limited imigination, if that's the only motive you can think of. Or perhaps, as is so very common, you see in others what you see in yourself. I read for escapism, pure and simple."
Quote:
Originally Posted by hermes
Anyway, aside from that philosophical consideration of reading, I am contemplating the social usefulness of reading. According to what I see on the 'idiot box' (grampa's word for television), on one of the few stations with anything edifying, Knowledge Network's 'Empire of the Word', private silent reading is a relatively new phenomena - 14th of 15th century if my memory serves me correctly. I used to tell my ESL students that reading with lips reading is taken to be the sign of a moron, but this is actually the way we read for centuries. According to my own (oops) reading, History of Private Life, a very tedious tome written by French scholars (their writing style or that of the translators drives me crazy), it wasn't until the later 17th century that people read books alone.
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Unlike speech, reading is not an inborn ability. (You
cannot stop a young child from learning spoken language if it's spoken in their presence.) Our brains physically rewire themselves around the ability to read, and the plasticity to so do fades at a fairly young age. What that means is that if you don't start learning to read at a very, very young age, you will never develop very far in your ability to do so. Education of children that young was pretty rare prior to the Renaissance.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hermes
So, to my real point...
I am captivating by the idea of combining social reading and technical advances, viz. group reading from an ereader. Small groups of 4-8 sitting under a tree listening to someone, the most literate of them, reading aloud some classic like Man of LaMancha.
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Such things happen, though I'd suggest you'd want the one with the best reading voice, not the most literate. The two are quite different, you know.