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Old 06-12-2011, 03:02 AM   #2
taustin
Wizard
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hermes View Post
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.
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 View Post
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.
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 View Post
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.
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.
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