[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.

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 or 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.

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.