There’s a lot of buzz about the new Amazon Kindle.
Yes, it’s cool, but I’m not overwhelmed conceptually because I’ve been reading novels, plays, stories, you name it, in my Palm Pilot for years. I get sneers and raised eyebrows from certain quarters, but folks–I could care less where the words are posted, in a rare collector’s edition or in my Palm: as long as I can read it comfortably, the story is doing its job.
Newsweek’s cover story this past week leads with Amazon.com’s genius founder Jeff Bezos and the amazing Kindle, but mostly it’s about reading itself–the future of it, the demise or transformation (take your pick) of reading as a pastime in the New Millenium.
It’s not news that reading has been falling off for years. I prefer to see it as a realignment, a "market adjustment" to pressure from competing entertainment sources. I can live with that. What disturbs me, however, is a trend I began to observe in the classroom: fiction writers who don’t read fiction.
In my experience, if you’re a writer, non-writers will assume there’s something amiss if you haven’t read everything. But writing takes time and intense concentration on subject for days, months, even years. That’s a lot of time and energy that can’t be spent with your nose in a book.
So how well-read should a writer be? No less than Norman Mailer said he was always disappointing young writers who assumed he would have read their work.
You can’t read everything, he observed, and still get your wrk done.
What about you? Are you a voracious reader? Do you read fast or slow? Would you rather write than read? Let’s have a poll….
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