nonexistentreads
I finally started to feel guilty about all the friend requests that have been piling up on Good Reads, so I signed on and approved all of you that have been trying to friend me. Then I realized that I hadn't put a single book on my list on that site, ever, as far as I can recall. I also hadn't looked at what anyone else was reading, since I have my own backlog of about eleventy-jillion books that I want to read. So I deleted my account.
I don't read enough to get anything out of that site or give anything -- as people who have loaned me books or observed me reading a book know, I read incredibly slowly. It takes me about six months to finish an average-length novel, not because it takes me ten minutes to read a page or anything like that, but because I read books so rarely, mostly on the subway. Then I lose interest in what I'm reading for another month or two.
I'm a terrible book reader, even though I'm writing constantly and read things all day too -- I guess I'm one of those harbingers of the apocalypse, the end of the age of the book. When our children and grandchildren are asking us about how there used to be books (or more books, at any rate) and did we read them, I'm afraid I'll have to be the one saying "hmm yeah, never did have that much use for books." I mean, I have a bookshelf full of them (dusty) and I was a voracious reader as a child, all the way from the age of two. I have a slew of favorite fiction authors (Nabokov, Joyce, Faulkner, Murakami, O'Connor)... but I tend to think of books as something I used to do when I was younger.
I wouldn't want the great works of literature to disappear, but I'm a little disturbed to say that I don't think it would bother me too much if the medium died out and was replaced with other forms of communication, written and otherwise. I don't know why it fails to bother me; maybe it has something to do with being turned off by the way book-reading has a sort of status symbol (certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of books, of course). What do you think?
I don't read enough to get anything out of that site or give anything -- as people who have loaned me books or observed me reading a book know, I read incredibly slowly. It takes me about six months to finish an average-length novel, not because it takes me ten minutes to read a page or anything like that, but because I read books so rarely, mostly on the subway. Then I lose interest in what I'm reading for another month or two.
I'm a terrible book reader, even though I'm writing constantly and read things all day too -- I guess I'm one of those harbingers of the apocalypse, the end of the age of the book. When our children and grandchildren are asking us about how there used to be books (or more books, at any rate) and did we read them, I'm afraid I'll have to be the one saying "hmm yeah, never did have that much use for books." I mean, I have a bookshelf full of them (dusty) and I was a voracious reader as a child, all the way from the age of two. I have a slew of favorite fiction authors (Nabokov, Joyce, Faulkner, Murakami, O'Connor)... but I tend to think of books as something I used to do when I was younger.
I wouldn't want the great works of literature to disappear, but I'm a little disturbed to say that I don't think it would bother me too much if the medium died out and was replaced with other forms of communication, written and otherwise. I don't know why it fails to bother me; maybe it has something to do with being turned off by the way book-reading has a sort of status symbol (certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of books, of course). What do you think?