Teal deer vs. the novel: is the internet soaking up novel-reading time?

[fictualities]

This year I've made one of the World's Most Embarrassing New Year's resolutions. Most of the time my New Year's resolutions involve personal faults that I'm not afraid to admit in public, or at least to my friends, who tend to know about those faults already. It's impossible to know me for more than a week, for example, without realizing that my

Comments

[daegaer]

I think you're right about length expectations - I've seen so many posts apologising for being overly long when they're a mere three (short) paragraphs. I wonder if it's particularly a style found on LJ/GJ/IJ type journals - it seems different on blogs, where entries can be very long and yet the expectation seems to be that they will be read.

On the other hand, War and Peace IS tl, though I did in fact read it. And now I need never re-read it!

ETA to say: I've found over the last few years that my novel reading has gone down too. Even before that I was finding long door-step type books to be too exhausting even to think of starting. I think I need to do the 50 book challenge as well!

To aid you in your novel reading, I can really plug the (not too long) following: The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner and A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb.

[fictualities]

War and Peace IS really long, isn't it? I, erm, skimmed some of the war parts. So if I ever do want to revisit Pierre and Natasha and Andre, the war parts will be hovering there like unquiet ghosts, saying "what about US, you ignorant poltroon?" So you're lucky that you attended to the thing properly the first time around. :D

[sistermagpie]

I seem to remember preferring the war parts--though maybe my memory's off. Some of the characters irritated me in peace.:-)

My best memory of that book was I was reading it on the subway and this guy taps me and says, "Is that good?" Like he was saying he just had to ask because it's one of those books you always hear about but what's it all about?

[mkcs]

War and Peace is too long, but Tolkien's entire life-work is way too short.

[anehan]

I've got nothing interesting to say on this. Just, the reduction in novel-reading time has happened to me, too. And I can definitely see signs of shortened attention-span in myself.

[fictualities]

Oh, I'm glad to hear it's not just me! There's so much about the net that I love, and in many ways it's opened a new world. But I can't help thinking that it's had other long-term effects on me besides simply making a lot more information available (and making long-distance friendships much easier to maintain).

[fictualities]

i don't know this new acronym, teal deer or tl;dr ....It stands for "too long, didn't read," and ack . . . if my memory isn't playing tricks on me, it goes all the way back to usenet at least. Teal deer (read tl;dr really fast and you'll see how that one came about) is a newish spin on the term, I think -- at least it's relatively new to me, and when I first figured out what people meant by it I shrieked with laughter. Ah, the spirit of the language; she is infinitely inventive, is she not

[22by7]

i've often heard it said that this fragmentation of reading time is part of a much broader social process - that we generally have less time for most things these days, and have to take care of/be aware of much more in the world. i was talking about pynchon novels the other day with people who are not netgeeks, and they all said things to the effect that it's rare for them to finish very long works these days, because there's just not enough motivation on their part. an 18th century reader might have had to work just as much/as long as a contemporary reader (i don't know if it's historically true, sorry), but there wouldn't be a million different ways of using the spare time. no walruses weeping over missing buckets to distract from a five-volume work of fiction.

this is all rather obvious :[

i spent about thirty minutes yesterday browsing a flickr community devoted to photos of people posing in amusing ways with record sleeves. after i hit the little red x, i thought... what did i just do? and then i backread five months' worth of

[fictualities]

an 18th century reader might have had to work just as much/as long as a contemporary reader (i don't know if it's historically true, sorry), but there wouldn't be a million different ways of using the spare time. no walruses weeping over missing buckets to distract from a five-volume work of fiction.Yes! This is a good point. Our lives are so saturated with media of all kinds that are always available that the attention we can devote to any one of them is just . . . not quite there. I guess I wonder what the effects of this change will be. I mean, your average eighteenth century reader would curl up with her novel because there was nothing much else to do. (Though I remember a scene in Pride and Prejudice where one of the shallower characters demonstrates her shallowness by trying to talk to Darcy about the novel he's reading rather than reading a novel herself -- she's trying to make a social, interactive act out of something that isn't.) But once a reader was more or less forced to read because no other alternatives were

[p_zeitgeist]

This is something of a tangent, but the whole tl;dr thing bugs the hell out of me, because I don't think it's inherent in the mechanism of our interaction here on the internet. Rather, I think it's a piece of culture that's evolved, and one that privileges forms of discussion/conversation favored by the majority over those favored by a minority. Which might be all right if the minority were a tiny number of annoying drones at a party, but that's not the situation out here. The world is a big place, and a lot of people's tl;dr is my barely long enough to launch a point properly

[fictualities]

Rather, I think it's a piece of culture that's evolved,It's certainly true that that the tl;dr phrase is much more likely to pop up in some communities/journals/what have you than others, and you're right -- within the broad church of the internet there are lots of little sects that have different spins on the seriousness with which the Conversational Imperative should be taken. To some extent I do think the medium changes the expected shape and form of the message. But to some extent, yes, local culture prevails