I Don't Read Books
Robert Bleil
English Department
As a teenager, I worked on a
bookmobile; during my college years, I clerked and
shelved books at two campus libraries; after college, I
became an academic librarian and earned a Ph.D. in
English, but I haven’t read a book in years. Sure, I
work with books every day: I mark the pages, critique
the arguments, analyze characters, map plots, and try to
help students create knowledge out of the data,
information, and experiences that they find in books,
but I don’t read them. I troll them. My brain has been
rewired.
A generation ago, I was an omnivorous reader who
juggled several books at a time. From fiction to
non-fiction, from philosophy to the fine arts, and from
history to mystery, my library was a dukedom large
enough to satisfy my insatiable curiosity. And then,
mysteriously, it happened. After a couple of years my
books began to gather dust almost as soon as I brought
them into the house. In frustration, I blamed my
work—academic librarianship leaves little time to
celebrate words—but even after I left my managerial post
for classroom teaching, my love for reading remains only
a memory. In the last ten years I have not picked up a
book without two tools at hand: a six-inch flexible
ruler and a red, fine-point, pen. With these tools I
mine books for data and I mark passages for future
recovery, but the private conversations between author
and reader than once sated my quest for knowledge have
fallen silent.
Fortunately, I don’t seem to be alone. According to
recent work by Nicholas Carr, I belong to an ever
growing segment of the population whose habits of
information consumption have changed dramatically as we
began to ingest more and more data online. It turns out
that learning to read isn’t like walking or talking,
which, baring a traumatic injury or illness, is part of
our genetic makeup. Instead, reading is a learned
activity. As I learned to read online, I began to forget
how to read books. Apparently, reading online changes
not only the way we consume information, but the way in
which we think.
It is a coincidence that my professional life
parallels the growth in digital consumption, but it is
profoundly telling. Retailing giant Amazon.com sold its
first book in July 1995, about six weeks before I
entered my graduate program in library science, and the
New York Times went online about a year later, as I
prepared to take my first professional job as a
librarian. So, for the last fifteen years I’ve turned to
the Internet for more and more of my daily allotment of
words. As I’ve consumed more and more words online,
reading a book has become stressful, tedious, and
frustrating; reading used to be a gateway to other lives
and other worlds, but now I cannot read a page without
distraction.
The good news is that I am learning to read books
again, but while I take the time to reacquaint myself
with the printed word, I’m trying to use what I’m
learning to help my students. Because their lives are
roughly contiguous with the lifespan of the World Wide
Web, it is entirely possible my expectations for their
writing may be as unnatural to them as texting seems to
me. For a generation who learned to read online, the
arguments contained in textbooks and the conversations
found in literature are written in a form that they
never learned to understand. It is too early to make
predictions about the clash of these two cultures, but
for now, I’m enjoying the new sounds and new ideas, and
I’m trying to be patient with my students. As for my
books, they’ll be waiting for my return.
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