<<< May 08, 2003 >>>

I had begun to make unhelpful calculations, multiplying the number of books I'd read in the previous year by the number of years I might reasonably be expected to live, and perceiving in the three-digit product not so much an intimation of mortality as a measure of the incompatibility of the slow work of reading and the hyperkinesis of modern life. All of a sudden it seemed as if the friends of mine who used to read no longer even apologized for having stopped. When I asked a young acquaintance who had been an English major what she was reading, she replied: "You mean linear reading? Like when you read a book from start to finish?" -- Why Bother?: In an Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels, Jonathan Franzen, 1996

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