Althouse: "34 hours! Not that Slate isn't fun, but I could have read Anna Karenina in that time. Curses, 'Explainer'!"

October 19, 2008

"34 hours! Not that Slate isn't fun, but I could have read Anna Karenina in that time. Curses, 'Explainer'!"

Farhad Manjoo -- who's got some program that records how much time he spends on each website -- frets over the information he's chosen to gather. Apparently, he wants to goad himself into a more efficient on-line lifestyle.

What interests me most here is the notion that one's reading time would be better spent reading substantial books, especially long, classic works of fiction. Why, really? There was that recent study that seemed to show that reading on line is more stimulating for the brain. And to me, reading on line feels much more active and creative, as you constantly make decisions about whether to go deeper or to branch out, where to branch out, and when to start something new.

If you are committed to a book, you keep going in linear fashion. You may think very deeply or skim along. That may be good, but what guilt trip makes us feel it would be better? And if books are better, why do we think of classic works of fiction as the gold standard? Why should we think it's bad to have spent an Anna Karenina amount of time reading on line?

And yet I still have some of that nagging feeling that all this on-line reading counts for less -- and even that it doesn't count at all... not that anyone is counting. (I won't get some cursed program to count for me.) I sometimes catch myself thinking: Am I reading all the time or not at all?

40 comments:

veni vidi vici said...: reading on the web versus the classic literature is kind of like downloaded songs versus singles and albums, whether in cd or vinyl form. it's all psychological, of course, but the online/download stuff becomes wallpaper, whereas a book (or album) has a physical heft and "value", if that makes any sense (and i know there's a lot of assumed-shared-experience-and-understanding in the foregoing).

it is difficult to imagine a "classic" born into this media (and man don't i sound like a luddite!). similarly, it is difficult to imagine the next led zeppelin or U2 born into the per-song-download era, much less the next barbra streisand or whatever. people already view their entertainment media differently (the music-as-wallpaper thing is real, and sad for those of us who got excited about new records, devouring the cover artwork while listening to it for the first time all the way through at home); the ethereal quality of the digital delivery interface only encourages that type of thinking.

it's not a judgement to say that because it is what it is. teens and college students will have a very different experience of media than i did growing up, just as mine was way different than my parents.

the sucky thing is when your HD with your media library craps out, or your new browser software doesn't let you import your bookmarks, or your old drive with archived graphics, music etc. is in a format that's no longer supported, requiring you to keep a "legacy" machine around just in case you ever need or just plain get a hankering to hear/view the archived materials. if you print everything out, you end up with a house full of crates of print-outs that's definitely not as attractive as a house full of filled bookshelves! i have that problem with CD's and vinyl, which i still buy and takes up way too much space, never mind the combined weight of all of it...; 10/19/08, 11:40 PM
Buford Gooch said...: Most of reading online is a shared experience with a contemporary. That's one kind of good.

Reading classic fiction is a shared experience with someone at least once removed (no feedback mechanism, really). The sharing in this case is knowing that you have read what at least thousands, if not millions of others have read. Sharing can be done, but with other readers in the future, as opposed to the author and other readers now.; 10/20/08, 12:31 AM
Kirk Parker said...: vvv,

"much less the next barbra streisand"

Yes, but surely it has some downsides too?; 10/20/08, 12:57 AM
Jim Hu said...: As it happens, I've been reading Anna Karenina on my iPhone. But I'm probably still spending more time surfing the web.; 10/20/08, 1:28 AM
Joan said...: No question -- I'm reading all the time.; 10/20/08, 1:55 AM
blake said...: It is reading, of course.

But not all reading is equal.

It's also writing.

But the bulk of reading and writing we do on the 'net is conversational. It doesn't replace other sorts of reading and writings, it really takes the place of talking.

It's more like a pub or club or a sports team (after hours), a card game group, etc.

The one-way stuff is more like a newspaper.

It's not at all like reading Anna Karenina--unless you're reading Anna Karenina.; 10/20/08, 4:34 AM
gefillmore said...: I don't read; I listen. Usually unabridged from audible.com, while I'm driving. If I try to read or listen just sitting down, I fall asleep.

As far as perusing and reading the internet, what better way is there of spending your time than reading ann althouse?; 10/20/08, 5:33 AM
An Edjamikated Redneck said...: Depends on the need I guess.

Since, currently, I am in search of what 21st Century folks think of the 21st Century, I read blogs.

When I need to know what 19th Century writers thought of London, I'll read Dickens.

There is also a level of enjoyment in reading- which is why I skip trolls and most poets.; 10/20/08, 6:18 AM
Donna B. said...: I must agree with buford gooch. Though I'm not sure he means the same thing I do.

I find sharing with other readers of classics (without the author's input) much more enjoyable than reading the author and other readers now.

It's one reason why I will not even click on comment threads that number over 100 comments. Aw... heck, I usually won't even read those numbering over 60.; 10/20/08, 6:20 AM
Bissage said...: (1) I see that Mr. Manjoo is described as “Slate's technology columnist.”

I find that fascinating because it has long been my belief that happy technology columnists are all alike; every unhappy technology columnist is unhappy in his own way.

(2) Anna Karenina is one of the great novels. No doubt about it. But it can be made to serve an even more elevated purpose.

For example, I keep a fine, leather-bound edition underneath my computer monitor. Just right!; 10/20/08, 6:49 AM
KCFleming said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 10/20/08, 7:15 AM
KCFleming said...: The internet depends largely on the tyranny of the new, a Short Attention Span Theater for readers, encouraging ADD flippancy in discovering the next shiny thing.

It's news as gossip, permitting brief arguments and culturally-tuned witticisms, bile and venom, movies and songs, and lots and lots of pets. Not to mention the porn.

It's the modern bazaar, with little tents springing up each day, while others fold. If you can't get it here, you probably don't need it.

The solitude of reading a story unfold over hundreds of pages, learning a new task or theory by taking in chapters instead of brief posts, and the sharing of that knowledge with others who have read the same book, these abilites required and created an entirely different sort of mind.

What does this shift portend?
Likely the same result when art moved from trained painters and sculptors creating transcendant images of human figures and landscapes to philistines flinging blots of color, photographing excrement, and creating "installations" from 'found objects'.

That is, likely not something good. But then, I'm a conservative, so what the hell do I know?; 10/20/08, 7:17 AM
Anonymous said...: There's a big difference between reading for information or diversion and reading a work of art. If you have only a certain amount of time for "reading", and it's all being done online, then you are missing out on a deeper experience. I've never thought of the time I spend online as "reading". It's more of a bad habit that keeps me better informed than I probably need to be. It's more like watching tv than reading, even when it doesn't involve video (which it does, more and more).; 10/20/08, 7:22 AM
George M. Spencer said...: People once memorized vast amounts of poetry and other text, like all that Bible begatting. We feel no more sadness over the loss of that skill that skill than we miss riding donkeys. Once technology permits the shift to a more efficient system we happily move on.

The same is happening with books and magazines, and newspapers. You can't sell old books. Used bookstores no longer buy them where I live. Children don't like books. (Or if they do, they spend far more time online.)

Increasingly, all three of the above media rely on marketing principles to sell content. It works, sometimes, but less so, if the same junk is free on-line. (And in 20, 50, or 100 years neural implants or thought helmets will replace the internet.)

If you want to write a best-seller, consider these titles and have at it:

a) Skinny Bitch; Hungry Girl; Hello, Cupcake; Eat, Pray, Love; Giada's Kitchen; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell;

b) The Passion Test; The Secret; The Love Dare; Before You Do;

c) Club Dead; Book of the Dead; Dark of the Moon; Deadly Night; Choke; Living Dead in Dallas.

Books about brain-power, green living; pregnancy; business leadership; personal self-love and fulfillment; dogs; and Abraham Lincoln are good, too.

A good title would be

"Recipe for Romance"
An Honest Abe Mystery by Brad Pitt.; 10/20/08, 7:22 AM
Shanna said...: I think it's interesting that he said Anna Karenina, rather than War and Peace. I know they're both pretty long, but War and Peace is generally referenced as a long book, right?

Anyway, I didn't love Anna Karenina when I read it. I prefer Doystoyevsky to Tolstoy.; 10/20/08, 7:24 AM
KCFleming said...: Why do I need to know anything if I can just look it up?

If the ...hey, what's that over there?!!; 10/20/08, 7:27 AM
Anonymous said...: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

It's truly evil.
My online activity: email and Althouse in the morning.; 10/20/08, 8:20 AM
Palladian said...: "Asked to come up with a surefire best-seller title, the Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf is said to have replied: "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog."; 10/20/08, 8:21 AM
Richard Dolan said...: Ann: "what guilt trip makes us feel it would be better? And if books are better, why do we think of classic works of fiction as the gold standard?"

Even accepting the perfomance art shtick, that's still a strange thing for a university professor to write. Certain texts have become classics for a reason, generally having to do with the quality of the writing and the influence the work or the author had on others. Classic fiction isn't so much the "gold standard" as it is the most accessible form to the general reader (compare reading Jane Austen to Immanuel Kant, for example).

Apart from the occasional (very occasional) gem, writing on the internet is mediocre at best, what with endlessly repeated talking points, agenda-driven drivel and worse. So what that one can flit from site to site, sampling this and that quickly? Even at its best, what it has to offer is (mostly) just a nice turn of phrase or an insight that, on second thought, is rarely very insightful.

"Why should we think it's bad to have spent an Anna Karenina amount of time reading on line?" I doubt that many think in those good/bad terms. But after reading lots of drivel on line, many people come to the conclusion that they wasted their time. That's not "bad," at least no worse than daydreaming or crossword puzzles or lots of other things people do to amuse themselves, but it is the sort of thing that, with a little experience, a sensible person learns to moderate.; 10/20/08, 8:24 AM
Henry said...: Yes, but could Mr. Manjoo have spent 34 hours at work reading Anna Karenina?

I read online instead of reading a newspaper. It's a good medium for current events epherma. It saves time. Unlike a print newspaper, I never feel compelled to read every article in an entire section. I just follow a trail of articles that look interesting.

When I want depth I read books.

I also read books -- long nonfiction books -- before sleep. And I generally sleep well.

Online reading is too hyperactive to lead into quality sleep.; 10/20/08, 8:27 AM
Unknown said...: I had to read My Antonia in high school. No amount of time I've spent on line, no matter what I was doing, has been as poorly spent as doing that. Sorry Willa.; 10/20/08, 8:27 AM
Palladian said...: Reading fiction is almost always a waste of time. Read history, poetry, philosophy or science instead.; 10/20/08, 8:32 AM
Rockport Conservative said...: I read fiction I call eye candy. I read non-fiction and always wish I had access to all the footnoted articles, papers and books. Some comments are like those footnotes, educational. Most are just people like me, trying to show how educated they really are and how much their opinion really matters. It doesn't. Nor does this.; 10/20/08, 8:36 AM
George M. Spencer said...: Palladian--

That's great...I didn't know that.

Today, however, you'd have to re-title it as "Lincoln's Doctor's Bitch."

Cerf used to be on game shows like 'What's My Line?' Can you imagine any book editor or publisher being on any TV show and being witty or sophisticated?; 10/20/08, 8:44 AM
Michael McNeil said...: Ann writes of Anna:
What interests me most here is the notion that one's reading time would be better spent reading substantial books, especially long, classic works of fiction. Why, really? […] And if books are better, why do we think of classic works of fiction as the gold standard?

Calling (classic or otherwise) works fiction in such as way seems to incorporate connotations of imaginary and therefore necessarily untrue and a distraction from real things and concerns.

Jacob Bronowski, in his somehow enormous, slim little book, The Common Sense of Science (admittedly non-fiction), had something to say about that (in the midst of a larger argument) as well. As he wrote:

“I have said … that science is a part, a characteristic part, of human activity at large. I have been at pains … to show scientific method as the method of all human inquiry, which differs at last only in this, that it is explicit and systematic. This is very striking when we come to problems of right judgement and good conduct. There never has been a great book or a powerful work of art which has not been thought immoral by those with an older tradition. Jews still think the New Testament immoral, and Christians the Koran. Savonarola thought Florentine art licentious, and when George Eliot wrote about him in the last century, she thought him licentious and her critics thought her so. Sidney's Apologie for Poetry is a school book now, and so is Shelley's Defence of Poetry. Yet Sidney was defending all literature against the charge of being a corrupter of men on the very eve of the Elizabethan flowering of the arts; and a succession of men and women went to prison for selling Shelley's poems. The harsh pattern of Swift's writing was fixed because he scandalized the religious sensibilities of Queen Anne. In our own day, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence have been held to outrage and to undermine morality. Yet it is overwhelmingly likely that their books will survive when the thousand spruce and proper critics of the day have been forgotten.

“Often the attack on a new outlook in the arts takes a slightly different ground. A book or painting is held to be harmful to the public mind, by being not immoral but without morality at all. Raphael was criticized in this way for being amoral, and so were Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites. In literature, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was called amoral, with many other works of the Russian novelists and playwrights; and the list of English playwrights who have been charged with a lack of any moral sense goes all the way from the Restoration to Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw.

“It is this last charge which is commonly brought against science. The claim is not that science is actively anti-moral, but that it is without morality of any kind. The implication is that it thereby breeds in the minds of those who practise it an indifference to morality which comes in time to atrophy in them the power of right judgement and the urge to good conduct.

“This charge seems to me as false of the sciences as of the arts. No one who stops to think about Anna Karenina today believes that it is without morality, and that it makes no judgement on the complex actions of its heroine, her husband, and her lover. On the contrary, we find it a deeper and more moving book than a hundred conventional novels about that triangle, because it shows so much more patient, more understanding, and more heartbreaking an insight into the forces which buffet men and women. It is not a conventional book, it is a true book. And we do not mean by truth some chance correspondence with the facts in a newspaper about a despairing woman who threw herself under a train. We mean that Tolstoy understood people and events, and saw within them the interplay of personality, passion, convention, and the impact on them of the to-and-fro of outside happenings. No ethic and no set of values has our respect now which does not recognize the truth in this.”; 10/20/08, 8:59 AM
Anonymous said...: Original George: My wife is a book editor, and I like to think of her as witty and sophisticated. All her friends in the editorial world are witty and sophisticated. They are also mostly unemployed, and make do hanging on one dreary, underpaid freelance project to another. Our blog friend amba has had a similar life, although her current regular gig with Natural History Magazine seems like a freelancer's dream.

The people who employ the witty and sophisticated editors are generally neither. But they do get a regular paycheck, at least until the next downsizing or corporate acquisition.

You can read all about it online.; 10/20/08, 9:19 AM
Henry said...: It's Money That Matters; 10/20/08, 9:22 AM
Trooper York said...: I read five books a week. OK most of them are genre fiction or history but so what.

People who are readers just read.

You can't be reading if you spend so much time staring at your belly button.; 10/20/08, 9:44 AM
KCFleming said...: "You can't be reading if you spend so much time staring at your belly button."

Except for reading an upside down "Hanes", maybe.; 10/20/08, 9:55 AM
Darcy said...: Excellent. Lots of commentary to chew on here. And this from the science guy (Michael McNeil)- or rather from his excerpt of Bronowski:

It is not a conventional book, it is a true book.

Loved that. Loved the book. Thanks, Michael!; 10/20/08, 10:00 AM
Kirk Parker said...: Original George,

"People once memorized vast amounts of poetry and other text... We feel no more sadness over the loss of that skill..."

Whoa, speak for yourself. The fact that I am aware of the tradeoffs, and would still make the choice for our modern situation if it were mine to make individually, doesn't mean I can't also see the value of what was lost.; 10/20/08, 10:10 AM
blake said...: I love Randy Newman.

All of these people
Are much brighter than I
In any fair system
They would flourish and thrive

But they barely survive
They eke out a living
They barely survive

But I don't guess it's a mystery who he's gonna vote for.; 10/20/08, 11:24 AM
blake said...: (That's in reference to Henry's link.); 10/20/08, 11:27 AM
George M. Spencer said...: Kirk--

I want a brain implant so I can play the banjo without taking lessons.; 10/20/08, 12:38 PM
Sigivald said...: Doesn't what we read matter at least as much (indeed, far more) than the mere fact of reading?

One can with relative ease programmatically generate grammatically correct sentences, and read them all day long - but I think we'd all agree that that would be time wasted.

Reading politics (or to a lesser extent non-politics) at Salon does not drop to that level, but it certainly hasn't impressed me in the past year.

Tolstoy, at least, is both telling a story and exposing (some portion of) the human condition, in a way that Salon content can't hope to - at least none of it that I've ever seen.

(This is equally true of more modern, non-Russian authors, even/especially "genre" ones. I'm not intending to promulgate the cult of The Canon or The Novel, though both are fine things.

But what we read must surely be important, beyond the mere fact of having been reading; otherwise why not just read auto-generated gibberish?); 10/20/08, 2:37 PM
Ignacio said...: Every three months or so, Ann Althouse posts once again that literature is passe and boring. This has been going on for years.

Blogs are not in competition with literature. The best-known bloggers of today are best compared, perhaps, to newspaper columnists of the past, such as Mencken or (in Vienna) Karl Kraus. There were many others, of course, but their names slip my mind. Oh, Walter Winchell. Hedda Hopper.

These days the hope is for crossover into TV. Thus we have 'Bloggingheads.' Is that a big hit yet?; 10/20/08, 3:09 PM
Christy said...: I cannot read a book for the same long stretches that I find myself reading the web. I'm enticed by the next link and ignore the bodily impulse to get up and move when I'm online. I confess to setting a timer on myself which I only sometimes ignore. Otherwise I'd fall victim to the ultimately unsatisfying compulsion to spend all day surfing the net.; 10/20/08, 4:51 PM
John Kindley said...: If you've read Anna Karenina, you can tell other people you've read Anna Karenina and that might impress them. It's a feather in your brain cap. It's evidence that you're "well-read." Telling people you read blogs, on the other hand, isn't likely to impress them.; 10/20/08, 9:38 PM
Ann Althouse said...: Then just lie. What the hell. If you're just trying to impress people. They're not going to test you.; 10/20/08, 9:58 PM
John Kindley said...: Ann, if I didn't know you better I'd think your serious response implied you thought my comment was meant seriously, or that I believed that the desire to be thought well-read by others was anything other than vain.

But even apart from wanting to be able to show off one' knowledge to others by name-dropping books one's read, I think there actually is a sense in which we may feel something's missing in our education if we haven't yet read (i.e. cover to cover) a book that we deem probably important. E.g., I can't say to myself or others that I've read Mises' Human Action. On the other hand, I agree with what you've said elsewhere that reading on the internet can lead you to what you really want to know more quickly and efficiently than just slogging through book after book. But still, if I really want to increase my knowledge of economics I'm probably at some point going to have to really engage with and study an actual book (whether I read the book online or not) rather than just skipping around to various places on the internet trying to get a sense of what Mises was all about.; 10/20/08, 11:54 PM