With the finishing of All the Light We Cannot See, I’ve come to decision time again. The Pulitzers in which I’ve taken an interest are not available at the local library, so I’m having to go to the Kindle version of whatever I fancy to read. I can generally bear it, but do prefer the feel of a real book in my hands as I’m reading.
Given fewer choices, and with time dwindling, I’ve settled (after much internal debate) on Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, which won the Pulitzer in 1980. I was a bit reluctant for the sole reason that the book is over 1,000 pages long, but it’s one that I’d actually heard of and wanted to read, and so I’ve decided to suck it up and go with the Kindle version. On the bright side, it’ll certainly be lighter than the actual novel, and I won’t find myself wishing I’d brought it with me when I’m caught in a situation where I have to wait a lot (like when I went shopping with Micha the other day and decided against bringing a book because I thought it would make my utter disinterest in shopping a bit too obvious). In this case, I can just pull out my phone and look like everyone else by burying my head in it.
And this is why I’ve titled this “…and some thoughts” instead of including the title of the next book up as I have in the past.
I was listening to a podcast today and heard an interesting observation from the guest. He speculated that, as fewer young people are reading novels these days, we’re coming to a point where, generation by generation, people are losing the power of empathy. His point was that in reading novels, we try to understand the characters and enter their worlds: what they’re thinking, and how they’re feeling. We strive to see life through their eyes. Absent this exercise, we tend to be more self-centered. We’re less able to see or even speculate (fairly) on the views of others. We’re more likely to apply our own perspectives to what others are about.
Yeah. We lack empathy.
I can see this. Social media is (I believe) by nature either adversarial or at least bordering on the unrealistic. It either foments disagreement or FOMO (fear of missing out). I know it isn’t just me who thinks that the more time we spend on our phones or computers, the less we have to do useful things like…reading novels. Or actually accomplishing anything meaningful. And believe me, I’m reading novels – 13 since the end of December. Seventeen in this Pulitzer run if you go back a couple of months before that. No big deal by older standards I’m sure, but a bit more compared to what most people read these days — the latest data I’m seeing says the average American reads 12 books a year. Still, that data seems to skew toward older people reading much more.
Now, am I comparing apples and oranges? I mean, when I was 20, I wasn’t reading a whole lot, if you know what I mean. I was too busy being 20 (and all of the shenanigans that come with that). But even then, I knew plenty of people who read quite a bit – sure, it was geek novels and science fiction but still, they were reading. Does anyone really think that, with the rise of gaming and social media, people are dedicating nearly as much time to reading? A recent Gallup poll seems to support my thoughts, saying that in some demographics (college graduates and women in particular), the drop is significant.
There’s a sizeable group of us who’ve grown up with books. We value the public library. We’ve heard the slogans – “Readers are Leaders” and such. But it seems the advent of the portable device is slowly strangling our ability to step outside of our bubbles and see the world through another’s eyes. I’d love to believe that for every child’s head I see buried in their digital babysitter watching a video or playing a game, there’s another who’s engrossed in a book (even if it is on a Kindle). I know this is not the case. And I’m not the best person in the world to advocate for this, I’m sure. I’m no Levar Burton by a long shot. But I also have the ability to see and the hindsight to know that my life has been significantly enriched by the books I’ve read – far more than by the tweets I’ve seen — and I’d take a good book any day over anything I can see on a “device.” Unless it’s a book.
So…on to The Executioner’s Song…
