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So much less taxing, so much simpler to just watch television or play video games or mess about endlessly on the internet.
Essayist Jonathan Gourlay recently wrote a sort of confession about the months he spent as a non-reader. It is surprisingly easy to slip away from reading. After a lifetime as a bookworm, I quit reading for almost a decade. Only recently, in the last three or four years, have I started to make reading a priority again. As Gourlay notes, my experience is that "not reading" was a surprisingly seductive pleasure. It is the height of laziness to not read a book. So much less taxing, so much simpler to just watch television or play video games or mess about endlessly on the internet. (It MUST be easy to not read - otherwise, why would so many Americans be doing it? [i.e. not reading.])
I did some of my worst writing during those ten years. That's no coincidence.
"Flattening" is a good word for what happens when you stop reading. You slip into a world without nuance. Things are either good or bad, end of story. People have simple, single-word motivations. Stories are tidy and mechanical and march along right to the end of the third act.
All other media pale in comparison, complexity-wise. Even the simplest tie-in genre novel will have more depth to it than any half-hour sitcom. Think about what happened when your favorite book was made into a movie. A pale imitation of itself. At best, a series of illustrations that serve as a companion piece to the book.
Now imagine living in a world where everything is a simplistic pale imitation. It's like eating nothing but Saltines. So bland, but so easy to digest. By comparison, a book is a five-course feast. Does it take more time? Of course. More effort? Certainly. Is it worth it? Oh yes.
I have read the book The Help, but I have not seen the movie. When people say they have seen the movie and ask if I have seen it, I tell them all the same thing: "The book tread a very fine line with "Gosh it was hard to be a white lady during the Jim Crow era" or "It's the civil rights era, but from a white lady's perspective," and I'm worried that the movie will have lost some of that complexity." Judging by the funny looks that come over their face when I say this, I'm pretty sure I'm right about that.
Not that books can't be simplistic. Sauron is pretty one-dimensional in the Tolkien novels, too. But the novels include all those songs and poems and stories, so much culture. And the movies are essentially one long action sequence.
Books: take the time! It's worth it!
Photo credit: Flickr/Daniel Y. Go
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