einstein“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits,” Albert Einstein said in a quotation I picked up from by jan on freedom.

“Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”

Einstein lived in a different age from ours, that’s for sure. I’m more worried that my students’ lives are so frantic and busy—like mine—that they hardly have time to read and reflect. I have to schedule the time in my calendar. Reading as a task. Indeed, people who manage to find time for reading may be the most industrious among us. Seriously, though, I have a big sense that the so-called reading crisis has less to do with television and the Internet than it does with our frantic American sense of having to get things done.

imageOr, given the realities of workplace “efficiency”—a code for fewer people doing more work—it’s not just the frantic sense;  it’s the frantic reality of having to get stuff done. Or else. At the end of the day, who has the energy for the work reading requires? Much easier to curl up with American Idol.

Moderator: One advantage of E, of course, as many e-book boosters have noted, is that you can whip out your cellphone or PDA and read in the grocery line or a doctor’s waiting room. So you can carve out time for reading that you might otherwise lack. Granted, you might not be able to do as much justice to your book as you could by focusing on it at your armchair. But that’s better than no reading.

In a related vein, yes, Prof. Powers may be on to something. If you go by a Slate article cited in Wikipedia, working time has increased for upper-income professionals, the very kind of people most likely to buy and read books. So what about lower classes? Slate says the opposite happened. Is that true, in an era when many working people must hold down two jobs, and when both husbands and wives must work? Also see 2006  numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. – D.R.

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