Piece on NPR about the book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
Excerpt: Jacobs, an English professor and a biographer of C.S. Lewis, explains that even in an era of unparalleled reading options — books, Web sites, magazines, blogs, Tumblrs, #Longreads, all of them available on Kindles, Nooks, iPads, laptops, phones, or, whaddyacallit, paper — he sees that many once-avid readers have become diffident. “They wonder if they are reading well,” he writes, “with focus and attentiveness, with discretion and discernment.”
The solution? “Don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens,” he urges. Read at whim, without shame and for pleasure.
Iowa Writers’ Workshop
“Inside the 154-year-old Victorian home that houses the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, you won’t see many Amazon Kindles. Twitter is viewed as a potentially disastrous distraction. And you can even anger an instructor for mentioning Google in your writing.”
Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/07/ap/tech/main20069912.shtml#ixzz1Osk76Tcc