Sunday, July 27, 2008

I'm more of a short stretch reader myself...

Michael Hyatt is the President and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. He writes a blog called From Where I Sit. Back in June he wrote a post called What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. In it he disects an article in Atlantic Monthly where writer Nicholas Carr asks, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?

There's one quote in particular that Hyatt pulls from the article:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.


I read this and thought... whiskey tango foxtrot ... are you kidding me? That's what reading is like for most mothers. (she said, noting that the writer and the blogger are both male)

I think he lost me where he said he'd "spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose". I have not had long stretches of anything remotely close to reading since early 2001.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I can completely understand! My daughter is almost two and there is NO long-term reading for me until she goes to bed around 7:30 - 8:00 pm. I daydream about the days I was single without kid and could spend ALL day with my nose in a good book - I've read many a book in a day that way. But I also remember that I wasn't the happiest person then and I love my husband and daughter dearly. But I still have those moments... :)

Btw, I love your blog and have been reading it for a few weeks. Got it off of Momwriters :)