Well, I've been planning, rather dreaming, to run away from this chaotic world and hide in a serene calm place and give myself completely to book reading. My "to-be-read" shelf grows bigger and bigger to scare me if I've enough time ever to read them all. Sometimes I feel like having a list of "must read stuff before I die" - but it kind of scares me away. Now, any of my friends reading these lines, might have started preparing themselves to lecture me on why is it not that good to be too much into books and why I should be trying out various other things! Nevertheless, I want to be with books, even if that's cardinal sin.
And when I come across such lines, the pain due to my ineffectiveness simply increases.
"These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don't. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I'm reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age."
More here.
But the find of the day is here. Only a month back or so, I struggled to browse through few pages of one of Eco's non-fiction works. When my friend brought him into our conversation, I just skimmed through the wiki page to stumble upon this link. It's a beautifully (for me, yes, it is beautiful) written essay on writing, reading, memory, visual effects, books, book reading and the printed versus digitized books. This article kind of gives me courage to explore ECO further. That is just one more on my endless list of 'to-be-read'.
2 comments:
Thank you for suggesting the links. They are very interesting. And thought provoking.
As Ulin mentioned in the article, we are over networked. I sincerely feel that the art of reading is gradually becoming just an act of reading. Becoming extinct even further with the intrusion of daily chores or internet. I remember i have expressed similar feelings in my comments on one of your posts (Books v Cigerettes >> Books v internet).
:) Eco rox :)
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