I’ve been reading Doris Lessing’s Nobel speech, and thinking about the similarities between it, and the recent NEA report on reading. Both stress the importance, for children, of books in the home. Both fret over the number, and attractiveness, of the alternatives to reading that are available in modern society.

But Lessing, fittingly, makes her point with a story, about aspiration and self-image and Anna Karenina. And her story is filled with more desperation, and more hope, than the NEA report. She worries about the effect of the Internet:

How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.

She worries that children in privileged parts of the world, children with TiVo and PSPs and SMS and DSL, may spend less and less time reading, and eventually wind up knowing little. She argues, I think, that without wide reading as a child, there is no education, and that without books in the child’s environment, this habit of reading will not happen: “Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.”

But she points out that there are other people in the world, people without DVDs and DOCSIS. That those people are hungry for books, hungry in a way that we who wallow in the vast Bulwer-Lytton-strewn midden heaps of first-world publishing don’t remember. And I read in that a suggestion that the eventual ascendance of the third world over the first world will come from hunger.

So, cut to the chase — is this true? Or does reading scraps of text from various Web pages build the ability to read, write, and understand, in the same way that reading long texts for hours at a time does? A positive sign is that more and more long-form texts are appearing on the Web, as more books are digitized and posted. But who reads them?

Posted: 12|11|07 at 3:17 pm. Filed under: Publishing. New here? Follow this entry via RSS 2.0. Pinging is currently disabled.