If not actually read.


In his recent and already oft-quoted article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr tells us that our web reading habits are causing a decline in our ability to actually read books. He may be right, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a substantial percentage of the books that people keep on their shelves haven't been read from start to finish and instead made the move from bookstore to home bookshelf without all of their pages actually being turned. If this is truly the case, it wouldn't be because of any negative influence that our relatively newly acquired web habits may have had on us.

Perhaps once a year someone conducts a survey among academic and literary types - which classics haven't you read, or even which classics have you lied about actually reading. The latest of these was published just recently - a Daily Telegraph article titled Great Unread Books: Which classic are you ashamed to admit you have never read? With the number of titles being published each year continually on the rise, obviously we're not going to read everything, suggesting that shame might be a rather "heavy" term to use here. Of course the shame that the interviewees express seems to be directly related to their view of themselves as an elite that even if it doesn't hold a particular view of itself, understands that the general public views it in a certain light. I find it somewhat surprising that all of the interviewees understood "classic" in its canonical sense. Nobody, for instance, expressed shame that they hadn't read Marvel Comics, for instance. Then again, perhaps all the interviewees had actually done so. Articles such as this teach us that for many academic types, not having read the classics is shameful, though when I think of "shame" (and reading) I picture something along the lines of a churchperson of one sort or another admitting to never having read the Bible. That could certainly be embarrassing, perhaps even rather shameful.


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