Now that You Tube is flooded with fake (AI) videos, people have to make a decision. Are they going to waste their lives watching crap produced by a computer algorithm, or will they go back to books, the written word. Of course the world of books isn't perfect either.
I don't know if we can reasonably expect any improvements in the world of books. But there are possible improvements in how we read. Do you feel guilty unless you read the lumber from cover to cover? Do you really benefit from 400 pages of verbiage about a topic, no matter how potentially interesting and important the topic is? For the most part, reading is an unnatural and tedious way to kill time.
But it has advantages.
Perhaps reading should imitate what I have recently advertised about walking: that we need to 'unclench the fists' while walking; we need to forget about 'how far? and how fast?'; that we need to frolic like a dog, investigating an arroyo.
Thinking along these lines I reread Bertrand Russell's essay, "In Praise of Idleness." It was somewhat helpful to today's topic, but too much of the essay was taken up with Russell's standard hobby horses of socialism and feminism. But at least the essay was short.
There is no better place to practice this 'unclenching of the fists' than when reading history books. From now on, I will read the introductions -- which are usually fun to read -- and perhaps the epilogue. But I will skip the 400 pages of names and dates between these two chapters.
That's not really true. I will skim the 400 pages of lumber, and if bored, move quickly on, just like my dog does when checking out animal holes and smells.
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