--- In [email protected], "whynotnow7" <whynotnow7@...> wrote: > > For those last few minutes of the day I sometimes enjoy > leafing through catalogs we get in the mail, the ones > filled with electronics and gadgets I won't buy.
I used to get an electronics catalog years ago -- can't remember the name, sorry -- that I really enjoyed because they would sneak writeups of fake merchandise in with the writeups of real merchandise. For example, in one issue there was an offer for DEDs. Darkness Emitting Diodes. In another there was a blurb about the newest in chip technology, WOMs. Write Only Memory. The game, from their side, was to see how many people tried to order the joke items. > I haven't figured out why people seem to be obsessed > with reading books. I can't recall the last time I read > one cover to cover - it has easily been years. I found that my reading slowed down as my eyes got older, and thus weaker. It actually took me some time to realize that I hadn't been reading as much because I *couldn't* read as easily as I had been able to in the past. It snuck up on me. Once I realized what the problem was, a good reading light and some glasses did the trick. > Perhaps they are a fun distraction for overactive minds > - I don't know. People have different reasons for reading. Some do it to relax, or as you say to distract them from their lives. I do it because I love good writing. Sadly, that is often my bane when it comes to modern writing, because I have high standards based on reading earlier writers. I think I stopped reading for a year after having plowed through my first Dan Brown novel. It took a re-read of Dorothy Dunnett to get me back on track. :-) Although books are not mentioned explicitly in this fair use snippet from Wikipedia, I agree with Marshall McLuhan's premise of "hot" and "cool" media, and I suspect (but don't remember) that he would class books as "cool." I for one wonder what he which he would have thought the World Wide Web was. In the first part of Understanding Media, McLuhan also stated that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, were "hot"—that is, they enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with "cool" TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of the viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensi- fying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value. More comments below: > --- In [email protected], "seventhray1" <steve.sundur@> wrote: > > > > Thanks for the recommendations. I wish I could find > > something I enjoy reading for a few minutes before I > > drop off to sleep. I can unreservedly pass along wayback's recommendation for Dan Eagleman's "SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlife." It's just what the title implies, and brilliant. And the stories are short, so it's perfect bedtime reading. You can drop off to sleep after any story without feeling that you still need to read more. > > I am so narrow minded that I can't bring myself to read > > fiction and usually stick with something "spiritua"l in > > nature. In comparison, I read primarily fiction and avoid anything "spiritua"l like it had a big herpes sore on its lip. :-) > > But most of the modern new agey type books seem dull > > and full of platitudes. More than "seem," I'm afraid. > > Lately I've been reading some of the lesser known early > > theosophists. Even that has been somewhat dull. Herpes city for me. I'm re-reading a book now because I need to analyze the author's writing style. He used a mechanism in this book that I need to use in something I am writing. The book is by Orhan Pahmuk, and is called "My Name Is Red." It's a murder mystery. But by a Nobel Prize-winning author. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red
