Rochester Arts and Lectures

The series is consistently good. This week, we heard Maureen Corrigan ("Leave me alone, I'm reading: finding and losing myself in books). The main thrust of her talk was the clear and present danger for books and reading, due in part at least to the Internet. She is not at all anti-technology or anti-Internet, but rather made the point that it has changed the way many people read. Fewer take time to sit and savor a book for hours on end. Information and entertainment both come in brief easily digested snippets. It's hard on publishers, on book reviewers (of which she is a very prolific one)--there are only 2 stand-along book review sections left in newspapers across the whole U.S.!

Of course, in the audience who listened to her, we were preseumably all readers--why else would we be there? And one can, of course, come up with many reasons why people read differently today than they did 20 years ago, including the lack of leisure time that so many of us deal with. And our children, in many cases, fill the time that used to be filled with reading, by participatiing in structured activites or playing video games, or watching tv. I'm not trying to pass judgement--neither was Corrigan, I think--just observing. (And thinking about the ever-growing pile by the side of my bed...maybe this weekend, I'll let the dust bunnies be, and take some extra time to lose myself in a book).