The revolutionary act of reading a book
For many of the societal forces who wish to keep you click-clicking through ad-riddled TV, tap-tapping your way through the ad-laden pages of the Web and flip-flipping your way through ad-gouged magazines, books really suck.
The problem, at least for them: There are no ads, no opportunities to ramp up your rate of consumption. When you open a book, the conversation that commences between you and the author is unmediated by commercial messages.
It’s an advertiser’s nightmare, really. Long hours are spent reading nothing but the author’s thoughts. Every hour spent on a book is an hour unspent on exhortations to buy-buy-buy.
Which is exactly why we should read-read-read – books especially. When a big chunk of your life is devoted to absorbing commercial appeals, that leaves a lot less of your life for absorbing someone’s provocative thoughts.
For example, you could watch cable TV in the hopes of learning more about climate change, or you could read a book like “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet” by Mark Lynas.
TV will give you tiny snippets of reporting on the potential effects of global warming, but you’ll never know where those snippets will pop up amid the barrage of advertising. And how can you cobble together something coherent from snippet-reporting, some of which even denies the existence of climate change?
In contrast, science writer Mark Lynas will give you a relentlessly coherent description of what the world will be like every time the global thermometer rises by a centigrade degree. And you don’t have to watch anyone tell you that the can of sugar water they’re holding has made their life oh-so-much-better, as attested by their Cheshire-cat grin.
So go ahead, consider yourself a revolutionary in our hyper-capitalistic culture by having the temerity to turn off the TV and crack open a book. It’s the difference between engaging your brain and grabbing your wallet.
I agree. I recently got back into reading and now read about six books a month.
Our Christmas Tree would be very bare without books – every year we are blessed with piles and piles. I love them. I’ve also recently got back into going to the local library – it’s a luxurious hour or so simply browsing and making the hard choices what to bring home to read.
Reading books is the best. I love my local libraries, I am a member of two of them. I borrow loads of books from them. It is a big funk you to the corporations who rule our lives and want us to spend all our leisure time consuming and watching their adverts on TV, radio or the net. You are not creating “user-generated content” when you are reading a book. You are not providing corporations with digital information about your preferences when you read a book. They can’t build a profile of you, so they can more effectively use advertising to create consumer desires within you, when you are reading a book. In the digital world we live in, the only privacy you have is the space between your ears.