Miles's blog

I don’t read enough.  I read some, mostly at night before I fall asleep.  Usually that means a few pages before I doze off.  This is not enough.  I used to read more.  I used to read all the time.  I used to read all day.  

Of course, television has always been a distraction, but for most of my life it was not a major distraction because television primarily has been a purveyor of garbage.  Sure, it has sports, and the occasional show I fall in love with like Friends or Bay City Blues, but in general, reading has been a much more attractive an option than tv.

Cable tv did present more of a distraction, but with the advent of innumerable reality shows (I mean, really, do this many people care about what all these housewives are doing?) and the switch of the History Channel from shows about actual history to ones about  Swamp People, I still managed to get in a great deal of reading.

Recordings of movies cuts into my reading, too.  I love movies, and the idea that I can pop in Saving Private Ryan or Casablanca or Major League is often much more enticing than reading.  Reading, of course, is an active enterprise.  Watching a movie is much more passive, and therefore much more seductive when feeling ill, tired, lazy, or just plan blah.  I have now watched a lot of movies made from books which I should have read in the first place.  For a long time I never read Gone with the Wind because I love the movie so much, but as with most of them, the book is better.  I have never read a single Dickens book, but I know about Ebeneezer Scrooge and Oliver Twist.  I never read the Maltese Falcon, but I know that Sam Spade looks like Humphrey Bogart.  The Bible?  Why bother?  There are lots of movies from that book.

Now, of course, I have Netflix.  This means I don’t have to leave the comfort of my couch to watch movies and old tv shows.  In the past at least I used to have to drive to Blockbuster or the Redbox or someplace, enough of a disincentive that picking up the book on my nightstand constituted a better idea.  But now, with just some remote control work (something I truly am good at) I can be watching Star Trek, or maybe a classic film.  Reading has diminished.

However, the single biggest impediment to more reading is the internet.  There is so much interesting stuff on there.  Have you ever been to Ted.com?  Wow, I love those talks.  They are smart to keep them about 15 minutes or so, making them easily digestible.  I watch all kinds of talk about science, stuff I would never know about. 

I use Stumbleupon to find new stuff.  It leads me to a lot of junk, but also to a lot of gems.  There are website about astronomy and physics, many contain fascinating photographs of far off nebula.  They tell me about planets orbiting other suns and sub-atomic particles.  Maybe one of them will explain M theory in a way I can understand it someday.  I surf the net and find history, technology, entertainment news (apparently lots of people like to watch movies and read about the private lives of movie stars), inspirational quotes, etc.

Anyway, so I don’t read as much.  Of course, I keep a book next to my bed as I always have.  A real book.  Of course, I always have a book on my iPad, but there is something about crawling into bed and curling up with a good book that cannot be replicated by curling up with a good tabloid computer.  For one thing, my iPad also connects to the internet and has a Netflix app.  So there I am distracted again. 

This is why I have a storage locker in Lakewood filled with boxes of books.  I have even read some of them.