Some good ones have been made recently. Found a lovely shade of not-quite-pink, not-quite-purple wool, got the paperback version of Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, and stumbled upon the BBC iPlayer. Life has definitely changed for the better!As I surfed about the iPlayer, this is what I came across. Why reading matters, a documentary on how reading shapes the human brain, what it does to us when we engage with the written word and why it is important not to lose the skill, possibly to other interactive media such as video games. The programme focussed on the creation of empathy in the mind of the reader (Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights), the sparks of genius encountered in Shakespeare's writing and the inter-connectedness that reading, an aquired skill, builds in the human brain. Very interesting insights indeed, but there is so much more to reading that I'm afraid an hour long documentary just couldn't do justice to the activity. What about the cultural learning, the escaping into a different world, the toying with language and the sheer process of discovery? And the many other brilliantly subtle and blatantly obvious things that reading does to us. Sure reading matters, but why it does is something that each person discovers for herself, in the same way as experiences shape life. Or perhaps I just love reading too much to want it to be reduced to bullet point justifications, fighting for survival against gaming and television.
2 comments:
Ah reading, one can write a whole thesis on it, or perhaps two, or three!
Exactly. And so to reduce the need/desire to read to a couple of mental and physiological impulses just didn't seem to do it for me. What they highlighted was good, but there is so much more to it!
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