So I’ve realized that my on-again, off-again Twitter account has encouraged a burgeoning possibly bad habit: piling up books in my TBR (To Be Read) pile while also consuming far too much of my free time.
And because it’s Thursday, and I need to start making this blog a habit, I thought I’d mention how crazy it is that collectively, so many of us (myself included, despite my attempts to fight it) have traded our long-form reading habits for hours of internet scrolling and “microblogging” on Facebook and Twitter.
I think there’s something to be said for recovering whole-book reading. There’s a sense of context you get from a whole book that’s missing from short articles, blog posts, and social media. Maybe that lack of context is helping fuel our increasingly-divisive, increasingly-polarized society. Maybe. I don’t know, but I think it definitely isn’t helpful that we get so much of our information in context-free bits and pieces from people who frequently are unqualified to comment on something or just don’t know the whole story.
So, books. I just finally caved and bought Beth Moore’s memoir and I think I’ll work on that this weekend. Never mind that I have five other books —three on the Kindle (at least) and two —wait, three— books on my nightstand to finish. Whether or not I actually have ADD/ADHD, I might actually have attention-deficit-reading disorder. And so, I think I’ll abandon all those other excellent books, …and get started on something new, of course.
Signing off before one more of my literary Twitter friends mentions yet another book I can’t live without reading (thank God for my library’s Libby app, or I’d really be in trouble), and maybe —just maybe— I’ll throw in a short review of Beth Moore’s book here once I finish, just to be sure that I actually *do* finish it in less than a couple weeks. Stay tuned.
