Reading

Recently I watched a video talking about the literacy crisis. A whole generation of youngsters are growing up with poor literacy skills, whilst adults are increasingly outsourcing their critical thinking skills to Grand Theft Autocomplete (AI).

The fact that I learned about this in a video speaks volumes about how we arrived at this point. Video content which is flashy and visually engaging, but light on information will always win over complex but ultimately dry text in a book. As a result, we’ve landed at a point where a substantial number of adults have poor literacy skills and just 1 in 3 children enjoy reading.

This is setting us up for disaster as these youngsters enter the workforce lacking the critical thinking skills to get by; without the ability to empathise; and without the broad range of knowledge a well-read person may have.

My job requires a lot of reading, a lot of writing, as well as a need to quickly read between the lines to enable me to arrive at a decision or a response, but I realise I’m falling into the same traps in my personal life. Whilst I like to think I can read and write pretty well, I have to work hard to stay engaged in a book. It is not something that has ever come naturally to me.

Part of the problem with the online world is it is absolutely exhausting. There is a constant flow of new information, new controversies and new ’news’ that I can do nothing about, but I feel obliged to engage with it anyway.

I’ve tried and failed to pull myself away so many times now, but I feel absolutely wasted by it all. One way I think I can restore some balance is to try to re-engage my reading muscles again. I tend to sleep better when I read at night, plus I may actually learn something along the way.

Thankfully Micro.blog, where this website is hosted has a handy bookshelves feature, which may help to keep me accountable. The plan is to switch from endlessly zoning out on Youtube (again) to reading books instead.

I’ve just finished Cory Doctorow’s ‘Enshittification’, which took me far longer than I would care to admit, but now I need to replace it with something else.

Now that ‘Silo’ the TV series is working its way through the last two books in the trilogy, I can start making my way through Shift and Dust without spoiling too much. Wool was a great book and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but fell out of the habit waiting for the TV series to catch up.

However, I’ve also signed up for a Storygraph account (an independent alternative to Amazon’s ‘Goodreads’) to keep track of what I have read and hopefully discover new things to get my teeth into.

If I can cut out some of the noise, increase my attention span and lose myself in a book, who knows, maybe I’ll have some more energy for everything else which must be done. Fingers crossed.

I’m on Mastodon