New Zealand Listener - October 13, 2018

OCTOBER 13 2018 LISTENER 19

E

ndlessly. The number of book groups

involved in the Book Discussion

Scheme (and there are other types of

book group) has risen 22% over the

past five years, from 1054 to 1290. Groups

include 25 in libraries, 13 that are men-

only, nine in prisons, five whose members

speak English as a second or other lan-

guage and five in high schools. Although

retired women make up the bulk of mem-

bers, scheme manager Barbara Brown says

new groups are more likely to have both

male and female readers in their thirties,

We discuss books ...

than ever, but there is a large number of us

who didn’t pick up a book at all, or read

fewer than three in the past year. Watching

television and browsing the internet are our

leisure activities of choice.”

Wolf stresses she is not taking a stand

against digital media. After all, when it comes

to reading, she argues, we get out largely

what we put in – the more we skim, the more

we’re likely to keep skimming; the more we

plunge into a text, the more we’re likely to

keep plunging. Emails, texts and tweets can

usually be understood with a quick scan and

students who regularly do research online

have been found to be better at ignoring

digitally aware citizens of the 21st century,

“but at the same time not lose the sophis-

ticated cognitive processes that we spent a

couple of centuries developing. It is prob-

lematic when our students of literature are

avoiding 19th- and early 20th-century lit-

erature because they are too dense. It is not

that I want everyone to read George Eliot,

but I don’t want them not to be able to.”

To be able to apply the same in-depth

close-reading processes to any medium,

she says, we need to cultivate a “bi-literate”

reading brain capable of the deepest forms

of thought in either digital or traditional

format. In order for this to happen, she is

calling for a pause, time out to consider

what we are gaining and what we are losing

when we read on different media, and how

we can preserve and expand our reading

capabilities to avoid the catastrophe, she

says, “of children able to read and decode

but who are not reading with critical analy-

sis, with all the implications for background

knowledge, inference deduction, empathy

and the ability to understand perspectives

that are different from our own.

“We should be thinking about our own

thinking, we should be thinking about our

own reading.” l

irrelevant information than those who use

the internet mostly to send emails, chat and

blog. Nor is there any doubt that printed

books and reports can be skimmed as much

as any online communication.

But there is concern, she says, that digital

media and the sheer volume of online infor-

mation and communication invite the fast

and shallow read. The result, she writes, is

more and more young people not reading

other than what is required, “and often not

even that: ‘tl; dr’ (too long; didn’t read)”.

Of course, we want our children to be

Susan Greenield: information is not knowledge.

forties and fifties. Fiction is three times

more popular with groups than non-fic-

tion, but last year’s most requested book

was a New Zealand non-fiction title, The

Good Doctor, by Lance O’Sullivan.

In the running for this year’s most

popular fiction title are crime novel

The Dry, by Jane Harper, and Orhan’s

Inheritance, by first-time novelist Aline

Ohanesian. Among non-fiction titles,

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Mat-

ters in the End, by US surgeon Atul

Gawande, is leading the pack.

GETTY IMAGES; ALAMY

It is problematic when

students avoid too-

dense literature. “It is

not that I want everyone

to read George Eliot,

but I don’t want them

not to be able to.”