JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Time for Reading
By LINDSAY WATERS
The Chronicle Review, 9 Feb 2007

I want to start a new movement, now.

From the 19th century on, more and more segments of our society —
farmers, factory workers, doctors, professors — have been urged to
speed things up in order to produce more eggs or automobiles, or to
heal or educate more people. Charles Dickens gave expression to the
pathos of life under such a regime in his novel Hard Times; so did
Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a work of cinematic art that gets to
the heart of what ails society. The Monty Python crew made fun of this
imperative in its “All-England Summarize Proust Competition” for the
best synopsis of Proust’s seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past in
15 seconds. The fun poked at attempts to speed-read the classics was
as painful as Chaplin’s effort to survive industrialization. And it’s
no joke: Imagine radiologists forced to read 13 mammograms per hour,
without interrupting their reading to speak to the women whose scans
they are analyzing. I know of at least one such case.

Is it any surprise that there is now a reading crisis worldwide that
affects people at all levels, from preschool to graduate school, the
affluent and the poor alike? Don’t assume you are immune, people of
higher education. (continues)