Trouble with Reading

The August 9 issue of the Los Angeles Times contains an article called “The Lost Art of Reading” by the paper’s books editor, David L. Ulin. He writes that “Sometime late last year -- I don't remember when, exactly -- I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read.” He notes that with his particular job this is a problem.

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After giving some of his own background of being a voracious reader since he was a teenager, he asks “So what happened? It isn't a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else's world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine…. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page."

Toward the end of the article Ulin says “How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?” The last line of the article sounds both mournful and heroic, “It's harder than it used to be, but still, I read.”

Interestingly, about a year ago Nicholas Carr had an article in The Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that spoke about the same problem. We may have spotted a trend. I hate to say it, but maybe we need to turn off our computers and sit down with a book.

Problems with Google Books Database

As someone who has had some success in using Google Books to locate the full text of certain books online and in finding which book contained a particular quote, I was surprised to see an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars.” In the piece, Geoffrey Nunberg chronicles a series of mistakes that appear when one searches in Google Books. These include having the wrong date of publication, completely inappropriate subject headings, and typos in titles.

I suppose it is not surprising that a project as huge as Google Books, which is being worked on at a rapid speed, is bound to have a few glitches, but this article suggests that mistakes go way beyond the “few glitches” stage.

Google Books is a valuable tool with great potential for making the information found in major libraries available to people around the world. Let’s hope that Google can locate and repair the errors in this database.