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Print It’s 11:38 p.m. You just made it home from work, the mid-week service, and the routine eat-out-afterwards. You have a stack of bills you need to sit down and pay, but you put it off again because that would require balancing your checkbook. Since you’ve battled a sinus infection all week, you decide to go in early tomorrow morning rather than dragging out the laptop and trying to tackle the work you brought home from the office. You just need sleep. So you drag on your PJs and cut straight to your “evening” devotion time. You stumble through a rambling prayer and finally crawl into bed and fall asleep on chapter one of your Bible reading. Mercifully, you remembered to set your alarm the previous morning, so you wake up at 5 a.m., trying to figure out what world you’re in. Somewhere about now you remember that article you were supposed to read for a meeting today at work. You can’t help but chuckle bitterly—you’ll get to that work article when you get to the four novels you promised yourself you’d read by the end of the month. Sound at all familiar? What about the part where you don’t have time to read? Does anyone out there besides me feel too busy to include leisure reading in your daily life?
Once Upon A Time… From this perspective, I approach this month’s column with the question: does anyone read anymore? If so, who are these people? I am jealous, and I want to know how they do it. Almost a year ago, we surveyed our readers and found that a lot of you Apostolic guys and gals seem to do a good job of staying up on your reading. I am curious if you are still reading today, and if you are reading more or less than you were a year ago. I am convinced I’m still reading, but maybe I’m reading different media. Like many others, I am now devoting some of my usual reading time to my favorite blogs. Another chunk of my reading time goes to various online news articles and, of course, e-mail. I hope for the sake of world literacy that I’m the Lone Ranger in not having read a cloth or paperback novel in almost three months. However, I think others join me in finding it difficult to squeeze leisure reading into your hectic lifestyle. Yet I know we’re doing something with our time. At the risk of re-opening the great TV debate, I wonder if we as Apostolics read less now than in the past because of the wide-spread acceptance of television and the Internet in our movement. In the past, without TV or computers, Apostolics looked to books for education and entertainment. Have we eliminated the need for the book by the availability of television and cyberspace? With our more open attitude toward these new media, does this spell the death warrant for books in our Apostolic culture?
The Whole Truth and
Nothing But Also, I encourage you this month to consider sharing your reading discoveries. Since we’re all so strapped for time, let’s make the most of our reading experiences by sharing them with each other. Please e-mail me with recent books you’ve enjoyed or your favorite timeless classics, and I’ll try to include your suggestions in our Reader Recommendations section of this column. If you have too much to say in a one- or two-sentence blurb, how about an outright book review? We don’t always have time to peruse the fiction of our choice for hours on end, but taking five minutes to enjoy someone else’s review can open new avenues of thought and encourage our own literary pursuits.
For Fun
Classics Remembered
Lagniappe
ninetyandnine.com © 2005, Lee Ann Alexander ----- Lee Ann Alexander is ninetyandnine.com’s book columnist. If you have suggestions on topics to explore, email her at Books@ninetyandnine.com. Footnotes 1Borges, Jorge Luis. “Poema de los Dones," from El Hacedor 2Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. (I, ii, 33) |
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