Angela Booth's Writing Blog: Has the web stopped you reading books?

Books: Write Fiction

Angela Booth: Short Fiction Secrets: How To Write And Sell Short Stories (Selling Writer Strategies Book 2)
Writing short stories is a fun and easy way to get started writing fiction — you can get paid to write, in your spare time. If you're new to writing fiction, you can learn the elements of writing fiction — short stories are much easier to control than longer fiction.
Angela Booth: Master Fiction Writing: Craft A Novel in 31 Days: Selling Writer Strategies 4
This program began as a 30-day challenge which I organized in 2010. Hundreds of writers joined the challenge; they wrote novels. You can write a novel in 31 days too.
Angela Booth: Step By Step To Fiction Which Sells: Plotting And Scene Magic
What if you could leave boring fiction forever behind you, so that the story in your head becomes the story on the page? You CAN, when you discover the magic of story, plotting, and scenes.

Is the web making you dumb?

That is, is it decreasing your attention span, and making you unable to think? It's an interesting argument. I've polled several friends, who say that they read as many books as they ever did, and in many cases more than they ever did.

However, since all my friends tend to be writers, they're not a representative group.

Read this article, Sorry, English major, the engineers have triumphed which states that:

"Kluth, of The Economist, agrees that people will read more 'in terms of quantity, but more promiscuously and at shorter intervals and with less dedication. As these habits take root, they corrupt our willingness to commit to long texts, as found in books or essays... This will result in a resurgence of short-form texts and storytelling, in 'haiku culture' replacing 'book culture.''"

Definitely not so for me, and maybe not for you.

Here are the books I've been reading in the past week (I always spend more time reading books than I do reading the web):

* Reread Wolf Hall. I first read it almost a year ago, when it first appeared, and was eager to read it again. Wolf Hall is on my list of books I'd take with me to a desert island. Wolf Hall is a long book;

* Finished reading Googled. Auletta's book goes a long way to explaining Google's culture, and why the company sees nothing wrong with being promiscuous with users' personal data (viz the current storm over Buzz). Googled is reasonably long;

* Half-way through Can You Forgive Her? I'm rereading Trollope's Palliser novels this year. I last read them at least a couple of decades ago, and I'm enjoying them more now. I reread The Small House at Allington in January; it introduces some of the characters of the Palliser novels. Since Trollope is a Victorian novelist, all his novels are long.

So, what about you?

Has the web stopped you reading books? What books have you been reading? (Please share in the comments.)

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