rosanicus

Books and screens: Everyone is panicking about the death of reading usefully points out that panic and woezery over reading/not-reading/what they're reading etc etc is far from a new phenomenon:

We have been here before. Not just once, but repeatedly, in a pattern so consistent it reveals something essential about how cultural elites respond to changes in how knowledge moves through society.
In the late 19th century, more than a million boys’ periodicals were sold per week in Britain. These ‘penny dreadfuls’ offered sensational stories of crime, horror and adventure that critics condemned as morally corrupting and intellectually shallow. By the 1850s, there were up to 100 publishers of this penny fiction. Victorian commentators wrung their hands over the degradation of youth, the death of serious thought, the impossibility of competing with such lurid entertainment.
But walk backwards through history, and the pattern repeats with eerie precision. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, novel-reading itself was the existential threat. The terms used were identical to today’s moral panic: ‘reading epidemic’, ‘reading mania’, ‘reading rage’, ‘reading fever’, ‘reading lust’, ‘insidious contagion’. The journal Sylph worried in 1796 that women ‘of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels … the depravity is universal.’
....
In 1941, the American paediatrician Mary Preston claimed that more than half of the children she studied were ‘severely addicted’ to radio and movie crime dramas, consumed ‘much as a chronic alcoholic does drink’. The psychiatrist Fredric Wertham testified before US Congress that, as he put it in his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), comics cause ‘chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction’, calling them more dangerous than Hitler. Thirteen American states passed restrictive laws. The comics historian Carol Tilley later exposed the flaws in Wertham’s research, but by then the damage was done.

Moving on: on another prickly paw, I am not sure I am entirely on board with this model of reading as equivalent to going to the gym or other self-improving activity, and committing to reading X number of books per year (even if I look at the numbers given and sneer slightly): ‘Last year I read 137 books’: could setting targets help you put down your phone and pick up a book?:

As reading is increasingly tracked and performed online, there is a growing sense that a solitary pleasure is being reshaped by the logic of metrics and visibility. In a culture that counts steps, optimises sleep and gamifies meditation, the pressure to quantify reading may say less about books than about a wider urge to turn even our leisure into something measurable and, ultimately, competitive.

Also at the sense that the books are being picked for Reasons - maybe I'm being unfair.

Also, perhaps, this is a where you are in the life-cycle thing: because in my 20s or so I was reading things I thought I ought to read/have read even if I was also reading things for enjoyment, and I am now in my sere and withered about, is this going to be pleasurable? (I suspect chomping through 1000 romances as research is not all that much fun?)