While perusing the latest Political Animal posts, I ran across in which Kevin suggests that online reading might be bad for off-line reading.
It’s not just that I spend less time reading books, it’s that I find my mind wandering when I do read. After a few paragraphs, or maybe a page or two, I’ll run into a sentence that suddenly reminds me of something‚ and then spend the next minute staring into space thinking of something entirely unrelated to the book at hand. Eventually I snap back, but obviously this behavior reduces both my reading rate and my reading comprehension.
Now Anna routinely teases me because I’ll read, re-read, re-re-read, re-re-re — but you get the picture — books that I’ve read many times before. Some of my Terry Pratchett boks have be read dozens of times. No. Really.
Is this perhaps because my brain cells have been dumbed down to the point that I can’t follow a new story? There might be some evidence to this: whenever I buy a sequel a long time after reading the original book, I’m forced to re-read the original before reading the sequel. Otherwise I’ll never pick up the threads of the original story.
Does this happen to anyone else? Or am I alone in my reading comprehension dungeon?