Over-readers Anonymous

Apparently there was once a blog with this title -- Over-readers Anonymous -- but it has disappeared. I always thought I had made it up.

I was thinking about it today after my experience last night. When one of the ladies was asked what her favorite television show was, she looked shocked. "I watch the BBC news and maybe Frontline sometimes," she said, adding emphatically, "if it's new. Otherwise, I'm reading."

Later one of the couples was talking about how their sons (college age now) never picked up the reading habit. "They just spend their time watching television or on the internet." As the politicians would say, heads were shaken.

When I was in the monastery, I spent most evenings in my room, usually reading a mystery after I had completed my work for the day. Others watched television. I know some people thought it admirable that I read at night, and were disappointed that other friars wasted time watching the tube. But what difference, really, was there between me reading an Agatha Christie novel and someone else watching the fine BBC television adaptations of the same novel?

The boys on the internet may be playing computer games, but if they are surfing the web, they are reading, aren't they? Maybe not what someone else might want them to read, but they are reading. In fact, with the way the net works, they may be jumping from factoid to factoid and actually picking up some interesting info along the way. (The parents made it clear that the boys read the books for their course work and do fine in school.) I know they may be looking at unsavory pictures, but as I recall, the print media always made those available, too, even when I was a teen back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Admittedly the internet has contributed to a growing problem with pornography, but the people last night weren't complaining that their boys were watching internet porn. They were just concerned that they were on the internet instead of having their noses poked into a book.

One of these guys has recently started ordering -- and reading -- books from Amazon.com. What did he order? The Iliad, The Odyssey and a volume of Greek mythology. His interest in boyhood games of fantasy has led him to study the classics of Western civilization.