Post by hifigator on Apr 25, 2011 14:51:11 GMT -5
He didn't proudly admit that he'd never read one book - he used it to emphasize the one book he said he did read.
Universities are coming under increasing fire for lax requirements and are far from the "look to your left, look to your right, one of you won't be here to graduate" days - Georgetown included - so using this to claim that basketball players get an easy ride (when I've pointed out before that UConn's abysmal graduation rate for men's basketball - one in three! - apparently only focuses on keeping athletes eligible) is disingenuous.
And, not to go all Generation Y on you, but reading a book cover to cover when all the key stuff is in one chapter doesn't seem that efficient (someone here turned me on to Long Reads, which is pretty fascinating and yet doesn't count as a "book" no matter how many of them I polish off). Education is about pulling together complex materials and bouncing them off of one another until you understand them and how they interact. You don't have to read a book to do that. The book's just the information delivery mechanism.
I'm amazed at how many people on here try and justify the position that reading books is not that important.
I agree with your sentiment, but I won't blame it on "this board" or the people here. As technology has evolved, there are more and more alternatives to reading a book. There are multiple "books on tape" options. Of course, the major alternative to reading a book is watching a movie. In most cases, this is realy more like "reading a slightly different, but similar story." I know, watching and reading are entirely different, and creating your own mental images is a significant of the equation. But I think that in this case, watching a movie is more like "reading" a similar book where the mental images have already been created by someone else. But I digress ...
Seriously though, there are simply a ton of alternatives to books as we knew them. Even the cureent evolved "book" product varies widely from the original. Is it still a "book" if it is a digital reproduction enjoyed from some version of a NetBook? I'm a bit of a stick in the mud when it comes to this. While I fully understand the convenience of a miniature IPad and the ability to have the great works of history at your fingertips and only a click away. But it isn't the same. I understand that I can view for free many of the daily newspapers like Miami Herald or Orlando Sun Sentinal, but I still prefer to pick up my crappy mullet wrapper of a paper called the Gainesville Sun on the way to work at a criminal price of .81 cents a day after tax.
I miss the days of "books," and in a more important revelation, maybe I never truly enjoyed the days of books. As soon as we were exposed to alternatives like radio, television, movies and digital formats, books were never the same. So I wonder if any of us truly appreciate books like those who came before us -- like those who had no other alternatives?? I wonder ...