Games! Games! Games!

Reading these days is far more difficult to fit in then it was five years ago, due not to my enthusiasm for television or video games (those are minor distractions), but due to the internets. I read far more material starting with an http:// than anything else. This isn’t a bad thing: I read a ton of quality material on the web, and feel I’m better for it. But it’s a different type of reading. There aren’t long, complex, overlapping narratives on the web that compel me to stay on the same web page for two hours. Rather, I read a paragraph or two about a specific subject and then move on. Bloglines and del.icio.us/popular are my home bases, and I read 30 or 40 web articles in the time it takes me to get through 2 chapters in a novel. Reading on the web is episodic, due both to internet conventions (short articles about a singular subject) and content (technical articles, news blurbs, or jokes). It’s less sophisticated than reading good fiction, but more informative in a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of way.