I love reading. It is one of my favourite pastimes. I don't mind too much whether it is in book form, magazine online, whatever, I just love reading. fiction, non-fiction, novels to academic papers, blogs to journals. Good writing is a wonderful medium of communication. I know there is a saying that a picture paints a thousand words, but the visual artist has no control over which 1000 words the observer will take away from the artwork. I guess to an extent the same is true of thewritten word in that it is perfectly possible for two people to read the same text and take away completely different understandings of the meaning of the text. One only has to look at the disagreements prevalent in pretty much every major religion over the interpretation of religious texts to see this, but how much more interpretation and consequently dispute would there be if we still used a pictorial represntation system of writing?
I find it very hard to imagine a society in which reading is not a significant part. I clearly remember being very confused by the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, a distopian view of a future in which books have been banned and all information is disseminated by video screen instead. In the book there is a suggestion that the world will be saved by small groups of people learning books verbatim ready to recreate them once society was re-established. This theme is comon in several traditions. In Islam the idea of the Hafiz has similar themes, as does the creation of early books in Western Europe taking stories with a long history in an oral tradition and writing them down. In the European tradition this was an interesting event since the people who wrote the stories down were predominantly early Christians, and the peoples whos stories were being written down were not. This has led to much interesting debate around how these stories might have been changed in the writing.
But that is perhaps a post for another day...
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