On my way through town yesterday, I overheard an enlightening conversation between a prospective student and her mother. The pair had just exited the Dartmouth Co-op with a new Dartmouth hoodie in hand, and were passing The Dartmouth Bookstore when the mother turned to her daughter and asked whether she would like a leisure book to read from the bookstore.
"I really would," the prospie lamented, "but I don't have time for reading anymore, you know that."
The mother agreed, and they went on their way.
On Monday, Isaiah Berg seemed to express a similar nostalgia for those days when we were able to curl up with a book and read without the GPA-dragon breathing her smelly breath down our necks ("Dartmouth Reads," March 30). His pitch for Dartmouth to expand its extracurricular reading opportunities, while well articulated, raises the underlying question of why Dartmouth students, and our generation on the whole, feel too busy to read.
I am one of the many that would describe myself, as Berg so kindly puts it, as "under-read." My extracurricular reading schedule consists of reading a couple of pages of a book in the three minutes between when I get into bed and when I fall asleep. And let me tell you, you don't get through too many books reading two pages a night.
But is my lack of reading really just a matter of me being too overburdened with schoolwork?
I think the problem, in fact, is the way our generation arranges its priorities. It's not a coincidence that the same generation that earned the title "the Facebook generation" is also the least-read generation. When there are so many viral videos on Youtube to be watched and commented on, who has time for Dickens? And between Twitter, crackberries, iPhones and DVD-capable iPods, why would anyone waste their time with some old Scottish loon like Adam Smith? Anything worth reading has since been converted into a movie that is probably available on iTunes.
Reading has become obsolete, an activity we see our parents doing as we turn up the volume on the Michigan State-Kansas game while simultaneously checking our bracket on CBS.com. And while Berg frames this as an institutional problem, claiming that we "are being underserved in [our] pursuit of knowledge when there is little institutional support" for our reading "Adventures in Wonderland," I think it is quite clear that it is our penchant for technology and our thirst for an Internet pseudo-community that has created such a deep, intraversable chasm between our generation and reading.
Reading groups like those Berg describes are indeed beneficial for both students and professors alike. But I think he is misguided in exactly how these benefits are manifested. The discussions that reading groups facilitate force readers to think about the books they read critically, as if from a literary critic's perspective. It transforms reading from a passive exercise into a proactive one. But a reading group cannot combat the more fundamental problem that reading as a form of enjoyment is losing its appeal in favor of more immediate forms of entertainment.
Reading hasn't been an institutional activity since my D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything And Read) period in elementary school. While Berg believes it is the College's responsibility to fix our reading habits, I think the problem is more individual.
The motivation to read must come from within ourselves. We must overcome that indescribable drive to scroll endlessly through the Arabian vacation Facebook photos posted by your old camp friend (the one you haven't talked to in eight years) and that urge to Twitter just one more time about how good the Hoffmeister is, and brush the dust off our bookshelves.
In the end, this is a personal battle we must fight alone. The moment we start holding Dartmouth responsible for our reading paucity is the moment we stop holding ourselves accountable for our own education.
