Reading for me will be a combination of books, magazines, Tumblr, and just kind of the Web in general on the iPad.
I had been reading magazines a lot, and I love magazines, and so I was always asking myself why is it that these gorgeous articles just don't translate well to the web? Presentation was one aspect of it.
In the long run magazines can't be a convenience play - the Web has stolen that. So magazines have to be high fidelity - a fantastic experience - to thrive. Magazines will survive the Internet age, but only the ones that give people an experience they just can't get anywhere else. A magazine will have to be truly loved to make it.
I love French films, and I copy things I see in them. I read magazines and also look at Tumblr. I love nails, so I literally just search the word 'nails' on Tumblr and start looking.
The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
So I'm reading a book on my new iPad, but can't the iPad read it for me? Do I have to do everything?
All the information you could want is constantly streaming at you like a runaway truck - books, newspaper stories, Web sites, apps, how-to videos, this article you're reading, even entire magazines devoted to single subjects like charcuterie or wedding cakes or pickles.
Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever.
I've gotten into doing electronic books and audiobooks, so I have an iPad. I still love reading a real book, but when you travel, it's better than carrying around a bunch of books.
I got my iPad, and I'm trying to buy books on that, but I kind of like a book. At the end of my life, when I'm old, I want to have all these shelves full of books. So I'm just gonna do the book thing.
I am not on tumblr. I can barely spell tumblr. However, there does seem to be someone on tumblr (who copied my reddit user name) who is apparently trying to impersonate me. I like the idea that people are pretending to be me. I spend most of my time pretending not to be me.
Nowadays I imagine people find freer and more accepting venues in blogs, on Tumblr and Instagram and Facebook, in the riot of shouting that trails in the wake of every news story. So there's always the pandemonium of the Internet, if you need to get your lunatic opinions out in public. I find most of that stuff a little insane-making and my preference is to encounter personal essays in the relatively sedate and stable universe of print, in literary quarterlies, magazines and books. But I'm sure you can find plenty of good stuff in lonely outposts all across the World Wide Web.
Accolades and lists may tell us about accomplishments, but life is meant to be experienced, not just accomplished. It's like the difference between reading books for the sake of reading and reading books just to get a good grade.
I feel like the books that I'm reading at any given time will really help me with my work, because it's just more characters, and you see new people while you're reading.
I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.
I do think that the kind of writing that I do will always be around and printed in books, magazines, and now blogs.