Research shows that reading makes us more empathetic. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/-1ph65.html
Maybe there's implications for ASBO policy - forget community service sentencing, put them in libraries, chained to a book. You might have to sew their eyes open, clockwork orange style. And a new type of librarian would be required to manage these readers - librarians with boxing experience could demand astronomical salaries.
And if reading has been shown to change brain structure, what effect might writing have?
PS. Since I added the twitter feed to this blog, I have been unable to comment here, and thus unable to reply to comments. Typical! For every step forward, there's a step backward. It all balances up.
I think making folks read is a brilliant idea.
ReplyDeleteYou'd need Conan the Librarian to keep them on task. But it would be better to expose folks to the written word than have them out picking up trash.
I say!
ReplyDeleteI suggest that several of the readers of this blog should start reading with this book.
MM III
Nanners, even if all they read was the lives of various hip-hop geniuses, it would be a start.
ReplyDeleteMingers, I'm assuming that link is to My Life As A Beachboy / Blissheid, possibly wonderful but how would you get a ruffian numbskull to read it?
I say!
ReplyDeleteThe book is: A Shed Of One's Own: Midlife Without the Crisis
Summary: For many men, middle age arrives too fast and without due warning. One day you are young, free and single; the next you are bald, fat and washed-up, with weird tendrils of hair growing out of your ears. None of it seems fair. With age should come dignity and respect, but instead everyone makes tired jokes about buying a motorbike. Marcus Berkmann isn't having it. Having marked his fiftieth birthday by hiding under the duvet for six weeks, the author of the cricket classics Rain Men and Zimmer Men is now determined to find some light in the all-consuming darkness. Musing over birth, death and all the messy stuff in between, he concludes that however dreadful you look in the mirror today, it will be much worse in ten years' time. His brutally candid despatch from the frontline is not for the faint-hearted, which is to say anyone under thirty-five.
MM III
Mingers. Albert would enjoy that inspirational book: "however dreadful you look in the mirror today, it will be much worse in ten years' time."
ReplyDelete