The demise of print looks as if it will be a long, drawn-out affair. John Sutherland, the chairman of last year’s Man Booker Prize Committee, offers an arresting statistic: Today more novels are published in one week than Samuel Johnson had to deal with in a decade. As he calculates it in “How to Read a Novel,” it would take approximately 163 lifetimes to read the fiction currently available, at the click of a mouse, from Amazon.com.
In today’s New York Times, William Grimes discusses a few books that have recently come out about “reading” – including our own (bestseller, may I say) Reading Like a Writer (link ) by the amazing Francine Prose.
I, too, would very much like to read slowly.
