I rarely use this blog to link people to other places, unless it is to inform you further about an author I’m citing, or an organization that needs promotion, within the context of my mini-reviews.  There is so much good stuff out there, one could easily spend hours and hours each day reading it all.  And this is pretty great, even if it distracts serious books buyers, at times. But I try to stick to my main task of alerting you to books we’re selling here at the shop.

This article, though, which came to my attention while snooping around the website of Mars Hill Audio, written by Hearts & Minds friend Ken Myers, is so well written, so rich, so provocative, that I really thought our friends would enjoy it.  Sorry I’m not touting a book this time. And Ken’s voice, of course, is different than my own (I hear the collective sighs of relief all over cyberspace—a guest columnist at BookNotes!)  I think I will cite this piece in a talk I’m doing in a few days at the Pennsylvania State Pastor’s conference, where we are selling books.  Along with some other good folk, I’ll get to be Calvin College prof, media guru, and important writer himself, author Dr. Quentin Schultze. 

The article about reading, Slower, Longer, Smarter, starts like this:

Many years ago, when working at National Public Radio, I talked with a friend who had left NPR to work in the news department at ABC. During the conversation, he remarked that the biggest difference between his old colleagues and his new ones was that reporters and producers at NPR regularly read books, while the people at ABC generally didn’t. He said this somewhat wistfully, suggesting that he missed the conversations and arguments that are nourished by a shared experience of the focused and sustained attentiveness that books make possible. Books, like music, are ways of ordering our experience of time and intellect. They encourage habits of mind that are quite different from those typical among people whose reading is enabled most often by a device appropriately called a “browser.”

Read the rest of it (it isn’t long) here.  If you are a book lover, are concerned about the state of reading in our times,  you will be glad you did.  If you don’t subscribe to this well-produced, exceptionally thoughtful “audio magazine”, you should consider it.