O Frabjous Day

Helen Rittelmeyer’s back! Here she is on “Winning the Distraction War, Losing the Distraction Peace” :

In the last six months I’ve eliminated from my reading life everything that felt like empty carbs. The rule of thumb was: In a year, will I look back and think that this was a good use of my reading time, which after all is limited? The result was a reading diet made up almost entirely of books, plus a handful of magazines, some blogs, no newspapers, and no articles about how Tumblr is making us stupid.

If I had deliberately set out to design a reading life that took into account all the warnings about digital natives and their addiction to distraction, the result would have been the same. Alas, after six months, I have to report that the results have not been entirely satisfactory.

Read the rest here .

(Personally, I only read books by dead people.)