“I feel like an alcoholic pushed into a permanently stocked bar, and I can’t even taste the merlot because I’m trying to down a tequila and sip a martini at the same time. I’m dying to return to the mono-media of paper and glue. But I’m just not sure that I’m strong enough to resist the lure of that Dickens in my pocket; the new Jim Crace short story nestling in that mega-zine; the stream of Pepys updates scrolling down my screen.”
Over at The Guardian Books Blog, Molly Flatt points to a new Stanford study and a TED talk by Barry Schwarz that show the downside of all the choices technology and modern society have given us. She calls it “always-something-better-out-there syndrome,” and she wonders if it’s killing the joy of reading.
