Guilty as charged

I've been accused of reading widely -- too widely.  That's how I run across writers such as Dan Ariely author of "Predictably Irrational" and "The Upside of Irrationality," Jonah Lehrer ("How We Decide"), Susan Cain ("Quiet"), et al.  And websites such as http://800ceoread.com, and Seth Godin's http://changethis.com -- monthly epamphlets (at < 25pages, I don't think they qualify as real eBooks -- especially since they are usually snippets of the main ideas from the authors' books.  Many are the usual thing with a little difference.  Others summarize bigger points (Hugh MacLeod's 49-page "How to Be Creative" published in 2004 and still at the top of ChangeThis' list of popular postings.)

And, of course, getting ebooks from the local libraries, especially reading them on my Nook, has been an absolute disaster for any discipline I could claim.  Now I can take my wandering reading habits with me.  (Ariely, Cain and Lehrer are all available through SEO or the Ohio eBook Project)  I had an older 1st-year student this past semester whose buddies kept coming over to borrow his truck and made concentrating on his school work difficult.  Between the Nook and the libraries and ebook services, I've got even more insistent buddies.

On the other hand, there are advantages to this grazing -- or this monkeybrain reading.  I do pull in a lot of information, get exposed to a lot of ideas that don't appear in the composition journals that I supposedly keep up with.  If I don't remember where I've seen a lot of the ideas, the reading habit has encouraged me to try to organize my notes, the stack of pages that come in in print form, and the screenfuls of book marks that I'm supposed going to read.  Linkrot has its benefits: if I don't need to read a link immediately, often the gracious gods of the internet move the material so I can ignore what I can no longer find. (Why was I reading that interview with Elon Musk of Tesla and Space-X?  Insights for my 2nd year comp class?)


And, of course, I have a ready supply of ideas to reflect on -- except when I forget to turn my quasi-leisure reading into satisfying a course assignment.  I've put down the ebooks about web design and am actually ready (forced by time) to finish up the website assignment.