The Intelligent Dog’s Guide To A Troubled World

It’s a bright, cold morning here in NY and I’ve awoken early and with a renewed vigor.  Central Park had the usual canine and human characters tramping about on the brown winter grass and bridle paths and I avoided as many humiliating hindquarter sniffs as possible.
 

I will be doing an unprecedented two posts today if my stamina holds out.  The first to share with you is this link from the NY Times: http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/book-lust/  

As a committed reader and “shadow” author, I find Egan’s convictions inspiring and dearly hope his argument is correct, that the book –paper, electronic or otherwise— is not dead.  The article begins:  “Every now and then, someone who is brilliant says something stupid — often the result of spending too much time riding a jet stream of high praise. Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple Inc., did such a thing last month when he all but declared the death of reading…” and goes on to these excellent observations: “Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.  For most of my lifetime, I’ve heard that reading is dead. In that time, disco has died, drive-in movies have nearly died, and something called The Clapper has come and gone through bedrooms across the nation.  But reading? This year, about 400 million books will be sold in the United States. Overall, business is up 1 percent — not bad, in a rough economy, for a $15 billion industry still populated by people whose idea of how to sell books dates to Bartleby the Scrivener.” Yes, well worth a read.