The Academy Awards played out last Sunday, and I realized I need to start reading more books.
I have watched so many films the last couple of years, about 2-3 a week, that film dominates as my largest source for narratives. However, I am not sure that is a good thing.
I do believe film is an art form, undoubtedly the most commercially successful one of the past century. A movie, unlike a book, only takes two hours to watch. This precisely is the problem: all this cinephilia is lowering my attention span. Film too often is a passive experience; we eat popcorn and watch a film. Reading a quality book requires many more hours of dedication and strict focus to avoid shifting one's eyes around the text without gaining comprehension.
From my own experience, people that read a lot of good books (e.g. if you run your hand across the cover, the author's name does not protrude) are generally better human beings. Thus, my desire to become more of an active reader draws me to a radical decision: I am going to delete my Netflix account. Extreme? Yes. Necessary? Not exactly. A move in the right direction? I believe so.
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