Four Books One Month

For 2011, my first year with a reading goal, I aimed to read 48 books. I'd become so caught up in the Internet that I'd hardly read any real books in 2010. I missed reading and knew that it calms me down, makes me happy, and teaches me more than I'll ever learn from a blog post. I'd also begun to worry about the brain changes Nicholas Carr describes in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain. Although I can't argue that linear reading is superior to surfing the Web, I know intuitively that I enjoy it more. I don't want to be a person who doesn't read real books. I am afraid that if I replace chapters with blog postings, I'll lose the capacity to derive joy from getting absorbed in a good book. As 2011 draws to a close, I'm happy to say I now consider myself a "reader" once more.