From the February 2008 Harper’s Magazine article Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading by Ursula K. LeGuin:

In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head.  A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do.  It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it.  It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it - everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. [37]

Ah.

Saw this in today’s Writer’s Almanac.  Struck a chord amongst all the religious/poetry reading of late…

Call It Quits

If you’re not a movie mogul, rock star, or President
if you’re not a CEO sitting on a billion in the bank,
no on will answer your e-mails, phone calls or letters.
You’ll be helpless, hopeless, too old, too young,
in too much pain, the wrong color, some unacceptable
sex, a non-believer in some religion people kill for.
You could be struggling to see through everyone’s
skin to their slick, writhing guts, including your own.

Or, you could call it quits, and slip into the unknown,
inexhaustible, frothing teeth of the sea that turns us
all to brine, sweet salt of the universe.

“Call It Quits” by Freya Manfred, from Swimming With A Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2008. (buy now) [ed note: with apologies to the author, I just had to add the line break before “Or”.]

This is a pleasant-but-impossible fantasy.  Salt is not sweet.  Keep working.

While it might seem odd to start a blog about books with a video, I am going to do just that.  In addition to everything I said in the about page, the following little poem/video also inspired me to start writing down more about the stuff I read.

Check out Billy Collin’s website for more ‘action poetry.’