Deviations into sense

[oursin]

Robert McCrum is surprisingly non-poncey in Fifty things I've learned about the literary life.

I particularly like:

20. Literary fiction is like sci-fi. It's a genre.*
15. You don't have to read every book you buy, and you certainly don't have to finish the book you've started.
34. Lists are the curse of the age.
38. Ebooks are not the end of the world.
42. No one is obliged to like Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.**

*I think this should be no 1
** That is a relief, as I have a paperback I bought in 197x languishing somewhere in the great book morass, still unread.

[W]e ask whether the internet is actually changing the way our minds work and Aleks Krotoski comes up with some surprisingly non-panicky or gosh-wow reactions:

'[T]here's no definitive answer and a whole lot of contradictory evidence
....
Many of the claims are a synthesis of hunches, agendas, anecdotal evidence and a response to the general paranoia that dogs us when faced with something unknown
....
[N]ew technologies – whether the printing press, the telegraph, the railway or the web – produce exactly the same concerns about our cognitive capabilities. How quickly we forget.

There has not been enough time to address whether the web is actually rewiring our brains; it will be a few years before any longitudinal studies can offer evidence one way or another
....
[T]he web is not doing anything to us; that it merely presents us with a mirror that challenges us to face ourselves.