Short Essay Assignment: Staying Awake
In an essay called “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading” written by Ursula K. Le Guin, she wants to question the assumption that books are becoming obsolete. She explains that the majority of people have not been ‘readers’ from long time ago. After I read that, I also thought that reading might not be the important factor in our live. Writing and reading skills perhaps are inner skills. I mean we cannot realize until we give people some comprehensive tests. If a person knows how to communicate with other people, he or she would feel it is unnecessary to learn how to read or write. Therefore, it was possible for the ‘readers’ to think that speaking or communicating was the only important. However, she says that historically, ‘readers’ are people who have had both economic and social power, not the majority of people. She writes “Literacy was not only the front door to any kind of individual economic and class advancement; it was an important social activity” (34). Moreover, she is talking about the corporate publishers who are favoring on formulaic best-sellers. When I was reading this, I wanted to ask her, if she was a publisher, what would she do to make money from selling the books? I mean who would want to sell something that no one wants to buy. It is the publisher’s job to make people to take money out from their pocket. I thought they would have no choice for doing such a thing. Anyway, I think her point is that best-sellers’ books are overwhelming the market, that publishers are spending so much of their budgets on established best-selling authors that it is more difficult for new writers to get a foot in the door. But her main point is that readers have always been in the minority, not the majority, and that books have endured and will continue to do so in spite of all the electronic competition. “In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with...