Booking Through Thursday...

[fajrdrako]

From May 29, 2008: What is reading, anyway? Novels, comics, graphic novels, manga, e-books, audiobooks — which of these is reading these days? Are they all reading? Only some of them? What are your personal qualifications for something to be “reading” — why? If something isn’t reading, why not? Does it matter? Does it impact your desire to sample a source if you find out a premise you liked the sound of is in a format you don’t consider to be reading? Share your personal definition of reading, and how you came to have that stance.

This kind of question makes my head ache; It's all just semantics, isn't it? Normally I'd say reading is ingestion of information through the written word. But I might talk about having read an audiobook, which is entirely aural. And if someone had read a book aloud to me, I might say afterwards that I'd read it, even though the process wasn't literally a matter of reading. I'd say this because the material was originally in written form.

But if anyone wants to use another words, that's fine with me, too. If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one to hear, does it make a sound? If a book isn't made up of written words, is it still a book to be read?