According to "Space Between Words" by Paul Saenger, handwritten manuscripts were first written like this:
accordingtospacebetweenwordsbypaulsaengerhandwrittenmanuscriptswerefirstwrittenlikethis
When Irish monks began inserting a space between words, silent reading became possible. Before then, one used the voice to try to sound out words without our tools of spaces, capital letters and punctuation. We have all grown up with these tools and expect most reading to be a silent activity. Reading can be done quite rapidly when it is silent and solitary. For me, reading a good book was indeed that sort of process, until recently.
Now, I sit down with "Natural Causes" by Barbara Ehrenreich or some other fine book. Pow! The first phrase is a delight. Just what my friend was writing about the other day. I want to share my delight and the particular phrasing the author uses. I want to emphasize that my friend and I are quite the modern current literary up-to-date people that we are. I reach for my computer, sign in, open email and type up a short note quoting the way the author phrases her comment, citing the page. Now, back to my reading.
Pow! The next sentence reminds me of the discussion the guys had about the subject. Back to the computer, address a email to the group and again, write out the comment, add a note of explanation and send it off.
No wonder, it takes me much longer these days to read through a book. Not only the emails, tweets and notes for blog posts. I realize that this author is quite good. How old is he? What else has he written? Check him out on Amazon, Google, maybe Facebook. Suddenly, I remember a book by this author that I bought a couple of years ago. I search for it on my Kindle but it says I have nothing like that. I look up the book and discover I have the title wrong and I have been spelling the author's name incorrectly. Might as well take a moment to send corrections out.
So it is that various indicators, predictions and notes assert that the book will take me ten hours of reading to finish while in reality, I take much longer. And that is when I focus on reading the book and not branching off to the news, the most recent magazines that have arrived and other books that deserve a little attention, too.
