Oh, and speaking of books...

I didn't necessarily mean to give up Facebook for Lent, but I did intend to spend much less time on the internet. It was frying my brain and taking time away from things of much more importance.

Since I've put my mind to it and stopped logging on out of boredom (no different than eating or boozing out of boredom), I've been able to rediscover my love of reading.  I'm making a concerted effort to pay attention, really pay attention to the words I'm reading, and it's been oh so nice.
(I finished Frankenstein last night.)

 This is an old article, but I found myself nodding in agreement as I scanned it.
(Yep. I could only manage to scan it. Nice, huh? Not as if it's War and Peace.)

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

-Is Google Making Us Stupid?