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Stop reading this blog, says Doris Lessing

From The Guardian:

The inanities of the internet have seduced a generation, and we live in a fragmenting culture where people read nothing and know nothing of the world, the new Nobel laureate novelist Doris Lessing warned yesterday.

Lessing, described by the Nobel committee as “that epicist of the female experience”, has been in poor health, and the £750,000 Nobel prize for literature was presented yesterday in London, while a recording of her acceptance speech was relayed to the Swedish Academy hall in Stockholm. Her tone was profoundly pessimistic. Although she is still working hard at the age of 87, and she insisted the world would always need stories and storytellers, she also warned: “Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books. We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned, and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing.

Though we’re fairly sure that well-educated know-nothings existed long before the Net, and though we happen to think that questioning certainties can be a very good thing, we take her point – especially when it comes to houses without books.

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