本周，我们播出第五期夏季阅读清单节目。在我们做这件事的5年里，我们对听众的广泛而深刻的阅读印象深刻。当我们知道在这个阅读几乎已被宣告死亡的时代，仍然有热心的读者存在，这真的鼓舞了我们。

But there is reason to worry that reading as we once knew it may be dead. Granted people do still read -- though not the printed page, at least not nearly as much as they once did. More and more, they read their kindles, their ipads and even their computer screens. You can get just about any book you want in an instant these days. One could perhaps reasonably hope that these devices may lead to a rebirth of reading that would reverse a long steady decline.

To be sure, they have a long way to go to accomplish any such thing. In 2007, for example, 1 in 4 adult Americans reported not having read a single book. On average, Americans read about 4 books per year. And that number keeps getting smaller year after year. 

 



If one were an optimist, who tended to look on the bright side always, one might respond that although book reading is on the decline, people spend more and more time reading all kinds of writing that didn’t even exist decades ago – the blog,the online chat, the text message. So maybe one could say that reading lives. But lives in a different forms.

 


But seriously -- Blogs? Chats?? Texts??? That’s not reading, not really. That kind of "reading" is to genuine reading what synthetic processed cheese food is to real cheese. 


说我们不是势利者或勒德分子
但我们确实承认自己热爱阅读，真正的阅读，最深层的阅读。

最深刻的阅读是那种能充分调动头脑和心灵能力的阅读。想象一下阅读一本深深打动你的小说——不是表面上的挑逗，而是占据你的道德想象力，让它真正发挥作用。想想那些挑战你思考和再思考的哲学书籍吧，它们不是用戏剧化的论点打你的脑袋，而是巧妙地引导你获得新的见解和新的思想深度。或者想想那些让你以全新的视角看待看似熟悉的事物的纪实作品。这是一种阅读，这种写作，似乎正在下降。



We at Philosophy Talk believe that that kind of reading -- critical, reflective reading that is both emotionally and imaginatively engaged -- is both a fun thing and a good thing. One could even argue that the mere act of reading, and reading deeply, can help make you a better person. It exercises capacities that play a huge role in real life: capacities to judge, feel, and imagine. Don't get us wrong. We're not saying that reading is a substitute for real life and lived experience. But reading is, we think, to real life what baseball practice is to an actual baseball game. Reading is a way of hone the imaginative, emotional, critical, and evaluative capacities that you need to be able to deploy in real life if you are to live well. It would be a shame if the art of deep reading were ever to disappear from our culture.

当然，有很多因素对它构成威胁。大众文化的制造者——尤其是面向年轻人的大众文化制造者——专门推广与合成加工奶酪食品相当的文化产品。如果你让人们吃够了这种东西，过一段时间他们就会开始喜欢它，不喜欢真正的东西。

这将是一个令人悲伤的结果。

Because so much of what mass culture offers up for us to consume is the culture equivalent of synthetic processed cheese food, reading of the kind we're talking will seem to many to be something of interest only for the "elite" few, who spend more time buried in books, rather than hooked up to some screen. But we shouldn't let reading devolve into a past time only for certain elites. We need to empower more people in our society to become the kind of readers we’re talking about. That’s definitely something our schools should be doing more of. 
And it’s also a reason why its important for us to do our small part, by compiling a philosophical summer reading list every year. Every summer, we want to invite our audience of very avid readers to help us extol the virtues and joys of reading – real reading. 
Won't you join us and become an ambassador for the book and for deep reading that enhances our most fundamental human capacities? Tell us what good reads are on your own summer reading list? Tell us what have you already read or plan to read that you would recommend to others.