Passage One

Sometime late last year, I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read. That's a problem if you do what I do, but it's an even bigger problem if you're the kind of person I am. Since I discovered reading, I've always been surrounded by stacks of books. I read my way through camp, school, nights, weekends; when my girlfriend and I backpacked through Europe after college graduation, I had to buy a suitcase to accommodate the books I picked up along the way.

In his 1967 memoir, “Stop-Time，” Frank Conroy describes his initiation into literature as an adolescent on Manhattan's Upper East Side. “I'd lie in bed...，”he writes， “and read one paperback after another until two or three in the morning.... The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than my own.”I know that boy: Growing up in the same neighborhood, I was that boy. And I have always read like that, although these days, I find myself driven by the idea that in their intimacy, the one-to-one attention they require, books are not tools to retreat from but rather to understand and interact with the world.

So what happened? It isn't a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will，exactly， but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else's world， and to let that someone else inhabit mine. Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves: This is what Conroy was hinting at in his account of adolescence, the way books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own. In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which everything is blogged and tweeted Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know.

Here we have my reading problem in a nutshell, for books insist we take the opposite position, that we immerse, slow down， “After September 11，” Mona Simpson once wrote， “I didn't read books for the news. Books， by their nature， are never new enough.” By this, Simpson doesn't mean she stopped reading; instead, at a moment when it felt as if time was on fast forward, she relied on books to distance herself from the present as a way of reconnecting with a more elemental sense of who we are.

Of course, the source of my distraction is somewhat different: not an event of great significance but the usual ongoing trivialities. I am too susceptible to the tumult of the culture, the sound and fury signifying nothing. What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.

The word “dissolved” in Paragraph 2 can be substituted by ________.

We can learn from Paragraph 2 that________.

According to the passage, why do people have reading problem nowadays?

Which of the following statements would the author most probably agree with?

The author's attitude towards internet culture is one of________.