New Zealanders used to have more bookshops per head of population that anywhere else in the world, because there was fuck all to do on the arse end of the world, so you might as well read a book.
Those days - and those bookshops - are all long gone now. Fuck, there hasn't been a dedicated bookstore on the main street of the country's biggest city for years and years. It's all on the screen now.
And while there is more access to anything else in human history through those screens, the digital footprint is ephemeral, and I do believe there's less of a chance of stumbling across cool stuff than when it is literally left lying around the place.
That's how I became a reader, from picking up the comics and magazines that were lying around all over the place. Everyone had some kind of reading habit - there were only two channels on the TV, not even video players, so everyone I knew was a reader in some way. There were always books around.
My uncles, who were only in their 20s and 30s at the time, all read something different, from Doctor Who annuals to eerie old horror comics, and I was all over that shit. (Looking back, the horror comics I would find stuffed down the side of my Uncle Sol's sofa probably weren't appropriate reading material a lot of the time - those cheap black and white reprints of cheaper horror comics from somewhere, smothered in thick, thick ink, the blood of the vampire's victim literally staining my youthful fingers.)
We've lost something with the physical object no longer getting passed around. And with everyone Kondo-ing the shit out of their personal space and reducing living rooms to bland hegemony, you're more likely to be suckered in by a dubious algorithm than actually reading an object.
There are always new ways to find the best entertainments in life, and kids today have plenty of choice, but nothing beats the actual thing.
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