When I was young, a friend and I came up with a “big” plan to make reading easy. The idea was to boil down great books to a sentence each. “Moby-Dick” by American writer Herman Melville, for instance, was reduced to: “A whale of a tale about the one that got away.” As it turned out, the joke was on us. How could a single sentence convey the essence(精髓) of a masterpiece with over five hundred pages?
Blinkist, a website and an app, now summarizes nonfiction titles in the form of quick takes labeled “blinks” . The end result is more than one sentence, but not by much. Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café” is broken into 11 screens of information; Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” fills 13.
Blinkist has been around since 2012. It calls its summaries “15-minute discoveries” to indicate how long it takes to read a Blinkist summary. “Almost none of us,” the editors assure us, “have the time to read everything we’d like to read.” Well, yes, of course, “So many books, so little time,” declares a poster I once bought at a book market. But I judge the quality of someone’s library by the books he or she has yet to read.
That’s because a book is something we ought to live with, rather than speed through and categorize. It offers an experience as real as any other. The point of reading a book is not accumulating information, or at least not that alone. The most essential aspect is the communication between writer and reader. The idea behind Blinkist, however, is the opposite: Reading can be, should be, measured by the efficient uptake(吸收) of key ideas. No, no, no. What’s best about reading books is its inefficiency.
When reading a book, we need to dive in, let it take over us, demand something of us, teach us what it can. Blinkist is instead a service that changes books for people who don’t, in fact, want to read. A 15-minute summary misses the point of reading; speed-reading with the app isn’t reading at all.
【小题1】What is the function of Paragraph 1?| A．To introduce Moby-Dick to readers. | B．To present an argument. |
| C．To look back on his childhood. | D．To introduce the topic of the passage. |
| A．What Blinkist is. | B．Why Blinkist is popular. |
| C．How to use Blinkist. | D．Where you can use Blinkist. |
| A．There are few new books of quality. |
| B．Many books are hard to understand. |
| C．People do not have enough time to read. |
| D．People do not like reading as much as before. |
| A．Obtaining key ideas efficiently. | B．Further confirming our beliefs. |
| C．Accumulating information quickly. | D．Deeply involving ourselves in books. |
| A．Positive. | B．Negative |
| C．Uncaring. | D．Tolerant. |
