SPECIAL
READING AND AUGUST
Text by Joan Pons.

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Ya me leeré este libro en verano, y aquel otro también. Seguro. Y arreglaré la estantería esa que no está bien fijada. También, también. Y quedaré con ese amigo que llevamos mil sin vernos y, por una cosa o por otra, nunca podemos. Claro que sí. El verano es para eso: para las cuentas pendientes.

Normally, home DIY, friendship keeping and reading are of secondary importance. There’s always something better to do. But come our holidays and things change, don’t they? We finally have the time to devote to all those very important things we have been unable to focus on for eleven months. Do we actually believe this??

C’mon, let’s play the game. Let’s pretend we read more during the summer, when on holiday, in August. As if it were an exceptional activity, something we don’t usually do; for a month, let’s stop being ourselves, what the hell! Let’s read! Let’s go bananas!

   Let’s open, though, a parenthesis of scepticism in this other parenthesis of fake belief (if you manage to understand the previous line). Because if August does indeed activate a state of emergency and we read more, then the mountain of apocalyptic surveys about current reading habits (saying that books are obsolete, that they’re not, that reading on tablets or smartphones, etc. isn’t reading, that blame it on the boogie) can’t be applied to this month. Thus, we that publish everything on our web site are entitle to avoid certain things such as: 

• Writing with bullet points.
• Because it makes reading easier.
• At least to those who are always in a hurry.
• And are slow at reading comprehension.
• Like those big bosses who need baby food-like briefings.
• With some things highlighted in bold, if possible.
• And some CAPITAL LETTERS too.

We won’t need, thus, to make tops such as this one, who it seems also invites people to read (even if after the click, the scroll is left half way or one advances directly to nr1):

O’s 10 most read articles.

The 10 least read articles.

The 10 most hated articles.

The 10 most awarded pics. 

The 10 most visited videos.

…

Oops, wait a minute; I should season these with some tabloid clickbaits:

The 10 censored pictures you won’t believe we never published.

The 10 fake articles people believed were true.

O’s 10 most WTF videos.

The 10 footnotes that will change your life forever.

The 10 design tricks you need to know before lunchtime.

Our roster’s 10 most shameful secrets.

Joan Pons’ 10 epic fails.

Deconstructing O: the 10 clandestine activities no one else will tell you about.

Etc.

(I know there are two missing, but we agreed that they weren’t necessary, didn’t we?)

Now we should hyperlink them to their corresponding links, obviously. But I’m afraid it won’t be possible to make them up from scratch with so little time.

it doesn’t seem thetimenow to change oru style book to adjust it to the standard of  comments where orthographic mistakes and typos aren’t corrected and where ther eis no punctuation signs or capital letters and everything is written randomly as if it were an example of stream of consciousness just told like this without the minimum respect for teh personreadingit because we needed to vomit this block of text which looks like experimental lit but sin’t and you can tell just by checking whether there’s lots of emojis 👽👽👽👽👽👽👽👽👽👽👽👽👽👽👽 (and if you’re able to see the alien in a box yu need to update your IOS) and also tags #reading #august #summer #weeklygif

Well, in fact, we’re not going to do any of these things now because we never actually do them. We don’t believe in them. Or we do, but we don’t care about them. Everything we publish at O is born from the belief that it deserves being read thoroughly. And we might be wrong. But each hyperlink we place is there to be clicked, each image to be contemplated, and each word to be read. That’s why this August we’re going to devote a series of special posts to the act of reading itself (on paper or on screen), to letters, to words, to contents. A truly meta exercise that, when you think of it, could be published any other month of the year. Because we’re always like this. If anything, we’re taking the excuse of the summer to make it even clearer, to seriously (or jokingly) reflect on the matter.

In the same way that Michael Snow, in his mid-length film from 1982 So Is This (from which today’s GIF was extracted), trusted (or tested) that the viewer was going to keep on reading until the end, despite how uncomfortable it was to read for three quarters of an hour on a screen spitting word after word with no sound (‘s the whole thing, should any brave readers choose to stand it), we also think that getting to the end of a text has a reward because… it’s a reward in itself. Meaning (¿identity?) is created thus. Word for word. One after another. And another. And another. And another… And this way until the end.