Catching up on Charlie Rose's week, I was struck by one of A.O. Scott's comment about "The Reader". He had quite a few reticenses about the movie but a particular one was that the movie "mystifies" reading and literature. To paraphrase him,  A.O. Scott does not believe that books are as transformative as they are often portrayed to be. (In "The Reader", he actually thought the point was almost assumed but not proven in any way, since the viewers are never made prevvy in any way to if or how the Kate Winslet's character may have been truly changed by her readings.)

What is truer and truer however is that media are cross-pollinating. More and more, people watch movie versions of books, then go buy the book; people listen to books on their ipods; people write books on the web; people write stories in group etc. In today's New York Times there is even a story about a a singer-songwriter from Brooklyn, Patrick Shea,  whose been writing one song for each of the 136 chapters in “Moby-Dick.”  Talk about mixing it all!