Kat,

Your description gives me pause. At our home, that time of day is spent cruising the Internet on personal computers, too much of the time. The difference, it is clear,between the Internet and a good bookshelf for the family is that you can govern the quality of the bookshelf, while the Internet is a swamp with what I think of as LCD tripe, meaning lowest common denominator.

Huge volume of culturally vapid, substance free and semantically numbing noise. Maybe we should go back to the bookshelf model.

There are some things that technology just hasn't figured out yet, among them how to emulate the kitchen table by oil-lamp with a fine book in hand.

A