The criticisms of literature and reading as portrayed by Lamb and Johnson interested me because in modern times one never sees such things; books are pretty much always seen as something that will improve your mental faculties.  Lamb states that one of his acquaintances had stopped reading and shortly improved in originality; he also portrays books as a substitute for thinking.  This is interesting to me, because I've always thought that books had the opposite effect.  The main thing I look to glean from books is new concepts; I think I would be a lot less 'original' if I didn't read (I don't think anybody is really original - original in my book is the ability to combine ideas of others in novel ways).  Books as a substitute for thinking I can see, because it's difficult to think deeply and read at the same time.  Once again, though, my thoughts would be a lot more limited without the influence of books, so I don't think it would be a good thing to sacrifice reading for more thinking-time.

Johnson talks about his contemporaries who think books have a negative effect on reasoning ability or who say that reading too many books will have an adverse effect on one's own ability to communicate.  The first point I completely disagree with, but the latter I can find some merit in.  It's something that I've seen others mention here and there as well as noticed in myself; if I read or otherwise consume too much of some form of entertainment in a day, my social skills decline.

The main thing that interested me about these criticisms of reading was how they compared to current criticisms of the internet; it's a pretty common idea that the internet rots your brain/attention span/memory.  Both books and the internet have been seen as something that decreases the natural function of the brain.  I'd say that reading books are considered to have a positive effect in modern times, but the internet hasn't been around long enough to enjoy similar opinions.  Maybe, because both books and the internet are something 'unnatural' (something our brains didn't originally evolve to cope with), the changes they wrought that deviated from natural functioning were seen as negative, simply because they were changes.  The changes that books wrought are mostly seen as positive now, and I wonder if the same might be true of the internet some day.  Maybe the changes the internet are causing aren't negative so much as they are simply different for us.  Of course, the flip side to this is that maybe the changes books wrought were negative, but we've gotten so used to that sort of intelligence now that we consider it better.