Schools lazy on literature: Carey THE "jittery, ADHD aspect" of the internet is encouraging laziness about reading, Australia's most internationally successful author, Peter Carey, has warned. Carey, who has won the Booker Prize twice, said there was a "make it easy" approach to teaching literature in schools and universities. There were many brilliant teachers but they were finding it increasingly hard to get students to pay attention to books. I don't see why everyone can't be reading Shakespeare . . . I believe Shakespeare can be taught and I know people who have taught it in poor, tough neighbourhoods in New York and the kids loved it," he said. But I think there's a tendency today to want to make it easy, to bring in the movie of the book, to talk about that instead. We are being impoverished by not understanding and treasuring the pleasure of reading difficult things. We are forgetting that reading requires muscles, that you've got to go to the gym all the time and be prepared to endure the pain and know that there's a reward at the end. That (forgetting) is consistent with the general jittery, ADHD aspect of the internet, and news as entertainment. New York-based Carey, 70, is in Australia for the Byron Bay Writers Festival, which starts today. The three-times Miles Franklin winner revealed he is working on a new novel set in Australia and covering recent history from the end of World War II. Carey was reluctant to discuss the book in detail but said it featured computer hackers and would "engage passionately on the relationship between the US and Australia." He said it was a joy to be writing a novel set in Australia because "for the past 2 1/2 years I have been living in this country every day." Carey won the Booker in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang.