The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

read, so much

It’s hard not to have some anxiety about what Adler and Van Doren might do to us if we fail in that obligation.

That's really funny

Forget for a moment how books should be read: Why should they be read? The first reason—the first sequentially in the story that follows but also the first in order of importance—is that reading books can be intensely pleasurable. Reading is one of the great human delights. And the Charles Atlases of reading rarely remember this.

As a professor of literature, I must say that when I first saw Foster’s books I thought, “Read like a professor? Good Lord, anything but that!” (Although, of course, Foster’s imagined professor is an ideal one.)

But however attractive this promise of expertise—or the similarly directive step-by-step approach of Adler and Van Doren, or the eat-your-vegetables lists of approved authoritative texts provided by Fadiman—can be for some, for others it only makes reading feel like drudgery. My son is one such person: it was the aroma of Responsibility, Obligation, and Virtue emanating from How to Read a Book that sent him fleeing. And there are many people like my son among the ranks of diffident readers, embarrassed non-readers, and guilt-stricken ex-readers—especially among natives or long habitués of the digital world. So I want to offer a very different model of what reading can be all about.

I wasn’t sure, of course, whether my friend would in the end like the book, but I knew he would be fascinated by much that happens in it, and, above all, I knew that we would have some enjoyable conversations about Stephenson’s story.

One of the reasons I love to share books

Thus Rudyard Kipling: “One can’t prescribe books, even the best books, to people unless one knows a good deal about each individual person. If a man is keen on reading, I think he ought to open his mind to some older man who knows him and his life, and to take his advice in the matter, and above all, to discuss with him the first books that interest him.”

Love this quote

I don’t like mixing reading with onerous duties.

Good idea

Moreover, in many cases these requests have little to do with actually reading anything, but rather with having read—with the desire to say, “Yes, now I can check that one off.”

ugh this is what i did with daniel but i did draw some benefit

“In the fourth grade,” he writes, “I embarked on a grandiose reading program.” He asked his teachers for lists of “important books,” which he then began dutifully to read, without having any sense of what made the books worthwhile.

I remember something like this in the third grade except I remember loving it. Maybe I wasn't getting that much out of the books but something about doing that at my own pace in mrs Kirby's class really appealed to me. I wish there had been more of that.

“I needed to keep looking at the book jacket comments to remind myself what the text was about. Nevertheless, … I looked at every word of the text. And by the time I reached the last word, I convinced myself that I had read The Republic. In a ceremony of great pride, I solemnly crossed Plato off my list.”

Don't want to read like this

So one reason I usually decline to give reading recommendations is that I don’t want to encourage such habits of mind. But there’s a positive counterpart to this negative reason: my commitment to one dominant, overarching, nearly definitive principle for reading: Read at Whim.

Does this mean just read when I want to without any disciplined plan?

The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It’s asking us to stop calculating. It’s asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.

So this is what I say to my petitioners: for heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the “calories burned” readout—some assiduous and taxing exercise that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading at all, but what C. S. Lewis once called “social and ethical hygiene.” In Lewis’s view, which I largely share, the tendency to think of reading in these terms arises when critics, especially members of what Lewis called “the Vigilant school,” convince others that they are the proper guardians of reading and the proper judges of what kind of reading counts.

not just stick with the screens?—if that’s all you’re

interview

Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefly by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much.

What’s frivolous is not the masterpiece itself, but the idea that at any given time I the reader am prepared to meet its standards, to rise to its challenges.

And so, belatedly, haltingly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education. I wasn’t sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or how long it might take to complete (forever, I had an inkling), but for once those weren’t my first concerns. Alone in my room, congested and exhausted, I forgot my obsession with self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.

That is to say, she came upon a world of wonderful books when she was ready for them—when she could receive what they have to offer.

So the books are waiting. Of this you may be confident: they’ll be ready when the whim strikes you.

All of this is, to me anyway, abidingly fascinating, and yet, as I explore these books, there’s a part of me that’s always saying “But you’re not really talking about reading”—about whatever it is that makes me cackle and snort when I have a P. G. Wode-house novel in my hands, even when I’m in bed and desperately trying to stifle the laughter lest I wake my wife up, which I always end up doing anyway, with the result that for some years now I have been forbidden to bring a Wodehouse book to bed.

Reading as if for life—how does this happen? At this point I cannot stress too much that I do not raise the spirit of David Copperfield as a means of denouncing the research of Wolf and Dehaene, as a means of celebrating the angelic Humanities at the expense of that beast Science. Such a move would be cheap, silly, and wrong. Rather, I simply want to emphasize that, having better understood the near-miracle of our ability to decode marks on paper, we are left with a truth equally remarkable: that some of us greatly desire to do so, and that some of us find abiding consolation in what we encounter when our eyes scan words on the page in those strange jerky saccades. That images striking the retina can be transferred to the edge of the left occipito-temporal fissure, and there can be decoded, is extraordinary; that what is decoded there can bring tears to the eyes, or cause laughter to rise up from the diaphragm, or bring to a deeply unhappy boy cut off from his beloved mother a few hours, or many hours, of joy … I don’t have words to express how deeply strange this is. I encouraged you in my previous section to “read at whim!”—but why would anyone ever be struck by that particular whim? This is a mystery.

Aspirations Some readers may be puzzled to find that this book didn’t end several pages ago. Read at whim, I told you—What more is there to say?

I've been wandering exactly that

It’s easy to see why Chabon believes that “all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction. That is why Harold Bloom’s notion of the anxiety of influence has always rung so hollow to me. … All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”

Now, in making this point, have I not reinstated the dominance of the Vigilant School that I deplored in the previous section? Am I not echoing Harold Bloom’s denunciations of the literarily insufficient? Not at all, for the authority I would appeal to here is not some culturally sanctioned (or self-sanctioned) critical arbiter, or even the kind of strictness of readerly conscience that drove Richard Rodriguez through every last page of Plato’s Republic. On the other hand, I think Bloom is right to reject the too-easy and often-recited “at least they’re reading” trope—wrong when he says that reading Harry Potter books has zero value and isn’t reading at all, but right when he scorns the idea that the act of passing one’s eyes over a page is so intrinsically valuable that it doesn’t matter what words the eyes are scanning.* So if I don’t want to say that all reading is equally good, equally valuable, but I also don’t want to give in to the Vigilant School, then what standard of readerly value am I appealing to? Answer: I am appealing to the standard of the reader’s own pleasure—a criterion that sounds more simple and straightforward than it is.

authors thesis?

Such a result cannot be surprising to anyone who has spent time around adolescent boys, even gifted ones; but there are lessons here for all of us. The chief one is this: Gibbon’s completely unregulated and undisciplined life made him miserable

It helps us to make a vital distinction between what I shall call whim and Whim. In its lower-case version, whim is thoughtless, directionless preference that almost invariably leads to boredom or frustration or both. But Whim is something very different: it can guide us because it is based in self-knowledge—it can become for us a gracious Swiss pedagogue of the mind.

and I needed to learn, as I eventually did, that if I set a book aside today I am not thereby forbidding myself to return to it later—nor am I promising to do so.

one of the primary reasons I am so suspicious of How to Read a Book and similar guides is that they promise to help us offload accountability for our reading: they say, implicitly,

that self-knowledge and discernment aren’t needful because experts can take care of that for us.

One possible, and rather simple, expedient is this: we can turn our temporal attention upstream rather than downstream—toward what preceded Tolkien or Austen or whomever rather than what succeeded them. After all, Austen became the Austen we know largely through her reading—something that is true of almost all writers.

The pursuit of the works that shaped a loved writer’s mind can be fascinating in itself.

somehwere there is a book of the writers that c.s. lewis loved. i wonder if jackson is the author

If we pay no attention to words whatever, we may become like the isolated gentleman who invents a new perpetual-motion machine on old lines in ignorance of

all previous plans, and then is surprised that it doesn’t work. If we confine our attention entirely to the slang of the day—that is to say, if we devote ourselves exclusively to modern literature—we get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself. … [I]t is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realises how absolutely modern the best of the old things are.

We may observe a like distinction to run through all the other perceptions of the mind. A man in a fit of anger, is actuated in a very different manner from one who only thinks of that emotion. If you tell me, that any person is in love, I easily understand your meaning, and from a just conception of his situation; but never can mistake that conception for the real disorders and agitations of the passion. When we reflect on our past sentiments and affections, our thought is a faithful mirror, and copies its objects truly; but the colors which it employs are faint and dull, in comparison of those in which our original perceptions were clothed. It requires no nice discernment or metaphysical head to mark the distinction between them. Here therefore we may divide all the perceptions of the mind into two classes or species, which are distinguished by their different degrees of force and vivacity. The less forcible and lively are commonly denominated Thoughts or Ideas. The other species want a name in our language, and in most others; I suppose, because it was not requisite for any, but philosophical purposes, to rank them under a general term or appellation. Let us, therefore, use a little freedom, and call them Impressions; employing that word in a sense somewhat different from the usual. By the term impression, then, I mean all our more lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will. And impressions are distinguished from ideas, which...

LOL. I can actually follow what he says here. That's cool

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was

born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.

4 hours per night of reading. Wow!

This is aspirational reading indeed. Machiavelli enters into the presence of the major writers of the past as though entering the court of a great prince: thus his “regal and courtly garments.” He clearly thinks that he must show himself worthy to enjoy their company; he must be on his best behavior and must demonstrate appropriate respect. (It’s not likely that Machiavelli would have had much sympathy with Auden’s claim that “there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day” with a masterpiece.) And yet these masters condescend—I use the word in its old sense, in which the high and the mighty show their virtue by coming down among the rest of us—these masters condescend to welcome a disgraced government official into their company. When Machiavelli enters his study he need not be anxious about the reception he will receive, or worry that his enemies have staged a coup and overthrown his friends. He will be greeted warmly as always, because there is nothing these masters like better than the attentive company of respectful guests. For Machiavelli makes it clear that in the deepest sense he is the guest, even though in a superficial sense it is his own study he enters. The wisdom and grace to be found in that room belong more to the writers—those whom in the Middle Ages would have been called auctors, both authors and authorities—than to him.

we have gone long enough without raising the question of whether reading makes you a better person. The short answer to that question is No. It doesn’t. And the long answer doesn’t differ too dramatically from the short one.

So nothing about reading, or listening to Mozart sonatas, or viewing paintings by Raphael necessarily transforms or even improves someone’s character. As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, “A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.” Nevertheless, I am going to argue, from time to time throughout the course of this book, that if you really want to become a better person, there are ways in which reading can help. But the degree to which that happens will depend not just on what you read—you have already seen that I am not dictatorial about that—but also why and how. So consider yourself either warned or promised, according to your feelings about moralistic exhortation.

One of the most noteworthy facts about his way of reading his intellectual masters is that it’s not passive—reverent,

He doesn’t feel somehow unworthy or unqualified to address them, and indeed to put them to the question, to call them to account for themselves and their ideas. Moreover, for all their greatness his auctors take no offense at his boldness: “they in their humanity reply to me.”

But one of the wonderful things about books is that they don’t grow agitated or dismissive. They patiently bear all the scrutiny you choose to give them, and the more carefully you read them the more of their secrets they yield. It’s as though they are asking to be put to the question, announcing their readiness to be investigated.

Still, writerly sensitivity aside, those who want no response at all are unlikely to publish a book; and a good many writers are mature enough to know that they have to take the bad with the good. We publish at least in part because we want a personal connection. The more positive that connection the better, of course, but it must be human.

“I agree with every word you write” would be a gratifying thing to hear, I imagine—I wouldn’t know—but even more gratifying would be a reader who carries your idea a step further,

funny

this situation means that listeners and readers owe a response to speakers and writers. Passivity is not enough, even if it’s very attentive. Reading is more challenging and more enjoyable—more worth the candle—if we are willing to answer the questions a text puts to us, even (or especially) if those questions are implicit.

serious challenge

All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.”

we ask questions.