The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

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?