The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

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.