The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

But if you write the question in the book’s margin—even if you just scrawl a question mark—you are marking the scene of your confusion. You are registering your puzzlement, not for the book’s sake but for your own sake. The interruption in the flow of your reading is a significant event, and you are quite literally taking note of it. Writing out the whole of your question is better than just flinging a question mark onto the page, because doing the former takes more time—it gets you out of the flow of mere passive reception—and because it forces you to articulate the precise nature of your vexation. A mere question mark could indicate confusion, disagreement, a

this is really wonderful stuff i wish i could have read this a long time ago

feeling of lacking information—any one of a dozen things.

I want to use this quote in particular as evdience for why its important to ask questions of a biblical text. But now I can see that its important to task questions of everything that i read and to write them out as often as I possibley can. How can i learn to read more effectively? this argument almost makes me think tha the most effective tool for reading is this computer. However,

This is important for two reasons. First, it sharpens your readerly attention now. Having formulated what’s bothering you, you have it clearly in your mind, and so when you return to the text you will be readier to note anything that answers your question or eliminates your confusion. Second, it’s a mnemonic device: the written-out question allows you at some later point to recapture what you were experien...

Wherever and whatever I read, I have to have a pencil, not a pen—preferably a stub of a pencil so I can get close to the words, underline well-turned sentences, brilliant or stupid ideas, interesting words and bits of information, and write short or elaborate comments in the margins, put question marks, check marks and other private notations next to paragraphs that only I—and sometimes not even I—can later decipher. I would love to see an anthology of comments and underlined passages by readers of history books in public libraries, who despite the strict prohibition of such activity could not help themselves and had to register their complaints about the author of the book or the direction in which humanity has been heading for the last few thousand years.

Almost everything I have written in these pages assumes something that in the history of reading has rarely been true: abundant and inexpensive books. I have to make an effort to remember what an extraordinary blessing this is.

(It’s noteworthy that Drexel

seems to think of The Imitation of Christ as light reading, perhaps the early modern equivalent of Chicken Soup for the Soul

“Scholars have always made notes,” says the English historian Keith Thomas.

You may be able to tell from what I’ve said so far that I am not a fan of the highlighter. Highlighters allow you very quickly and easily to mark a text, but only by covering it with a bright color; and the very quickness and easiness of the process are inimical to the kind of responsiveness I’m recommending. (There’s something to Simic’s preference for the stub of a pencil and the intimacy with the page it enforces.) With a highlighter you can have a text marked before you’ve even had time to ask yourself why you’re marking it; and while you might be able to add a question mark or exclamation point in the margin, that will be the limit of your interaction. And such marks are often quite hard to see after they dry.

so what do i make of this? of course he is right. it is very easy to highlight. I do need to ineract more aggressively. I wonder what he would say about electronic reading. surely he is going to speak to that. And what is the method i need to use to get and keep such thinking. Is evernote the tool and if so, how can i work harder to capture material and tag it in such a way that it will be most hepful in teh future.

yes, i don't see a good solution to this. the hanheld kindle is very cumberson to use in this regard. However, the pc version of kindle makes this easier. But still the notes are not immediately obvious as to what they are alluding to. In this instance, i can see now that when i click on a note over here in the margin, it highlights whatever i have notated. but in a book like this with much highlighting, that still does not obviosuly tell me what i'm commenting on. I would prefer that such highlingting appear as a different color. in other words, if the text that my note was about appeared in blue, then it would be obvious what i was reacting to.

e-reader annotation separates your comments from what you’re responding to.

At this point some may be muttering that this is all well and good, but writing such comments is enormously time-consuming. It slows you down. It allows you to read fewer books. To those complaints I reply, Yes. It is, it does, and it does. And those are good things.

this is a big part of the message of this book for me. I need to read far better than I do and I need to read less. Ironically, i think that reading better will actually result in my reading more because i'm discovering that the books hold more interest to me when i respect them enough to actually try to hear what they aresaying.

It’s what you’re reading that matters, and how you’re reading it, not the speed with which you’re getting through it. Reading is supposed to be about the encounter with other minds, not an opportunity to return to the endlessly appealing subject of Me.

I wish i had read this a long time ago. I suspected this already. but to hear this exposed in such a powerful way will cause me to never mistake this problem again. It's making me think that i have no business seeking to read 50 books per year. It also doesn't matter that anyone else knows what i've read.

Yes, lying is wrong. But sometimes in this world we have to choose among evils. It is wrong to lie, but it may be still more wrong to read a bunch of books you don’t want to read—and by “read” them I mean cast your eyes across most of the lines on most of the pages—in order to impress people whose opinion you shouldn’t be deferring to anyhow. So it would be less bad, I think, take a little time to figure out what people will be impressed to hear that you’re reading, use Wikipedia to find out just enough about those books to enable you to bluff plausibly when questioned

this is hysterical. and are books really summarized like this on wikipedia? tat never occured to me

You probably read too fast anyway. Consider

i'm still grieving that i have not read this sooner

But—to anticipate a point to be treated later—it’s rather odd that I tend not to feel that same panic at the thought of not having time to reread books I already love, even though I know that such rereading will surely be pleasurable. The possible pleasure of an unread book weighs more heavily on me than the sure pleasure of one I already know.

this is a new thought. what do i need to re-read. i never re-read anything

But, all things considered, I believe that most people read quickly because they want not to read but to have read. But why do they want to have read? Because, I think, they conceive of reading simply as a means of uploading information to their brains.

Ugh

It is in fact a perfect recipe for boredom, because, though few people realize it, many books become more boring the faster you read them. This really shouldn’t be surprising. Especially if a book is artfully written—if its language is unusually vivid or lovely, or if its presentation of ideas or images is subtle and surprising—its best features may be easily passed over by the rapid reader.

yes. this is what i've discovered this week in reverse. By reading slower i have become far more interesting in what i am reading

It is in fact a perfect recipe for boredom, because, though few people realize it, many books become more boring the faster you read them. This really shouldn’t be surprising. Especially if a book is artfully written—if its language is unusually vivid or lovely, or if its presentation of ideas or images is subtle and surprising—its best features may be easily passed over by the rapid reader.

the danger of reading too fast

On my blog I have written much about the Kindle, and I will not rehash all of that here;

those who believe they are skilled multitaskers tend to be worse at it than others.

That is funny

These are facts that every would-be reader has to face, because they are the facts that, above all others, have led so many intelligent and well-educated people to despair of their ability to read books, even when they were once avid book-readers.

What can I do to combat this?

You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function.

for me this is the study of scripture and sometimes reading

not because we have found our vocation but because we have found our avocation—when the reason for our raptness is sheer and unmotivated delight.

yes but i want to have this same sense about my calling

Few lessons could be more valuable, or more consequential, because to read in this utterly absorbed way I have been describing is to collaborate with a book on the conquest of time.

basking ineverlasting present had not thought about how reading aids this

though what they have learned and taught is applicable to readers with nonspiritual needs, if there are any such people.

great comment

Moreover, the strictness of his instructional plan makes Adler and Van Doren look like devil-may-care hedonists.

really funny

For us to “ruminate” is to engage in a pretty dignified, or dignified-sounding, act, but Hugh was thinking of cows and goats and sheep, ruminant animals, those who chew the cud. A ruminant beast has multiple stomachs, the first of which, the rumen, can be used for temporary storage: the animal chews some food and swallows it, sending it to the rumen, but then regurgitates the partially digested lump and chews on it some more. Only after rumination does the food get passed to the next stomach, from which there is no return. Hugh believes this is the perfect model of attentive reading: to read the text, to pass it along to the depths of the mind—but then to call it back for further thought. (Hugh’s model of reading is notably and consistently physical: he wants to train our bodies to be our assistants in reading, surely because he knows what John Self learned, that bodies have a natural propensity to interfere with still and quiet attentiveness. To “incorporate” is literally to take into the body.) If you have ever read a passage and only later realized that you may not have understood it, and have therefore returned to reread it, you are a ruminant reader. However, as we have seen, powerful cultural and psychological forces inhibit any ruminant instincts we might have. If we are easily distracted, or in a hurry, or if we are wanting to get a book read so we can cross it off our list and move on to the conveyor belt’s next item, we may forget about that passage and never reg...

that I expect them to read each poem slowly, carefully, aloud if possible, and at least five times.

fasinating

I also require students to memorize fifty lines of poetry and recite them to me, for, as George Steiner has often commented, to memorize something is in the truest sense to learn it “by heart.” And I have often noticed that when people write papers about poems they have memorized they tend to have a deeper understanding than is usual; they seem to have intuited the underlying logic of the poems—they get them,

what does this say for sermon prep?

(One enemy of good reading is confusion about which mode of attention is appropriate to a given book. I am certain that this very confusion makes it almost impossible for anyone to read—genuinely to read—the Bible. In both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, narrative and other more-or-less literary forms are dominant, which seems to call for a strategy of reading for understanding similar to what one might use in an encounter with, say, Homer; but these books’ status as sacred text suggests, to many modern readers anyway, that their purpose is to provide information about God and God’s relation to human beings.

strong challenge. very curious now bout his christisnity. dont know how to ask that

“Strip-mining” the Psalms, or the Song of Solomon, or even the more elevated discourses of the Gospel of John, “for relevant content” might not seem like a promising strategy, but many generations of pastors have pushed it pretty hard, as though the Bible were no more than an awkwardly coded advice manual.)

words of delight i think is an important check against this. very much want to give it a careful reading

if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week;

wow this challenges me significantly to cultivate these abilities

Darwin read for information as well as anyone ever has, I suppose, but found that his ideal attentiveness to those texts wasn’t transferable to anything demandingly artful—and yet he had no trouble reading novels. How are we to account for this?

thi is a hint to why i dont enjoy casually listen to music. i have the skill to listen critically. at some level my mind or soul is demanding i do that.

Darwin found novel-reading to ask, and gently ask, such a different kind of attention than he was required to give to his data that the sheer change was as good as a rest. It was a rest for the overworked portions of his brain. But major works of art are neither so humble nor so polite, as Auden reminds us in that passage we have already cited: “When one thinks of the attention that a great poem [or work of music] demands.…

demands is a strong word. i want to put some poetry on my kindle but dont kmow where to start

By contrast, hyper attention requires “switching focus rapidly between different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.”

this likely explains my desire for reading multiple things at one time

Getting schooled While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture few people will want to. And that’s to be expected. Serious “deep attention” reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured by the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea (only about 150 years old) that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level.

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

we suffer not from “information overload” but from “filter failure.” Bacon’s famous sentence is really a strategy for filtering.

use accordingly

No one could plausibly claim that we late moderns are uniquely challenged in this respect: surely a higher percentage of human beings today have regular access to silence than at any time in human history.

If most of us read too fast, most of us also read too many books and are unwisely reluctant to return to something we think we already know.

a first encounter with a worthwhile book is never a complete encounter, and we are usually in error to make it a final one. But those who want to have read, who are checking books off their “bucket list,” will find the thought of rereading even more repulsive than the thought of reading slowly and ruminatively.

Critical reflection of some kind is inevitable, so it would behoove us to do it well. The best guide I know to readerly judgment is our old friend Auden, who graciously summed up a lifetime of thinking about these matters in a single incisive sentence: “For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.”

thoughts about writing book reviews. also see book review article in google reader. I need to learn to do this

high-kicking in the margins of the text like a row of Radio City Rockettes,

hysterical

Every great thinker has been aware of the work of his or her predecessors and highly responsive to them, and has usually had colleagues as well; and every great thinker has had to retire into solitude, often, in order to think really hard and without interruption. Even a suspicious recluse like Newton valued his interactions with members of the Royal Society, though he also tended to be deeply annoyed by his correspondents’ failures to understand him.

Complare deep work

But I don’t say this kind of thing any more, because I have realized just how much serendipity has come my way through just clicking on links. (I found many of the most incisive quotations in this book that way.)

I find such suggestions irresistible, even when they are autosuggestions, which is why, I think, I have come so passionately to distrust reading lists. I used to try to determine in advance what books I would read over the summer, but eventually realized that to put any book on such a list nearly guaranteed that I would not read it. No matter how anxiously I had been anticipating it, as soon as it took its place among the other assigned texts it became as broccoli unto me—and any book not on the list, no matter how unattractive it might appear in other contexts, immediately became as desirable as a hot fudge sundae. And over the years I have decided that this instinctive resistance to the predetermined is a gift, not a disability.

In Proust and the Squid, Maryann Wolf notes that for many children the act of being read to—and therefore the book itself—is powerfully associated with being loved. And that association does not cease at this stage: as the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald has commented, “Twice in your life you know you are approved of by everyone—when you learn to walk and when you learn to read.”