The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

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.”

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.

Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame.

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.

At the purely cognitive level, this is what reading is: coding and decoding. It is a communications system, deeply similar to what a computer does when it decodes the zeroes and ones of a program, or what happens when, as our cells reproduce, strands of DNA are read and copied.

Similarly, once a reader is acclimated to the pedestrian, the mundane, and the predictable, he or she can come to accept them as normal—normal, if not delightful.

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.

Similarly, if you want to understand Tolkien better you might want to start by reading Beowulf, and some of the Eddas and sagas of medieval Iceland, and then perhaps Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and it would even be worthwhile to get to know the nineteenth-century medievalism that Tolkien despised and against which he reacted, or thought he reacted. Listening to the music of Wagner would help also.

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.”

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

And there is something even more beautiful, perhaps, when we achieve this “eye-on-the-object look” 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. This is what makes “readers,” as opposed to “people who read.” To be lost in a book is genuinely addictive: someone who has had it a few times wants it again, and wants it enough, perhaps, to beg a friend to hide the damned BlackBerry for a couple of hours, please.

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.

One of the most widely quoted sentences of Sir Francis Bacon—it comes from his essay “Of Studies”—concerns the reading of books: “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.”

Bacon tells such worried folks that they can’t read them all, and so should develop strategies of discernment that enable them to make wise decisions about how to invest their time. I think Bacon would have applauded Clay Shirky’s comment that we suffer not from “information overload” but from “filter failure.” Bacon’s famous sentence is really a strategy for filtering.

Some books don’t need to be read with the patience and care I have been recommending here; at times it’s okay, even necessary, to skim (merely to “taste” rather than to ruminate).

Education is and should be primarily about intellectual navigation, about—I scruple not to say it—skimming well, and reading carefully for information in order to upload content. Slow and patient reading, by contrast, properly belongs to our leisure hours.

When we say that education is a leisure activity, we simply mean that you can only pursue education if you are temporarily freed from the responsibility of providing yourself with food and shelter. Maybe this freedom comes from your parents; maybe it comes from loans that you’re going to devote a good many years to repaying. But somebody is buying you time to read, think, and study.

“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.”

They have become passive where they should be active, and the teacher becomes a crutch for laziness, fear, uncertainty, and sometimes even a creeping snobbery about reading, about choosing what to read, deciding how to read, and figuring out what one thinks about what one has read. These folks grow up into the kind of adults who answer questions about their favorite books by listing works they think should be their favorites—but that they may never have even actually read.

An effusive encomium to the joys and benefits of reading, yes, but not too effusive. Richard’s bookish, readerly community, extending through time and across space, has still a substantial membership; nonreaders outnumber us—always have and always will—but we can always find one another and are always eager to welcome others into the fold. May our tribe increase.