The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

What’s odd, when you think about it, is that people can be seized by the whim to read in the first place. It’s not exactly a natural thing to do.

When children are thrown together without a usable language, they invent one of their own.” But as for writing, “A group of children is no more likely to invent an alphabet than to invent the internal combustion engine.

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.”

to publish a book is to invite a response.

The more heavily you annotate a text—the more questions you ask and comments you venture—the more often you disrupt the continuity of reading.

I believe that most people read quickly because they want not to read but to have read.

if you think of reading in this way, as a means of uploading data, then reading will always seem too slow. If I can transfer the complete contents of a book to my computer in ten seconds, why does it take me a week to transfer it to my brain? And why is that latter form of uploading so error-prone and so often incomplete?

though few people realize it, many books become more boring the faster you read them.

only those who have experienced that complete absorption of the self in something else, something beautiful, know also what it means to have misplaced that capacity; only we know the anxiety that arises from the fear we may never have that again.

“what reading teaches, first and foremost, is how to sit still for long periods and confront time head-on.

the cultivation of attentiveness has always been hard for human beings: as long as we have had readers we have had readers frustrated by their inability to concentrate. It is the nature of the human beast.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television

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.

Plan once appealed to me, but I have grown to be a natural worshiper of Serendipity and Whim; I can try to serve other gods, but my heart is never in it.

for many children the act of being read to—and therefore the book itself—is powerfully associated with being loved.