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“When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit”—for our own personal Christmases and Easters, not for any old Wednesday.
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What’s frivolous is not the masterpiece itself, but the idea that at any given time I the reader am prepared to meet its standards, to rise to its challenges. Those challenges wear heavily upon the unprepared reader (at age ten or twenty or sixty) and as a result the reading, which in anticipation promised such riches of meaning, proves in fact to be that dread appointment with the elliptical trainer I mentioned earlier. And who needs that?
It’s easy to see why Chabon believes that “all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction. That is why Harold Bloom’s notion of the anxiety of influence has always rung so hollow to me. … All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”
A man in a fit of anger, is actuated in a very different manner from one who only thinks of that emotion.
we have gone long enough without raising the question of whether reading makes you a better person. The short answer to that question is No. It doesn’t. And the long answer doesn’t differ too dramatically from the short one.
If reading really was supposed to “make you a better person,” then “when the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps … to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do.”
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.”
Alberto Manguel: “The existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until the moment in which a reader reads it. Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.”
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 feeling of lacking information—any one of a dozen things. When you write out your question you render the discomfort exactly. 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 experiencing
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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. There are times when I have thought that a book or article was choppy and disorganized, when (I later realized) the real problem was that I had been so active in my commentary that I had disabled myself from following a flow that was actually there. I was
this is why REREADING anything difficult or of importance to you is mandatory!
blaming the road for my own riding of the brakes. There’s a balance to be kept here, and it varies from one reading experience to another. Some books require a lot of commentary, others only a little; and then there are those that we really shouldn’t read with pencil in hand at all. Lord help the person who annotates a Harry Potter book or the latest John Grisham. In books of that kind momentum is not to be squandered.*
But if you were determined to take notes on The Stand or Twilight, what in the world would you write? It’s only when you read challenging and complex books without that pencil that you are forgoing an opportunity for meaningful and substantive interaction—and for recording that interaction so your future self can benefit from it.
ah but one could make notations regarding. plot error or incohesion-character development or inconsistency. etc...
Reading with a writing instrument in hand is an unnatural act for many readers, yet I think in most cases it is necessary to attentive response. 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
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I tend to agree but use a Color coding system when using a highlighter and post it notes that I explain in the front of the book.
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.
agreed...quality of reading. not quantity.
think this is a bad idea. 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. Americans have enough encouragements to narcissism; let’s try to do without this one. Consider
YES!
the far more dreadful 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Leaving aside its absolute violation of the sovereignty of Whim—given the length of the list and the brevity of life, if you enslave yourself to this tome’s tyranny you’ll never read another word just for the hell of it—let’s just focus on the salient fact that this book is not about reading at all.
“Primary
Education of the Camiroi,”
The philosopher William James famously wrote of the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that constitutes sensuous experience for babies, who have not yet developed the filters necessary to organize that experience into discrete and meaningful units, but our daily technologies threaten to return us all to virtual babyhood.
essay for the journal The New Atlantis, Christine Rosen
Plastic attention As Nicholas Carr explains in his recent book The Shallows, the fact of neuroplasticity holds both good and bad news for the would-be reader, and the balance between the two varies according to age. After presenting a
Although neuroplasticity provides an escape from genetic determinism … it also imposes its own form of determinism on our behavior. As particular circuits in our brain strengthen through the repetition of a physical or mental activity, they begin to transform that activity into a habit. The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes [Norman] Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into “rigid behaviors.”
chemically triggered synapses that link our neurons program us, in effect, to want to keep exercising the circuits they’ve formed. Once we’ve wired the new circuitry in our brain, Doidge writes, “we long to keep it activated.”
Plastic does not mean elastic, in other words. Our neural loops don’t snap back to their former state the way a rubber band does. They hold on to their changed state. And nothi...
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Nicholas Carr’s chief emphasis in The Shallows is on what we lose when we exchange the patient, extended attentiveness appropriate to long-form reading for the quick skimming and sorting encouraged by the Internet;
Shirky, who teaches new media at NYU, has a word of consolation for that pathologist: “no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it.” Shirky’s view is that “the reading public” is a single, uniform entity; that it pronounces verdicts; that one of those verdicts is that long-form reading is no longer worth anyone’s trouble, though apparently this did not use to be the reading public’s verdict; that it’s impossible to alter the public judgment or return
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Hayles, has a more complex—perhaps a more confused—view: in her recent work she argues, quite plausibly, that our educational models have traditionally valued what she calls “deep attention,” while today’s students are proficient in mobile, flexible, fast-twitch “hyper attention.” Deep attention she identifies as “the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities” and defines it as “characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high
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cognitive mode has advantages and limitations. Deep attention is superb for solving complex problems represented in a single medium, but it comes at the price of environmental alertness and flexibility of response. Hyper attention excels at negotiating rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention; its disadvantage is impatience with focusing for long periods on a non-interactive object such as a Victorian novel or complicated math problem.” She further believes that the “pedagogical challenge” for teachers, in the foreseeable future, “will be to combine hyper
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if it’s important to cultivate both forms of attention, and Hayles “can’t get [her] students to read whole books anymore,” doesn’t that suggest a manifest failure of cultivation? Doesn’t that indicate that the quest to maintain or preserve or simply teach deep attention is, in her classrooms anyway, a failure? I think it does, and I think we cannot reasonably expect anything else. And here I am going to make what I believe to be one of the most important arguments in this book, even though it may amount to an undermining of my own profession.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, perhaps 2 percent of Americans attended a university; now the number is closer to 70 percent (though only about 30 percent get bachelor’s degrees).
In 2005, Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, sociologists from Northwestern University, published a paper claiming that while there was a period in which extraordinarily many Americans practiced long-form reading, whether they liked it or not, that period was indeed extraordinary and not sustainable in the long run. “We are now seeing such reading return to its former
social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” I don’t think of the distinction between readers and nonreaders—better, those who love reading and those who don’t so much—in terms of class, which may be a function of my being a teacher of literature rather than a sociologist, but may also be a function of my knowledge that readers can be found at all social stations (witness the example of William Cobbett). But whatever designations we want to use, it has to be admitted that much of the anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations
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Steven Pinker’s comment that “Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted
on.”
Thus my efforts throughout this book to dissociate reading from academic life, not just because teachers and professors make reading so much more dutiful and good-for-you than it ought to be but also because the whole environment of school is simply alien to what long-form reading has been for almost all of its history. Rarely has education been about teaching children, adolescents, or young adults how to read lengthy and complicated texts with sustained, deep, appreciative attention—at least, not since the invention of the printing
press.
Such will be our fate “unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not.”* So what did those poor deluged people do? Well, they adopted several strategies. First, they practiced various ways of marking important passages in books: with special symbols, with slips of paper, and so on. (Several of the annotative strategies mentioned earlier have their origins in this period.)
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.”
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.
“To
be successful today, it not only becomes necessary to skim but it becomes essential to skim well.”
“When the only information on the topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist.” Norvig is Research Director at Google, so he might be expected to say something like this, but I still think he’s right—except, I would argue, concentrating has rarely received equal billing with
skimming.
education, especially in its “liberal arts” embodiments, has been devoted to providing students with navigational tools—with enough knowledge to find their way through situations that they might confront later in life.
This is one of the ways in which the artes liberales are supposed to be “liberal,” that is, “liberating”: they free you to make your own way through the challenges of life without requiring external props.*
Jonathan Rose’s magisterial Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
Rose’s book is largely a celebration of autodidacticism, of people whose reading—and especially the reading of classic texts, from Homer to Dante to Shakespeare to the great Romantic poets—wasn’t imposed on them by anyone, and who often had to overcome significant social obstacles in order to read. “The autodidacts’ mission statement,” Rose writes, was “to be more than passive consumers of literature, to be active thinkers and writers. Those who proclaimed that ‘knowledge is power’ meant that the only true education is self-education, and they often regarded the expansion of formal educational
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Yes, I know that the word “school” derives from scholia, meaning leisure. I have tried that one on my students, with no more success than anyone else who has ever tried that one on students. 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. This is not just a
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