The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

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 to some status quo ante Internet; and that—Shirky is a self-professed “optimist”—there’s no need to go back because the future will be better than the past. Don’t worry, be happy. (Incidentally, or not incidentally, the reading public has chosen to pronounce this devastating verdict against Tolstoy’s masterpiece by purchasing over one hundred thousand copies of the Pevear and Voloknonsky translation of War and Peace in the past four years. The reading public has an odd way of making its disparagement known.)