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

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.

It’s only when you read challenging and complex books without that pencil that you are forgoing an opportunity for meaningful and substantive interaction—

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.

My impatience with Faulkner’s style may not mark a maturation on my part, but a narrowing of taste, which is something that many people experience as they age.

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.

Why do people want to read faster? Not least because life is short: “So many books, so little time,” as the saying goes. We don’t want to miss something special, especially if we miss it because we simply run out of years. This is understandable, and when such thoughts pass through my mind I can feel a brief rush of panic. 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

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?

we need not worry here about grades and instrumentality, because we operate under the sign of Whim. We read what we want, when we want, and there is no one to assign or to evaluate. We are free readers.

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

The reader who notices this word, then, notices a vital, not a trivial, point about the story Gibbon tells. But the reader in a hurry isn’t going to notice it—and, let’s face it, it’s hard not to be in a hurry when you’re reading a book that in small print exceeds two thousand pages and even in an abridged edition pushes a thousand.

If we read more slowly, won’t that just mean that we get through less text before succumbing to distraction?

A typical day for me begins with a consultation of my RSS reader: I subscribe

to about two hundred feeds, and on any given morning I find about a hundred updates to scan, some of which I load in my browser. A few of those I read in full, many I just look over; some go into a service called Instapaper to read later, while others get bookmarked.

no one actually multitasks; instead, we shift among different tasks and give attention to only one at any given time; • the attempt to multitask results in a state of “continuous partial attention”; • those who believe they are skilled multitaskers tend to be worse at it than others.

attentiveness is worth cultivating: not just because it is good for you or because (as Gallagher also says) it can help you “organize your world,” but because such raptness is deeply satisfying.

The genuine student will move on from cogitatio to meditatio, meditation, which for Hugh means “incorporating” the text—if the text is truly worthy, which the serious reader will discern—into the reader’s own experience.

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.

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.

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.”

a lyric poem requires of you short periods of concentration—shorter by far than, say, Animal Farm. You can read it through without losing your focus, as long as you remember that you are not expected to make that reading a comprehensive one. You can then come back to it later, as many times as you wish—and indeed, the more often you come back to it the more greatly it will reward you, if it’s really good.

take time to discern what this book—or story, or poem, or essay, or article—has to offer you. Slow down. Make a point of revisiting passages that seem especially rich, or especially confusing, or for that matter especially offensive. Chew the textual cud for a while before sending it to the further stomachs of your mind:

Actually, we could do worse than employ the threefold model of our old friends Adler and Van Doren: reading for information, reading for understanding, reading for entertainment.

I think we can make use of this tripartite scheme—with the necessary substitution of pleasure for entertainment.

When we read for pleasure we don’t, or shouldn’t, take notes: being rapt is then our only ambition.

When we read for information—the paradigmatic case being the textbook on the contents of which we are about to be...

When we are reading for understanding, we may or may not take notes, dep...

inimical

(One enemy of good reading is confusion about which mode of attention is appropriate to a given book.

triptych

Darwin intuited what neuroscientists have since confirmed about the brain, that different parts of it are assigned different duties, so that his devotion to painstaking scientific research (“grinding general laws out of large collections of facts”) need not have made it impossible for him to be nourished by music and poetry.

the plasticity of the human brain allows for major retraining, and adaptation to changing circumstances, both internal (in case of injury and disease) and external (in case of changing cognitive environments).

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 tolerance for long focus times.”

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.”

but 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?

It is more common to come across the person who has known the joys of reading but who can be distracted from them: people who, rather like Nicholas Carr, once had a smoothly functioning reading brain but allowed it to fall into disrepair. It is for such people that I have written this book. But even these folks are never more than a small percentage of the population.

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.

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.

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).

Shreeharsh Kelkar has pointed out, “To be successful today, it not only becomes necessary to skim but it becomes essential to skim well.”

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.

the idea that many teachers hold today that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading—or at least to appreciate and enjoy whole books—is largely alien to the history of education. And perhaps alien to the history of reading as well:

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.

No novel or play or long poem will offer its full rewards to someone who consumes it in small chunks and crumbs. The attention it demands is the deep kind.

Quiet, please But how can we concentrate, how can we cultivate or practice deep attention, how can we read with all this noise?