The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.

“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”

What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?

At the purely cognitive level, this is what reading is: coding and decoding.

“all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction.

“A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

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.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is the perfect guide for those who don’t want to read but who want to have read.

many books become more boring the faster you read them.

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.

“Researchers used brain scans to examine what happens inside people’s heads as they read fiction. They found that ‘readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.’ … The brain regions that are activated ‘closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.’”

Reading too is, or should be, a moving between the solitary encounter and something more social.

Greene’s speculation: “Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already.”

“in books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.”