The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

Thus Lewis, Bloom’s polar opposite in this matter, imagines a group of educated adults, having been well instructed by the Vigilants, complacently discussing their recent reading; “Yet, while this goes on downstairs, the only real literary experience in such a family may be occurring in a back bedroom where a small boy is reading Treasure Island”—or, perhaps, Harry Potter—“under the bedclothes by the light of an electric torch.”

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Young people often signal through their pretensions what they hope to become: they have discerned, maybe in a limited way, some good and they are pursuing it as best they can, given limited knowledge and experience. They see people whom they admire, or are in some way attracted to, and they try to copy the preferences of those paragons. Such copying can lead to more and more pretension; but in many cases the pretense becomes real: the tastes we aspire to often become our own tastes.

having better understood the near-miracle of our ability to decode marks on paper, we are left with a truth equally remarkable: that some of us greatly desire to do so, and that some of us find abiding consolation in what we encounter when our eyes scan words on the page in those strange jerky saccades.

Some forms of intellectual labor are worth the trouble. In those times when Whim isn’t quite enough, times that will come to us all, we discover this. Such work strengthens our minds, makes us more capable of concentration, teaches us patience—and almost certainly a touch of humility as well,

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those who want no response at all are unlikely to publish a book; and a good many writers are mature enough to know that they have to take the bad with the good. We publish at least in part because we want a personal connection.

In any event, 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.

once you start reading a book on the Kindle—and this is equally true of the other e-readers I’ve tried—the technology generates an inertia that makes it significantly easier to keep reading than to do anything else. E-readers, unlike many other artifacts of the digital age, promote linearity—they create a forward momentum that you can reverse if you wish, but not without some effort.

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.

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Come to what you read with a charitable disposition: don’t expect to fight with the text, but instead seek to treat it well; be willing to meet it more than halfway, as though it were a guest in your home, which in a way it is.

In both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, narrative and other more-or-less literary forms are dominant, which seems to call for a strategy of reading for understanding similar to what one might use in an encounter with, say, Homer; but these books’ status as sacred text suggests, to many modern readers anyway, that their purpose is to provide information about God and God’s relation to human beings. “Strip-mining” the Psalms, or the Song of Solomon, or even the more elevated discourses of the Gospel of John, “for relevant content” might not seem like a promising strategy, but many generations of pastors have pushed it pretty hard, as though the Bible were no more than an awkwardly coded advice manual.)

The English professor Carr quotes, N. Katherine 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 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.”

Augustine’s biographer Peter Brown has commented that some of Augustine’s intellectual eccentricities are the product of “a mind steeped too long in too few books”—something that can be said of almost nobody today.

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.

With this research in mind, it’s important to circle back to something Paul Bloom notes: “We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones”—not that we can’t distinguish them, but that we don’t.

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I mentioned early in this book the kind of rereading distinctive to the fan—the Tolkien addict, say, or the devotee of Jane Austen or Trollope or the Harry Potter books. The return to such books is often motivated by a desire to dwell for a time in a self-contained fictional universe, with its own boundaries and its own rules.

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we should note that it’s not what readers are escaping from but what they are escaping into that counts most.

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Auden once wrote that “there must always be … escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep.”

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Critical reflection of some kind is inevitable, so it would behoove us to do it well.

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“For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.”

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nobody’s taste will ever be all-embracing: therefore he has one category for the recognizably good work that you hope someday to enjoy, but also this: “I can see this is good but I don’t like it.” Just that, because no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to enjoy everything that is worthy of praise.

But those who are not satisfied by book groups tend to give two reasons. The minor one is that the books chosen are rarely challenging enough to provide first-rate conversation. The major one is that too few participants in book groups are interested in really exploring the books: rather, for them, books seem to be an excuse for talking about other matters that they’re more deeply interested in, often their own emotional lives.

the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald has commented, “Twice in your life you know you are approved of by everyone—when you learn to walk and when you learn to read.”

English teachers are mediators. They are not ends in themselves. That’s how it should be, anyway. They are training wheels that young readers ought to be able to shed once they acquire the skills they need to read purposefully and profitably on their own.