The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

I find myself particularly intrigued by younger people who have heard their cohort called “The Dumbest Generation,” who are continually told that their addiction to multiple simultaneous stimuli renders them incapable of the seriously focused and single-minded attention that the reading of big thick books requires. Some of them are defiant in response to such charges, but most at least half-believe them. Told over and over again that they can’t read, they begin to wonder why they should even try.

the American reading public, or a significant chunk of it anyway, can’t take its readerly pleasure straight but has to cut it with a sizable splash of duty. Books that aren’t certifiably good for you are, in this way of thinking, to be suspected—and to read for “entertainment,” or the sheer pleasure of the thing, verges on the morally unjustifiable.

Now, if people came to me and said, “Here’s a list of ten of my favorite books—can you think of some others I’m likely to enjoy?” I would be more likely—and better prepared—to answer. But that rarely happens, which is unfortunate: as much as I dislike the general, abstract, decontextualized lists that people tend to ask for, I love making recommendations to people I know and whose interests and tastes are familiar to me.

Thus Rudyard Kipling: “One can’t prescribe books, even the best books, to people unless one knows a good deal about each individual person. If a man is keen on reading, I think he ought to open his mind to some older man who knows him and his life, and to take his advice in the matter, and above all, to discuss with him the first books that interest him.”

The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It’s asking us to stop calculating. It’s asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.

Utilitarianism runs deep in our thinking.

Adler and Van Doren don’t want to get into these complications, preferring the simple distinction between entertainment, on the one trivial hand, and information and understanding, on the strong and noble other. But to divide the world of reading in this way is to leave yourself unable to account for pleasure, and likely to mistrust it when it comes.

for heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the “calories burned” readout—some assiduous and taxing exercise that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading at all, but what C. S. Lewis once called “social and ethical hygiene.”

Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefly by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed. The poet W. H. Auden once wrote, “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.

So the books are waiting. Of this you may be confident: they’ll be ready when the whim strikes you.

We are served best when we read books when we're actually ready for them. Timing is as important as selection.

I think Gibbon’s experience is immensely relevant. It helps us to make a vital distinction between what I shall call whim and Whim. In its lower-case version, whim is thoughtless, directionless preference that almost invariably leads to boredom or frustration or both. But Whim is something very different: it can guide us because it is based in self-knowledge—it can become for us a gracious Swiss pedagogue of the mind.

I needed to learn, as I eventually did, that if I set a book aside today I am not thereby forbidding myself to return to it later—nor am I promising to do so. To everything there is a season, and, by corollary, everything is sometimes out of season.

On quitting books

The pursuit of the works that shaped a loved writer’s mind can be fascinating in itself.

if you turn upstream to see where your favorite authors came from, intellectually speaking, you may discover all sorts of works that are fascinating, illuminating—but also, yes, challenging. “Challenging” is precisely what the (downstream) imitators usually are not, but that means that they’re not all that rewarding either. They tend to be mere shadows of the originals they strive to copy. Austen and Tolkien weren’t trying to copy anything, but they were drawing on the power of earlier writers and thinkers, and deepening their own sensibilities by doing so. If you imitate them in that sense—not by trying to write what they wrote but to read what they read—you’ll find your horizons expanding, your mind stretching, your resources of knowledge coming near their limits. But all this will draw you closer in powerful ways to the writers you most love. That at first will be your incentive, though perhaps as you continue the pursuit will come to have its own fascination.

A person who had been sedentary for a lifetime would not think that she could rise up from her sofa, head out the door, and run a breezy 10 K. Instead she would work up to it slowly, starting with a few strolls around the block perhaps, then longer walks, then a little jogging, and so on. The same applies to the reading of texts written in an unfamiliar idiom or genre, or written in an age whose stylistic preferences differ from our own.

But what do we have more need for, in our whirling mental worlds, than strength and concentration and patience and humility? These are virtues worth aspiring to, especially because they lead to new and greater delights.

But one of the wonderful things about books is that they don’t grow agitated or dismissive. They patiently bear all the scrutiny you choose to give them, and the more carefully you read them the more of their secrets they yield. It’s as though they are asking to be put to the question, announcing their readiness to be investigated.

“I agree with every word you write” would be a gratifying thing to hear, I imagine—I wouldn’t know—but even more gratifying would be a reader who carries your idea a step further, who adds thoughts you never had that enrich your understanding of your own project. Even the reader who is critical in a genuinely constructive spirit is better, I think, than the reader who, however appreciative, is wholly passive.

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.

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 I already love, even though I know that such rereading will surely be pleasurable. The possible pleasure of an unread book weighs more heavily on me than the sure pleasure of one I already know.

I don’t think that e-readers are going to be a cure-all for everyone in need of cultivating better and longer attention. But I do think that my experience suggests that it’s not reasonable to think of “technology”—in the usual vaguely pejorative meaning of that word—as the enemy of reading. The codex is itself a technology, and a supremely sophisticated one, but even digital electronic technologies vary tremendously: e-readers are by any measure far less distracting than an iPad or a laptop. It’s at least possible for new technologies to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

As Winifred Gallagher has written, “attention enables you to have the kind of Dionysian experience beautifully described by the old-fashioned term ‘rapt’—completely absorbed, engrossed, fascinated, perhaps even ‘carried away’—that underlies life’s deepest pleasures, from the scholar’s study to the carpenter’s craft to the lover’s obsession.”

The person just beginning to bring some discipline to his or her life as a reader need not be ashamed at reading non-masterpieces, or at only being able to focus on reading a few pages at a time. Let that person, then, begin with short stories or essays and work toward longer works that demand extensive attention. Indeed, it’s vital as a reader to move forward in an orderly way (ordinate procedere debet): “the man who moves along step by step is the man who moves along best, not like some who fall head over heels when they wish to make a great leap ahead.”

Hugh particularly insists that the student of reading cultivate the virtue of humility: “For the reader there are three lessons taught by humility that are particularly important: First, that he hold no knowledge or writing whatsoever in contempt. Second, that he not blush to learn from any man. Third, that when he has attained learning himself, he not look down upon anyone else.” Armed with this humility, the reader can safely pursue the wisdom to be gained from reading; the reader can become a true student.

Such a reader must certainly practice cogitatio, must cogitate on the text, that is, intellectually discern its meaning as best he or she can. But this is not enough, because, to return to a point we emphasized earlier, such reading is purely reconstructive and therefore nonresponsive. 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.

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. However, as we have seen, powerful cultural and psychological forces inhibit any ruminant instincts we might have. If we are easily distracted, or in a hurry, or if we are wanting to get a book read so we can cross it off our list and move on to the conveyor belt’s next item, we may forget about that passage and never regurgitate it for further attention.

W. S. Merwin wrote a poem called “Why Some People Do Not Read Poetry,” and it begins thus: Because they already know that it means stopping and without stopping they know that beyond stopping it will mean listening Yes: poems require stopping. But then so do many experiences of great value. Stop walking, stop talking, stop browsing the Internet, and then kiss your beloved.

Don’t waste time and mental energy in comparing yourself to others, whether to your shame or gratification, since we are all wayfarers. 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 some rare cases you might think of the book as the host, yourself as the guest: Machiavelli’s habitual posture suggests that he thought of entering his own library as though he were entering a great king’s court.) Above all, 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: you may well spare yourself a case of heartburn later.

All books want our attention, but not all of them want the same kind of attention, and good readers know this and make the necessary adjustments.

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 tested—we had better take notes. When we are reading for understanding, we may or may not take notes, depending on the context. Sometimes we wish to be rapt or are caught up in the book regardless of whether we wish to be or not; other times we will strive for a more detached analytical mode.

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.” Hayles believes that “each 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.”

One of the most widely quoted sentences of 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.” This is usually taken as a wise or sententious general comment about the worthiness of various texts, but Ann Blair shows that Bacon was making a very practical recommendation to people who were overwhelmed by the availability of books and couldn’t imagine how they were going to read them all. 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. I 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.

Such is the mystery of rereading, and few topics are more important for anyone who wants to make sense, and make value, of reading. If most of us read too fast, most of us also read too many books and are unwisely reluctant to return to something we think we already know. I use “think” there advisedly, because as my examples show, a first encounter with a worthwhile book is never a complete encounter, and we are usually in error to make it a final one. But those who want to have read, who are checking books off their “bucket list,” will find the thought of rereading even more repulsive than the thought of reading slowly and ruminatively. And yet rereading a book can often be a more significant, dramatic, and, yes, new experience than encountering an unfamiliar work.

No one takes pleasure in every kind of reading, and if we think we do we lack self-knowledge or else have “no taste at all”—no genuine appreciation of anything. But to be satisfied with our own narrowness is just as bad: there is great value in the kind of “self-conquest” that Auden recommends because it is an expansion of being, an extension of our lives into realms of experience that we would not know if we did not make the effort to enjoy those works of which our detached critical self approves.

Erin O’Connor, who has taught English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and also at the high school level, precisely notes the difficulties here, echoing a number of points we have emphasized in these pages: 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. But, too often, this backfires. Kids get turned off, and reading just becomes a chore they have to do for school. Or—and this pattern is less discussed, but still troubling—they become dependent. They may really enjoy reading—but they think they need a class, and spoonfed lectures, and guided discussions, in order to get anything out of what they read. They are willing and eager—but have learned from their teachers exactly what they should not have learned. They have become passive where they should be active, and the teacher becomes a crutch for laziness, fear, uncertainty, and sometimes even a creeping snobbery about reading, about choosing what to read, deciding how to read, and figuring out what one thinks about what one has read. These folks grow up into the kind of adults who answer questions about their favorite books by listing works they think should be their favorites—but that they may never have even actually read.