The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

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.

Good

And not just teachers; there’s also the desire to drop casual mentions at parties of the intellectually stimulating and culturally sophisticated reading you’ve been doing.

What parties does he attend?

Yes, lying is wrong. But sometimes in this world we have to choose among evils. It is wrong to lie, but it may be still more wrong to read a bunch of books you don’t want to read

(“I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing,” Lynne Sharon Schwartz writes. “Can I go back to my books now?”) Such people are born, not made, I think; or mostly born and only a little made.

Those are my tribe, but they are few. It

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.