The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

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.

I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. … What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?”)

But it’s at this moment, with no one ordering him or expecting him to do any such thing, he randomly picks up and decides to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Then he moves on to Great Expectations. And so, belatedly, haltingly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education. I wasn’t sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or how long it might take to complete (forever, I had an inkling), but for once those weren’t my first concerns. Alone in my room, congested and exhausted, I forgot my obsession with self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in. He concludes, “I wanted to find out what others thought.” For the first time in his life, Walter Kirn was reading at whim. And it’s never too late to begin this new life as a free reader.

The pursuit of the works that shaped a loved writer’s mind can be fascinating in itself. One of the most remarkably odd and yet enlightening books in the history of literary criticism is a thick, square tome by John Livingston Lowes called The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. The book, which was published in 1927 and in the editions I’ve seen runs to seven hundred pages or so, is a simple inquiry into what Samuel Taylor Coleridge read that found its way into his poem “Kubla Khan.” The inventory that Lowes creates is one of the most wonderfully bizarre miscellanies imaginable. To take but one example, consider the poem’s great wild fountain: And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, Amighty fountain momently was forced: A mid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river.* It turns out that Coleridge didn’t come up with this image on his own, but rather took it from a popular book of the eighteenth century commonly called Bartram’s Travels. William Bartram is the author, and the book’s full title is Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Containing an Account of the Soil a...

As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, “A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

George Eliot was so wounded by bad reviews that her lover and companion George Henry Lewes used to go through the papers and magazines to make sure she never saw one. And Brendan Gill tells a story about the American writer John O’Hara, who, among his many accomplishments, wrote the book for the Broadway musical Pal Joey: when some friends passed him on the streets of New York and told him that they had just seen Pal Joey again and had enjoyed it even more than they had the first time, O’Hara snapped, “What was wrong with it the first time?”

in his novel The Prime Minister: “He had read much,” Trollope says of Everett Wharton, “and though he generally forgot what he read, there were left with him from his readings certain nebulous lights, begotten by other men’s thinking, which enabled him to talk on most subjects.”

willing to read more slowly and with greater care. 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. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.”

the attempt to read noninstrumental texts in an instrumental way—to read fiction or poetry or history or theology or even what the bookstores call “current events” as quickly as possible and with the goal of accurate transference of data—is not a good idea. It is in fact a perfect recipe for boredom, because, though few people realize it, many books become more boring the faster you read them.

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.”

In his brilliant sequence of poems called “Horae Canonicae”* W. H. Auden pictures this blessed condition: You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.

But in any event, Schwartz is absolutely right to say that “what reading teaches, first and foremost, is how to sit still for long periods and confront time head-on. The dynamism is all inside, an exalted, spiritual exercise so utterly engaging that we forget time and mortality along with all of life’s lesser woes, and simply bask in the everlasting present.”

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.

Darwin found this alteration in his mind deeply worrisome: My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

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.

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.

a chief theme of Jonathan Rose’s magisterial Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is that the culture of reading among those classes was more dynamic, more impassioned, before the study of English literature was incorporated into the general curriculum of English schools (in the wake of the Education Act of 1870).

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.

In explaining why he wrote his book In Pursuit of Silence, George Prochnik offers a telling statement: “I’ve always been a lover of silence, and this love is bound up with my passion for books. The writer Stefan Zweig once defined a book as a ‘handful of silence that assuages torment and unrest.’ For years before I began writing about the subject, I’d been feeling that silence was a diminishing natural resource. I wanted to understand whether this was more than a subjective impression. If so, why had the world become louder, and what could be done to reinstate silence as a value in our culture?”

And Diana Webb in her book Privacy and Solitude in the Middle Ages argues, convincingly, that many people, men and women alike, sought monastic life less from piety than from a desperate need to find refuge from all the racket. Maybe they just wanted to find a place where they could be left alone to read.

Pascal in his Pensées notes that “the error of Stoicism” is to believe you can do always what you can do sometimes.

What he felt for this small being was not at all what he had expected. There was nothing happy or joyful in this feeling; on the contrary, there was a new tormenting fear. There was an awareness of a new region of vulnerability. And this awareness was so tormenting at first, the fear lest this helpless being should suffer was so strong, that because of it he scarcely noticed the strange feeling of senseless joy and even pride he had experienced when the baby sneezed.

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.

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.

Our goal as adults is not to love all books alike, or as few as possible, but rather to love as widely and as well as our limited selves will allow.

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.

serendipity. The word was coined by that curious man Sir Horace Walpole, known today (if at all) as one of the founders of the “Gothic” tale of suspense and terror, but more famous in his own time as an especially elegant and proficient writer of letters. In a 1754 letter to a friend he describes his discovery of some curious Venetian coat of arms and pauses to say that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity.” And then he explains this “very expressive word” of his own invention: “I once read a silly fairy tale, called ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’”—Serendip being an old name for Sri Lanka: “as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of … (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description).” The finding of what one is not looking for will be the element of the letter most obviously relevant to what I’ve been saying so far; but equally important is the phrase “by accidents and sagacity,” or, as Walpole puts it later in the same letter, “accidental sagacity.”

because I have realized just how much serendipity has come my way through just clicking on links. (I found many of the most incisive quotations in this book that way.)

Plan once appealed to me, but I have grown to be a natural worshiper of Serendipity and Whim; I can try to serve other gods, but my heart is never in it. I truly think I would rather read an indifferent book on a lark than a fine one according to schedule and plan. And why not? After all, once upon a time we chose none of our reading: it all came to us unbidden, unanticipated, unknown, and from the hand of someone who loved us.

In Proust and the Squid, Maryann Wolf notes that for many children the act of being read to—and therefore the book itself—is powerfully associated with being loved.

as 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.”

All a long summer holiday I kept my secret, as I believed: I did not want anybody to know that I could read. I suppose I half consciously realized even then that this was the dangerous moment. I was safe so long as I could not read—the wheels had not begun to turn, but now the future stood around on bookshelves everywhere waiting for the child to choose—the life of a chartered accountant perhaps, a colonial civil servant, a planter in China, a steady job in a bank.… I suppose my mother must have discovered my secret, for on the journey home I was presented for the train with another real book, a copy of [R. M.] Ballantyne’s Coral Island with only a single picture to look at, a coloured frontispiece. But I would admit nothing. All the long journey I stared at the one picture and never opened the book.

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.