The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader., the original post I wrote about it is below it
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Read would give 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 study intellectual diet, any more than 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 accessed. The poet W. H. Auden once wrote, “When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there's 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.

one dominant, overarching, nearly definitive principle for reading: Read at Whim.

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 should 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.

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.

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This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.

A while back my teenage son drifted into the room where I was reading, tilting his head to catch the title of the book in my hands. It was that venerable classic How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren. “Oh man, he said, “I had to read that in school last year. Maybe I learned something about how to read a book, but after that I never wanted to read a book again.”

reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens. . . That sort 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 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.

most

serendipity is the near relation of Whim; each stands against the Plan.

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.

All books want our attention, but not all of them want the same kind of attention.

A book about the pleasures of reading ought to be a pleasure to read. I did not find this book to be a pleasure to read.

It wasn't a waste of time. I took notes. “Read at whim!” the author, Alan Jacobs, reminds us, quoting poet Randall Jarrell. Worthy advice. Jacobs also warns us not to multitask, to read deeply, and to treat the text “like a guest in your home.” All lovely thoughts.

Jacobs irritated me when he berated those who read to cross items off an ultimate reading list. Is that a bad thing? He doesn't pick on readers of romance novels with the same vim. Unfair, I think.

And do we really need an entire book about the urgency of the need for reading in our time? Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College, and so I dare to say to him, Shame on you, Professor Jacobs, for not following the counsel of thousands of English teachers, for overwriting a book out of material sufficient for a good essay.

Short review: This is an enjoyable short book about the pleasures of reading. The point that gets the most play is that we should be reading more at Whim. By that he means reading should be more about pleasure and less about reading what others say is important. So if we are interested in it, we should go ahead and read it. Great books are great because they have a lot of intellectual content, while intellectual content is good, our brains can only process so much. We should revel in the intellectual content and if we are reading primarily because one says we should and not because we really want to, we are likely to read too quickly, without enough desire and in the end we would probably be better off just reading a summary to get the point instead of pretending to ourselves that we were actually reading to gain something from the book.

Jacobs has a meandering style that I like. He has some of the best quotes about reading. It is only about 150 pages of real content so it won't take long to read.

It is a lendable book on kindle, so if you want to borrow it, leave a comment on my blog and I will set it up.


My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/reading-jacobs/

Alan Jacobs, who readers of this blog (all ten of you) may know from previous references to his excellent blog TextPatterns, has recently released a wonderful book about reading that I simply can't recommend highly enough. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction is just the sort of pithy, sympathetic tract that our times demand – it encourages bibliographic exploration, celebrates chance literary encounters, while offering sincere understanding for the would-be “well-read” among us who fear missing out on an overly massive menu of “great works.”

[Note: see more of my writing at Near Earth Object.]

Those chance literary encounters are the subject of this passage, which I found so delightful and even moving, that I thought I'd share it here.

The cultivation of serendipity is an option for anyone, but for people living in conditions of prosperity and security and informational richness it is something vital. To practice “accidental sagacity” is to recognize that I don't really know where I am going, even if I like to think I do, or think Google does; that if I know what I am looking for, I do not therefore know what I need; that I am not master of my destiny and captain of my fate; that it is probably a very good thing that I am not master of my destiny and captain of my fate. An accidental sagacity may be the form of wisdom I most need, but am least likely to find without eager pursuit. Moreover, serendipity is the near relation of Whim; each stands against the Plan. 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.

. . . people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it . . . They're the ones who need help, and want it, and are prepared to receive it. I had become one of those people myself, or was well on my way to it, when I was rescued through the novelty of reading on a Kindle. My hyper-attentive habits were alienating me further and further from the much older and (one would have thought) more firmly established habits of deep attention. I was rapidly becoming a victim of my own mind's plasticity, until a new technology helped me to remember how to do something that for years had been instinctive, unconscious, natural. I don't know whether an adult who has never practiced deep attention—who has never seriously read for information or for understanding, or even for delight—can learn how. But I'm confident that anyone who has ever had this facility can recover it: they just have to want that recovery enough to make sacrifices for it, something they will only do if they can vividly recall what that experience was like.