READINGS IN LANGUAGE

How we can still enjoy reading books even in the digital era

Is it still possible to enjoy reading books in the digital age when most everybody is too busy fiddling with a laptop, cellphone, or iPad for instant gratification or quick information? Yes, but only if you do it whimsically and for the simple pleasure of it, says Alan Jacobs, an American writer and professor of English, in his book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 162 pages). Jacobs argues that to foster serious reading, reading must be extricated from academic expectations. “Education is and should be primarily about intellectual navigation, about…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 this playful and irreverent yet earnest guide to reading, Jacobs offers a roadmap to the enjoyment of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, showing how this can be done whether one reads from a printed book or from an electronic device. He says that books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self, but that because of too much emphasis on reading as an educational tool, achieving this deep kind of absorption has become very difficult to both young people and mature adults.

Jacobs describes this predicament in terms of his own experience: “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.”

Read an excerpt from Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction in The Chronicle Review now!

Read Abigail Deutsch’s review of Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction in the Wall Street Journal now!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois and author of the “Text Patterns” blog. His books include The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis; Original Sin: A Cultural History; and A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love. He is a frequent contributor to First Things, Books & Culture, and other magazines and journals.

ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:
In “The Problem Is: You Write Too Well,” an article she wrote for the September 6, 2011 issue of The Chronicle Review, creative writing assistant professor Rachel Toor was puzzled by this strange remark often uttered by academics hard at work massaging their dissertations into book manuscripts: “People on my dissertation committee said that I write too well.” She looked into the matter and was surprised to find that the remark often meant the opposite of what was said.

Read Rachel Toor’s “The Problem Is: You Write Too Well” in The Chronicle Review now!

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