The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

Alan Jacobs

New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

I enjoyed every minute of reading this book, though I certainly don’t need to be persuaded about the pleasures of reading.  I see it in my children, I feel it daily, and I am so increasingly addicted to the joy of reading that finding the next great read, for both myself and my kids, has become one of the engines that drives my days.  I would hazard a guess that most of you also feel a sense of superfluity when you read the title of the book.  We don’t need to be told about the pleasures of reading; we are readers; we already take pleasure in reading.  But what writing this blog about books about books has done for me is to enrich my love of reading, and my commitment to making more and more time for it, with stories of others’ love.  Time and time again I have found my own pleasures and thoughts so beautifully articulated by a complete stranger, and there is wonder in that. 

I was almost giddy with delight as I read Alan Jacobs’s story of his love of reading.   A professor of English at Wheaton College, and the author of a biography of C.S. Lewis and a book called Theology of Reading, about how to read lovingly and charitably, Jacobs is also a technophile.  RSS feeds, email and twitter began to swamp his days, and he’d find himself unable to read because of the constant urge to check his i-phone.  He realized one day that he was reading less than he did when he was 10.  And with less pleasure.  What I found most moving about this book is that Jacobs says that when he bought a Kindle (in order to avoid lugging a heavy pile of books on a trip) the Kindle saved his reading life, or, rather, it gave him back his deeply attentive reading life which had been frayed by the distractions of his technological tethers.  This is quite a confession coming from a professor of English.  He also recommends lying about the Great Books you have (not) read, and he thinks that there are too many undergraduate students of English.  So there are quite a few surprises in this English professor’s book about the pleasures of reading.

This is not one of those doom and gloom books about the demise of reading.  On the contrary, he begins by quoting research from the American National Endowment for the Arts that shows that “For the first time in over a quarter-century, … literary reading has risen among adult Americans.” And yet, we continue to wring our hands.  Jacobs quotes frequently from Nicholas Carr, whose The Shallows was a worrying about the effect of the internet on our ability to read well, but Jacobs points out that the so-called dumbing down of America could be a self-fulfilling prophesy:

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. (6) 

That is a sobering thought.  It’s such a common sensical observation, but it has stuck with me.  Of course there will be some kind of diminishing if you call a generation dumb.  We don’t call our individual children dumb, so why would we label their generation so negatively?  It has allowed me a moment of self-congratulation that I have not wrung my hands in sight of my boys and have, I hope, inculcated not just a love of reading, but a belief that they can tackle big books and enjoy them.

Jacobs’s main thesis is that reading is not hygiene; it should not be done out of duty or by rote.  Rather, he advocates that you follow Whim, and “Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame” (23).

He has a particular beef with books like 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, which he calls “the perfect guide for those who don’t want to read but who want to have read” (68).  I disagree entirely with his disdain for the book (I adore the children’s literature version), but the concept of wanting to have read instead of simply wanting to read, I found very persuasive.  “Yes!”, I scribbled in the margins (annotations being another of his pieces of advice for amplifying your pleasure of a book).  Yes!  There have been many times that I have picked up a book in order to be able to say that I have read it, not simply to enjoy the reading of it.  I also have great difficulty in abandoning a book that I am not enjoying.  Reading off of someone else’s list of greatest hits, he says, is a waste of good reading time.  Lie, he says:

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—and by “read” them I mean cast your eyes across most of the lines on most of the pages—in order to impress people whose opinion you shouldn’t be deferring to anyhow.  So it would be less bad, I think, to take a little time to figure out what people will be impressed to hear that you’re reading, use Wikipedia to find out just enough about those books to enable you to bluff plausibly when questioned—and then go back home and read whatever you want to read. (68)

I love his faith!  This is not a professor speaking to students (who should never, ever rely on Wikipedia!), it is a book lover speaking to other members of his tribe who may have lost the plot.  I love his faith that we can abandon obligation and simply follow Whim, that the joy of reading will give us not just guilty pleasure but abiding pleasures as well (17).

Where I begin to disagree with Jacobs is in his belief that

The extreme reader, to coin a phrase, is a rare bird indeed.  (“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.  They take care of themselves; they always do go back to their books. (107)

I am an extreme reader, but I was not born one.  I am mostly made, not born, and I owe that making to my degrees in English as well as to the learning I get from other readers, on-line and in print.  As gently as he can, Jacobs is saying that undergraduate departments cannot expect to continue to expand as they have in the 60 years since the GI Bill greatly increased university enrollment:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, perhaps 2 percent of Americans attended a university; now the number is closer to 70 percent (though only 30 percent get bachelor’s degrees).  … [It] has to be admitted that much of the anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree, arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of “the reading class” beyond what may be its natural limits. (107)

I get very uncomfortable with a notion that there are natural limits on the size of the reading class (a term, to be fair, that Jacobs dislikes himself, thus his use of quotation marks).  I owe much of my abiding pleasure of reading to the universities I attended.  I am not an autodidact who would have found that love without an institutional gateway. 

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. (114)

Though I do read very differently when I’m teaching a book and reading it for pleasure, I can’t make the same kind of distinction.  Learning and depths of pleasure are inseparable for me.  I needed one to reach the other, and I find them complementary.  And, yes, I know that this puts me in another class of rare bird, but it’s a class I would have been left out of if the access to undergraduate education was not so readily available.   

My copy of this book is a review copy, but I will be buying multiple copies to give as gifts to thoughtful book-lovers.  It really was a pleasure to read.

A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign.  Since you, the reader, are that hero of modern literature, the existential loner, the smallest denominator of moral force, it behooves you to take counsel, sustenance, and solace from the writers who have been writing about you these hundred or five hundred years, to sequester yourself with their books and read and reread them to get a fix on yourself and a purchase on the world that will, with luck, like the house in the clearing, last you for life. (129-130)

Poet L.E. Sissman, quoted in Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books

Edited by Leah Price

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

This book was all over the pages of literary periodicals before the holidays.  The book is a great idea for a gift book for a bibliophile, and there are some lovely passages from the interviews with the writers whose bookshelves are profiled in this book.  Sadly, though, this book was a disappointment.  A good third of the photographs were out of focus.  Not artfully out of focus.  Just out of focus.  Not acceptable for a coffee table book.  The interviews were also largely identical.  The same questions were asked of all of the writers, by email I’m guessing, and while there were one or two personalized questions, the interviews began to feel far too similar.  It’s interesting to compare answers to the same questions, yes, but there also has to be individuality, some loving attention to detailed probing. 

I’m glad I spent an hour or two with the book, but it’s not one I’d recommend you rush out to get your hands on.

I hope that 2012 brings all good things, and in the spirit of organized new year’s thinking, here is a lovely calendar for delinquent library users, made by Aunt June. 

Almost every cloud had a silver lining.  In this year of failing spectacularly to curtail my book buying, I also read and finished more books on the very same day as buying them than ever before.  I did not manage to listen to a single audio book, though I had pledged to do three, and that’s just fine because I’ve discovered that I’m just really, really not an aural learner.  When I heard the news of Christopher Hitchens’s death last week, I put on God is Not Great and I listened to him read his own book and it was marvelous.  It was also a reminder that few read as well as he, and in the absence of that kind of perfect match, I’d really rather just read my books.

I was glad to have an inducement to read science books, and on the strength of my enjoyment of that challenge, I am pledging to make 2012 a year in which to read more non-fiction to the kids.  History!  Science!  Exploration!  My eldest just wrote an essay today on why Science is his favourite subject, and I’m looking forward to finding books that will nurture that interest.  We’ve been so blessed to have shared so many hours tucked up with a good story, and I can’t wait now to explore excellence in children’s non-fiction. 

My version of the 1% Well Read challenge was to read from books recommended in 1001 Children’s Books To Read Before You Grow Up, and that was, by far, the most fun challenge of the year.  Not much of a challenge, it has to be said, but delightful reading.

And this is at the heart of what I discovered about challenges: too many are too easy for me because it is not actually a challenge to read books of Canadian fiction or children’s literature or mysteries because I read them already in great quantity.  What is a challenge is staying in touch with others who read them, but I’m not interested in blogging about Canadian literature or children’s literature or mysteries, so it leaves me a bit stuck.  I’m undecided about how to proceed with next year’s challenges, but having them has undoubtedly been a boon.

I have read with more focus, zeal and pleasure this year than ever before, and I think that I have felt less of the sadness and stress of “so many books, so little time.”  I’ve made the time, night after night, and at the end of this reading year, I am nothing but grateful for books.

So that challenge did not go so well, and I have learned that abstaining from anything that I love is just a recipe for misery and guilt.  I love books, I read a lot of them, I have a constitutional inability to return library books on time, I like to write in them, so I might as well own them.  I will not be signing up for any more challenges that don’t allow me to buy books, and I’ve stopped apologizing for it. 

I was surprised to discover that the Chunkster Challenge was too much for me.  I signed up to read four books of more than 450 pages, and I only managed two: The Moonstone, and Little, Big (still in progress, but I’m determined to get it done before the end of the month).  I like a fast reading pace, and I found that I did not want to devote chunks of time to a chunkster.  The first I read in the first week of January (reread, actually) because I was sick in bed and it ticked lots of reading challenge boxes.  Then for the next 11 months, I was never drawn to a big book.  I’ve turned to Little, Big in the last weeks of December because it also ticks several boxes, but it’s slow going and I resent it a little.  One should not resent the book one is reading; it rather defeats the purpose. 

As a person who has lived in nine countries, I am appalled to tell you that my Global Reading Challenge was a total bust.  Two out of seven continents: Europe and North America.  Dreadful.  Must do better next year.

I lost interest in doing my updates of my reading challenges half way through the year.  No particular reason, I just did not feel like writing about it. 

And last, and most regrettably, I did not do much in the way of connecting with others who were doing the same challenges.  It was not the community-building exercise I had hoped it would be, which is a passive way of saying that I did not make enough of an effort to connect. 

What I have done, though, is to deepen my friendships with the book lovers I already know, and some I’ve met through this blog, and that has been a pure delight.  My ego is a little bruised by having bitten off more than I could chew in some cases, but my bibliophilia is more robust than ever after a year of reading in a more planned and conscious way.  I will choose my challenges with a bit more caution for 2012, and with a better sense of who I am (not just who I want to be) as a reader.

Full story here.

find more folded books by Isaac Salazar here

A new report released Monday by education advocacy group People for Education finds that while literacy and standardized test scores have climbed over the past decade, the number of students who report that they like to read has dropped, from 76 per cent of Grade 3 students in 1999 to 50 per cent in 2011.

A 26% drop in students who like to read is enormous.  Hammer cites three possible reasons for the drop:

reading at home may have come to feel like an extension of schoolwork for some students, who aren’t being taught to read for pleasure.

Teachers may be to blame for not picking out engaging books for students, and parents can also help by reading at home with their children.

The report also points to other factors, including declining numbers of teacher librarians in schools – only 56 per cent of Ontario schools have a teacher librarian now, compared to 76 per cent in 1999 – and the rise of new distractive technologies, including social media.

If I squint, I can see why the first two might be to blame, but I don’t really see how in the span of 12 years, the school system can have managed to turn reading into unpleasant work or that teachers are somehow now less likely to recommend good books.

No, my guess is that it’s the cuts to librarians that’s to blame.  They are considered a frill, non-essential.  I know it’s not sound math, but there must be a correlation between a 20% drop in teacher librarians over the same time span as the 26% drop in students who report that they like reading.  I don’t have to squint to see a link there.

It is a librarian’s job to be enthusiastic about books, to connect a child and the book he or she is meant to meet.  It’s not just about putting a warm body in the room so that an adult can scan the barcode.  Librarians know their shelves, they know their students and they know how to match one to the other.  Without that professional enthusiasm, of course there will be a drop in the number of students finding the books that spark, kindle and keep alive a love of reading. 

It wasn’t until reading this article that I realized that along with head chef and bottle washer, one of my jobs as mother has been librarian.  I read a lot about children’s books.  I read children’s librarians’ websites and periodicals, I keep up with new publications, and I absolutely adore reading about other readers’ favourite childhood classics.  I am discovering many of them for the first time myself, and my enthusiasm for the job is boundless.  I have, in effect, professionalized my own love of reading as I cultivate it in my children. 

I am almost certain that my kids would answer yes on a survey that asked them if they like to read.  (I have enough humility and experience to know that our children will sometimes surprise us with answers we do not expect.)  It’s because I have worked hard to match them with the right books, but as Roger Sutton points out in A Family of Readers, as they get older our children need independence in their choice of reading material:

Feel free to share, but give your kid plenty of room and privacy.  The current vogue for book clubs might lead one to think that the primary goal of reading is to have something to talk about with your friends.  While books do provide a durable kind of social glue, you might find that your child is not especially interested in sticking to you.  He or she will probably be more interested in the pursuit or discovery of like-minded souls, both within the pages of books and in like-minded fellows who see the brilliance, for example, of Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett or Francesca Lia Block.  Should your child invite you in, by all means accept, but don’t make the first move.  Let your kid lead.  Books require–and provide–privacy and independence.  

My concern is, when they throw off my guidance in the natural move to reading independence, I want someone to be there to keep my boys’ love of reading alive by continuing to find them books that keep them up for “Please, just one more page.”  If schools keep cutting library staff, that someone will be harder to find.