The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
Over the last decade or so, more and more people have begun to report an overpowering feeling, whenever they pick up a book, that gets labeled “restlessness” or “distraction”—but which is actually best understood as a form of impatience, a revulsion at the fact that the act of reading takes longer than they’d like.
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
So why is reading books any better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, you need to put down your book, if only to think about what you’re reading, what you think about what you’re reading. But a book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is... See more
The American Scholar • Solitude and Leadership
To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or of one’s orientation toward it. The distinction must be recognized, for when we read we not only transplant ourselves to the place of the text, but we modify our natural angle of regard upon all things; we reposition the self in order to see differently.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Reading, he told me, creates a “unique form of consciousness…. While we’re reading, we’re directing attention outward toward the words on the page and, at the same time, enormous amounts of attention is going inward as we imagine and mentally simulate.” It’s different from if you just close your eyes and try to imagine something off the top of your
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