"Reader, Come Home"

Maryanne Wolf's recent appearance on the Ezra Klein show resonated with me, I too have found it increasingly difficult to get beyond surface and shallows to the more immersive and transportive forms of deep reading. Like Wolf I still buy and borrow books, kindles and book-books,* but (as she writes in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World) “more and more I read in them, rather than being whisked away by them. At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.”

Me too.

And I too must, with great regret, sigh a string of  yesses to Wolf's barrage of diagnostic questions:

• Do you, my reader, read with less attention and perhaps even less memory for what you have read?
• Do you notice when reading on a screen that you are increasingly reading for key words and skimming over the rest? Has this habit or style of screen reading bled over to your reading of hard copy?
• Do you find yourself reading the same passage over and over to understand its meaning?
• Do you suspect when you write that your ability to express the crux of your thoughts is subtly slipping or diminished?

• Have you become so inured to quick précis of information that you no longer feel the need or possess the time for your own analyses of this information?

• Do you find yourself gradually avoiding denser, more complex analyses, even those that are readily available?
• Very important, are you less able to find the same enveloping pleasure you once derived from your former reading self?
• Have you, in fact, begun to suspect that you no longer have the cerebral patience to plow through a long and demanding article or book?
• What if, one day, you pause and wonder if you yourself are truly changing and, worst of all, do not have the time to do a thing about it?

Sigh.

What to do about it? 

For starters, make a holiday leisure-reading list and get to it. Once I finish Wolf's Come Home I'll pick up its prequel, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Then finish Kim Stanley Robinson's The High Sierra: A Love Story and Zach Carter's The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (which KSR said everybody should read). Then, 

• Jennifer Egan's The Candy House 
• Ian McEwan's Lessons 
• Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Song of the Cell 
• Jon Meacham's And There Was Light
• Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead...

Lists are easy, reading lots of books without distraction used to be a lot easier. Got to fix that.

But first, I've got to read a bunch of students' final reports. It's that time of the semester again. This post was self-incurred procrastination. A deliberate distraction. I don't think I can blame digital culture for that.

Teacher, come home. Remember that students, after all, are just aspirant fellow thinkers. CoPhilosophers, even.

==

*Used to buy lotsa books at a place called Bookstar... 

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