Read at Whim

I don’t know about you, but I can create a stack of books to read and then a new book arrives in the mailbox and I decide to read the new book. On the day before we left for Israel Alan Jacobs’ new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, arrived, and I said to myself, “That’s a book to read on the flight.” And I did. Which decision illustrates the whole point of Jacobs’ new book: read at whim.

Why “whim”? Lower case “whim” in Jacobs’ dictionary means “thoughtless, directionless” but upper case Whim means this: “Read what gives you delight — at least most of the time — and do so without shame” (23). One of my favorite writers, who often writes about reading, calls this “desultory” reading — a kind of wandering and meandering from one book to another. More or less, that’s how I have been reading for years. What strikes me today as a “must-read” becomes sometimes a “read later” and sometimes to a “I’m not even interested now.” Whim is a good word for it, and it’s a good habit to establish.

So, what are your reading habits? Do you read this way? Or do you have a list, work down it, and when done go to the next one on the list without regard to something new that strikes your fancy? Do you believe in reading lists? A canon of books to make one intelligent, or informed, or literate?

Jacobs’ book has no chapters, or at least as commonly made clear in books. He meanders through themes, they build into one another, but there’s no real argument and there’s no real plot — this is an essayist’s approach to an essay on reading in an age where it is far too easy to get distracted.

Our problem, of course, is the internet and social media. They are all consuming, or can be, and they can create habits of the mind — quick, insatiable, and “whim-y” kinds of habits that prevent us from focused reading. Sherry Turkle sees this as an addiction of the habits in the mind. I agree — it is too easy to sit down, begin reading a good book, see something that can be checked on Wikipedia or hear the ding of the e-mail or wonder who’s commenting on the blog or what Facebook might offer or Twitter (how many were distracted to checking one?) and then not really find the focused attention required for a good book. Plutarch once observed that Rusticus showed composure in waiting until his lecture was over before he opened a package. That lecture was on curiosity. That’s the sort of problem this book addresses, and it addresses it well (though I do wonder if this book might better have been a longish essay in Books & Culture but since I like his prose and wit and quotations, I’ll take it in longer form). [By the way, the letter to Rusticus was from the emperor. I swipe this story from Montaigne, and I can’t recall that Jacobs quoted that great French essayist in this book.]

Anyway, here are some themes in the book: Whim, aspirations, upstream, responsiveness, kindling, true confessions (how Kindle refreshed Jacobs’ ability to read well again), lost (rapt), plastic attention, quiet please, serendip …

I’m a fan of essays and essayists, which means I’m a fan of Jacobs. One point he made I love: education kind of reading is not what we need to cultivate (and it’s one reason why many professors don’t write — it was a schooling kind of reading and writing that was mastered); what we need to cultivate is reading for pleasure, for the rapture it creates.

There’s a special kind of silence created by focused reading, and one can almost hear that kind of silence. How about you?