Read Any Good Books Lately? Or Any Books At All?

by David Safier

A year or two ago, Kevin Drum, one of my go-to bloggers (Poltical Animal at Washington Monthly), said he was finding it harder to sit down and read a book. His concentration wasn’t what it used to be. I had experienced the same thing myself but hadn’t been aware of it until he mentioned it. I filed the thought away for later.

Now is the “later” I was waiting for. Leonard Pitts’ column in this morning’s Star talked about his having the same problem settling down with a good book.

You’re talking to a fellow whose idea of fun has always been to retire to a quiet corner with a thick newspaper or a thicker book and disappear inside. But that has become progressively harder to do in recent years. More and more, I have to do my reading in short bursts; anything longer and I start drowsing over the page even though I’m not sleepy, or fidgeting about checking e-mail, visiting that favorite Web site, even though I checked the one and visited the other just minutes ago.

He refers to the article in The Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, which discusses our diminishing literary attention span in greater detail. It’s an interesting article, but to be honest, I only skimmed it, ’cause it’s kinda long (he said, self-deprecatingly).

As a retired English teacher and lifelong reader, my long time conditioning should make me immune to these newfangled changes in reading habits. Hell, I have more time than I’ve had in decades. I should be devouring a book or two a week. But I’m not. And like Pitts, when I’m reading a book, I find myself wondering who emailed me recently or what my favorite blogger wrote in the past 15 minutes.

Sustained reading is an exercise in tunnel-mindedness. The rest of the world stops turning as you immerse yourself in the world on the page in front of you. If you start thinking about what’s for dinner, you have to stop,take a breath and go back two paragraphs to get yourself into the literary flow again.

We live in a 24/7 world. It’s more probably a 1440/24/7 world, since the internet has allowed us to track current events and email communications on a minute-by-minute basis. That makes it hard to spend two unbroken hours living in Tolstoy’s world, or even in a book-length analysis of our current quagmire in Iraq. We want our information in bite-sized chunks.

I’m neither a harrumpher nor a Luddite, so this isn’t an “ain’t it awful!” post. It’s an observation about a significant change in the way many of us relate to the written word.

As an educator, I have to ask myself, if someone like me has trouble sustaining interest in a book over long periods of time, what about young people who were born into this interconnected world and walk down the street with iPod buds in their ears while texting on their cell phones? If the rhythms of reading have changed significantly, what does that mean about the way we should deal with reading in schools? I’m thinking less about the teaching of reading in the early grades than the reading assignments from, say the fourth grade on through high school, and even through college. Is our traditional system of “book larnin'” becoming as antiquated as monks sitting on rickety stools copying the Bible in the age of the printing press?

Note: To lessen my guilt about writing this “the book is dead” post, I bring you the next post about a new Progressive Book Club. There, I feel better now.