I remember being a kid and curling up on the couch with a book, with no intention to do anything but read that book for several hours at a time, and, crucially, no fear that I would be unable to do so. I took for granted a brain that could drop everything else and just move my eyes back and forth across a page pretty much forever.
Now I spend lots of time every day reading the internet, including some pretty in-depth stuff, white papers, etc. But, that is a whole different reading experience than I used to have. I am following hyperlinks and reading little sub-explanations for things before returning to the main text, I am opening up new tabs to look up words of which I want a fuller understanding, I am reading emails as they come in and responding swiftly before picking up where I left off, and, increasingly, I am asking LLMs (Large Language Models) to answer questions and provide context for what I am reading.
And, while I still consume quite a few books, I “read” those books almost exclusively by listening to the audiobook format, usually while simultaneously doing other things.
It is easy to blame being a parent and owning a home for my lack of focused attention to the act of reading paper books. Too easy, actually—it’ glib and facile.
When I try to place blame there, I am struck by the fact that, while listening to audio books, I can only really follow them if I have the speed set to 1.5x or higher. That’s not a humblebrag—If it were just me being too smart, if it were just about efficiency of listening time, then there’s no reason I should have *trouble following them* at a lower speed. But I do. My mind wanders, and I suddenly realize that I haven’t even heard what’s been playing for the last 30-60 seconds, so I have to back up and try again.
The same thing happens often (though thankfully not always) when I try to read actual paper books these days. My eyes pass over the words, but my mind wanders after a page or two, until I suddenly realize I’ve “read” a whole page but have no idea what happened, and I have to go back.
I have to sort of “click into” a reading zone. I have to slow my mind down and stick with the effort of focusing until suddenly my brain seems to remember the right speed to work at, and then I can read as I used to—but it can take a long time to find and I don’t always succeed!
Some of the attention given to this phenomenon was pandemic-driven—more people were trying to read than normal because they had more time, and people’s anxiety levels were higher, which interferes with focus and ability to sit still. But that’s not all of it. It started for me before the pandemic, and it hasn’t yet ended.
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I wonder if I will return to paper books when I’m older. I hope that I do. I used often to think of myself sitting beside a pond on acreage that I own, on a chair I made myself, and spending an entire day reading a book cover to cover, like I used to devour Great Brain books and Carry On Mr. Bowditch and Dickens and London and then Pohl and Asimov and Butler and Borges, all in one go, start to finish, as I might a fine meal.
Slowness is a quality of the old and the young. My son can spend ten seconds just deciding whether to laugh or cry. There is something comforting about the idea of also returning to the slowness of paper books as I age and time stretches, as it seems to. Perhaps I ought simply to be grateful now for the quality of modern audio books, which is amazingly high and quite available through your local library, I assure you.
But what if we are just different now? What if my inattention is not merely the product of raising an infant? What if the way I read the internet and the bombardment of my senses to a commercial maximum at every possible moment of my public life has altered my brain in a way that makes it impossible for me to return to that slowness?
Would that even be bad? I’m better informed now. The internet is a more efficient delivery mechanism for information than books are, for myriad reasons. It’s a better learning tool—the interactivity of Youtube alone is better than any set of skill-acquisition books could be. Even strictly in the realm of fiction, something like 17776 approaches a novel in complexity, and takes advantage of the internet’s unique structure to do something that’s never been done before.
So I want to say that it’s actually fine even if I just stick with sped-up audio books that sound like they’re being read by chipmunks. It’s fine if Reading A Book is not an undivided activity in my experience. It’s fine if things change, even if what’s changing is an art form that’s been around nearly a millennium and that I happen to love dearly just as it was.
Oh, to be Tom Wolfe. To be Hunter Thompson. To grow up in a world where there were serious magazines with big circulation that paid real money, where there were publishers you damn well knew were going to exist still when it was time to put a book out. There was lots about those times and those men that were awful, but what a privilege to just write and get as good as you can get and not even question whether your chosen form was viable. They wanted to change the novel, expand it, maybe they even wanted to save it. I don’t know who on the modern literary scene has the hubris to talk that way without a smirk and a giggle. I’m not sure anyone does.
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Those two things are connected. That is, a certain loss of confidence by the writing-industrial complex is connected to my inability to easily sit for long periods and read. A novel must to be valued. It is ambitious by nature, demanding as it does the investment of a large amount of time, even played aloud at 1.73x speed. You must take a chunk of your life and attention and give it all to one voice leading you through one story. You must value it.
In the internet age, all value exists in an exploding supernova of value. Humans are into the Zettabytes now—A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes of data, and humanity generated ~59 of those suckers in 2020. It’s not just that people are out of practice at focusing at the slow, steady pace required for serious reading, it’s a change of values. What book can be good enough that there’s not almost certainly something else better and more specific to you out there that you should be looking for?
Still, I hope I return to paper books in a serious way some day. I’ve given in for now, but I aspire to be the old guy hauling a hardback around when everybody else is getting told stories through their neural implants. I do value books that much, in my best self. And I love their slowness, the languorous trickle of stimulation they can produce on the mind.
When I was a kid, when I would get really into reading, I would do strange breathing patterns and vocalizations. Inside my head, I would hear two voices. One of them was whispering the text in a tiny, high-pitched drawl, and the other was bellowing it in bass tones, but from far enough away that the two voices were equal and balanced in volume.
Now that is a very strange state to be in! It was some weird self-soothing thing that I did, and I’m sure my parents thought it was so bizarre, but I would just get so tuned out and immersed in these books that I wasn’t fully aware of my body or what I was doing, only of the words flowing into me as fast as my eyes could move.
Self-soothing or not, weird or not, I don’t care, I want to get that stoked on reading books again one day. If a book can give that level of engagement and abandon to one person, it’s worth writing. I still refuse to get rid of my shelf of unread paper books, just because I like knowing that they’ll be there, waiting for me, whenever I’m ready.
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I prefer to read physical books (hardcover if possible, but paperback isn’t a dealbreaker). Audiobooks are great and reading online or with a tablet is fine too, but there’s something wonderful about holding a book in your hands.
As an educator and (Owen’s) parent, and now grandparent, I found this essay super interesting. I observed firsthand how much pleasure reading gave Owen as a child. I also observed the advantages in the classroom that my readers had over the non-readers. “Reading enjoyment has been reported as more important for children’s educational success than their family’s socio-economic status” (OECD, 2022). In the past ten years I have wondered (worried) whether future generations are going to be deprived of this simple and powerful pleasure.