Slow Reading For Dummies
July 21, 2010
Have you heard there’s Slow Reading now, similar in spirit to Slow Food? Like foodies fed up with greasy beef patties in buns manufactured a thousand miles away, serious readers are worried about what the Internet is doing to our reading habits. I like online news, Twitter and blogs (obviously), but I also think Slow Reading is a great idea. I’m all in favor of lingering over a novel, the way I’m in favor of taking my time with a fillet of fresh, local salmon and a glass of cold chardonnay. In fact, I like to savor a thoughtful essay with a glass of good wine. (Is Slow Drinking next? Just wondering.)
According to a recent article by Patrick Kingsley in the Guardian, the first person to popularize the term “slow reading” was Lancelot R Fletcher, and Fletcher argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing a reader’s creativity, as uncovering the author’s. But why should you care about the author’s creativity unless it stokes yours?
An entry on Wikipedia gets this: slow reading is “the intentional reduction in the speed of reading, carried out to increase comprehension or pleasure.” Yes—slower reading will increase your pleasure. (Wikipedia then carries on with this sentence: “The concept appears to have originated in the study of philosophy and literature as a technique to more fully comprehend and appreciate a complex text. More recently, there has been increased interest in slow reading as result of the slow movement and its focus on decelerating the pace of modern life.” I mean, really, it’s wordy writing like that that fosters a longing for 140-word tweets. But, I digress.)
According to Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, the Internet is an ecosystem of interruption technologies. These ever-present sources of online distraction are changing the way our brains process information and hence the way we think and communicate. “When we’re constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking,” Carr says. Is this true? Is the Internet making us stupid and shallow?
Blogger Tracy Seeley, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, claims the Internet creates “monkey mind.” Her solution is to download the software Freedom, which blocks Internet access for whatever period of time the purchaser chooses. Seeley says the software frees her “from surfing and skittering across the surface of things, which eats up [her] time and makes confetti of [her] concentration.”
I can’t see myself spending more money on software to keep me from the internet access I already pay for.
So, my solution is simpler. Call it Slow Reading for Dummies, or the Idiot’s Guide to Deeper Comprehension of the Written Word: Walk away from the computer and pick up an old-fashioned book. You know, the kind made of paper, with pages you turn by hand. My environmentally-aware friends might grumble, but I figure I read responsibly—I never buy a book that seems a waste of a tree. Besides, if I read only on the internet, I’m probably wasting a good chunk of my mind.
For more on this (yeah, yeah, I know I’m pointing you to online reading but I never said I didn’t value online reading, okay?):
- The art of slow reading on the Guardian
- Tracey Seeley‘s monkey mind
- The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain
The pleasures of reading Alain de Botton
November 23, 2009
I’ve gone through several books by Alain de Botton over the past few years. I read The Architecture of Happiness on the strength of its beginning, which includes a passage on the inner workings of his own house, a house that, left on its own after the occupants have left, rearranges itself after the night by “clearing its pipes and cracking its joints”. Nice. On the whole, though, I was glad I took that book out of the library instead of buying it. Ditto How Proust Can Change Your Life. (The Consolations of Philosophy is still on my to-read list—in my defence, I have a very long to-read list.) I do have on my bookshelf The Art of Travel and Status Anxiety, and still occasionally refer to them. Right now I’m halfway through The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and I have to say I think this is de Botton’s best so far.
De Botton’s talent is to bring to our attention what seems ordinary, mundane, plain and even ridiculous and, in allowing a reader to see it deeply and thoughtfully through his eyes, bestow it some dignity. He displays this talent beautifully in Work.
Consider what he does in the first chapter, “Cargo Ship Spotting,” with a group of five men standing in the rain at the end of a pier: He likens their study of the progress of the cargo ship Grande Nigeria to that of ornithologists observing a Phylloscopus trochilus, he compares their concentration to that of a small child discovering a piece of chewing gum on a crowded sidewalk. The men’s dedication to their study, he argues, is deeper than that of many museum attendees who go through the motions of admiring a centuries-old nude but really are rather impatient for the cafeteria at the end of the hall.
These men, who may not be well-read or aware of 14th century Florentine art, are alive to some of the most astonishing aspects of our time: “They know what it is about our world that would detain a Martian or a child.”
That’s what de Botton knows. He also knows how to put it in language you want to savour. That’s his gift.
De Botton also introduces us to the world of an artist who paints for love, since money largely eludes him. This painter, de Botton says, knows what his art is for: “To help us to notice what we have already seen.” And the same can be said for de Botton’s work.
I live on the “wet coast” of British Columbia, and from the end of the sidewalk to my house, I have a narrow view of the ocean a block and a half away. Cargo ships, coming to or from Vancouver or Seattle, frequently pass through those waters, and I rarely pay them much attention. At least I haven’t in the past; I expect I’ll look at the next one I see in a different way.
