I started reading Alan Jacob’s latest, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press), and I’m having trouble putting it down.
Trevor Logan has a nice summary of the book at First Things:
It seems a rare accomplishment that a book on the pleasures of reading could actually pull off being pleasurable itself. But Alan Jacobs’ newest book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, does just that. It is a marvelous manifesto of sanity in an age of jeremiads about the modern predicament of attention loss on one hand, and those proud champions of distraction singing the hallelujah chorus of a world devoid of long-form books on the other. “Read at Whim” is Jacob’s advice and motto for a new generation of readers. Read, Jacobs proclaims, for the sheer pleasure of reading; simply for the [heck] of it. And by all means, don’t get bogged down by the authoritarians who smugly look down their noses at those who aren’t reading the “right” books on the “list.”
Jacobs enlists the wisdom of the great readers for pleasure, from the frolicking G.K. Chesterton to the jocular David Foster Wallace, in his defense of not reading to impress others, but for the sheer joy of losing oneself in another world within the world and thereby becoming more and more a whole self. Jacobs rallies against the “lists” of books proffered by many an intellectual whose methods seem to inhibit the pleasures of reading instead of evoking desire for new worlds and new eyes.
There are those who “read to read” and those who “read to have read.” It is Jacobs’ desire to give hope to those who have been burnt out by the latter, and to encourage the lost souls’ journey into the former.
You can read the whole review here.
