The Lost Art of Reading?

By Dave Boehi

The article by David L. Ulin of the Los Angeles Times begins with a familiar complaint: “Sometime late last year—I don't remember when, exactly—I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read.”

I’ve read this lament fairly often over the last year.  In The Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr wrote:

Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Ulin and Carr are part of a growing number of writers, researchers, and thinkers who are looking at the way our Google/Facebook/Twitter culture and asking some important questions like, “How is this affecting us?” and “Is all this good for us?”  While the Internet offers many wonderful benefits to our lives, it’s important to consider how our preoccupation with media, the web, and social media is changing the way we interact and communicate and even think. 

For obvious reasons, I’ve been particularly interested in how our reading habits are changing.  A huge shift is occurring in the way we gather and process information. 

In one sense, this is just the latest twist in a story that has been growing for nearly a century.  It seems that each new media invention—movies, radio, television, VCRs and DVDs, the Internet—inevitably affects the way people read and reduces the time they devote to it.  What feels different about recent trends is that the Web is still so new, and it is evolving so quickly that few people are stepping back to look at how it is changing us.

In his Los Angeles Times article, “The Lost Art of Reading, Ulin says: 

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves … In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.  Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know.”

At the end Ulin concludes that reading is “harder than it used to be, but still, I read.”  Then I noticed the italicized biographical information on the next line:  “Ulin is book editor of The Times.” 

This guy reviews books for his job, and he still finds it difficult to force himself to be quiet long enough to do read them?  If he has trouble, what does that mean for the rest of us?

I suspect we are becoming a society of people who rarely allow themselves to slow down enough to think and contemplate.  It’s difficult to spend time reading a book—or, more important, reading God’s Word—when there are so many other distractions calling for your attention.  And when you spend so much time with those distractions that you grow impatient and fidgety after only a few minutes of quiet.

It requires a strong will to force yourself to read something longer than a few hundred words.  It requires discipline to study and apply the Scriptures, to talk with God.  I suspect that in the coming years, many will come to realize that, without this quiet time, they will feel increasingly empty.