Read more books. It’s a noble resolution for bibliophiles, but lately I’ve been contemplating the opposite. I hesitate to even write these words as they sound like reading heresy. But slow down and read on.
Envision yourself gulping a burger while you careen through traffic and ponder your upcoming meeting. (Ever happen? Are you enjoying that burger?) Now think of dining at a four-star restaurant with that same splash dash attention. The former is not necessarily healthy, but the latter is a culinary crime.
My reading style doesn’t always pay homage to the caliber of writing. Sometimes it’s about the sprint and other times just a gnat-like focus. For instance, “The Overstory,” is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel featured in an earlier blog post, and a lyrical, intricately woven story that deserves to be savored. I confess—I wolfed it down.
Yet one glance at the precarious skyscraper of books on my nightstand or my ever-expanding wish list, and I feel a pang of reading desire, melded with a dose of reality about the limits of time. That must only mean one thing: read more, faster. Right?
Then I recently came across, “Slow Reading in a Hurried Age.”
Like slow eating improves our dining experience, or slow medicine brings longer comfort, the concept of slow reading is designed to encourage more thoughtful engagement.
The book’s author David Mikics crystalizes the crux of the problem:
“Real reading of real books, reading designed to augment the reader’s creative strength, never loses its power. It is not subject to time the way that e-mail, Twitter and instant messaging are. Such reading demands time from you, in order to give you something that will last: knowing a book in a way that convinces you to come back to it over and over, so that you reap greater rewards the more time you spend with it.”
Since the 2013 publication of “Slow Reading in a Hurried Age,” I suspect that our penchant to do more faster has only accelerated, hampering our ability to absorb, retain, and sometimes even enjoy.
Mikics isn’t a modern-day Cassandra, instead he offers solutions to help us regain our reading sensibilities. The suggestions, outlined as fourteen “rules,” have abundant literary examples and pragmatic advice, the collective gist designed to help us savor.
The aim is not to turn pleasure-reading into work but by slowing down and improving our awareness, pleasure-reading remains reading pleasure.
A post on Literary Hub describes several similar techniques that professional readers use to ensure and enhance their leisure reading enjoyment.
Instead of using vacation escapes for fluff stuff, perhaps I’ll use that precious time to sink into a hefty tome. (After all, Lin Manuel-Miranda read “Alexander Hamilton” while lounging on a beach and look at the revolution that happened there.)
A consequence of the slowdown may be that I read less; but in trade-off, I hope that more often I will bask among perfect phrases; make notes; learn how to actually pronounce hitherto unknown words; reread a happy ending and smile twice; and maybe even retain an extra bit.
Mostly, I hope to remember that reading is not a contest—even with myself—and accept that I will never be able read everything that I long to read…unless that is, in the words of writer Jorge Luis Borges, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
