In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the
dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they
say, or reading the right books, in the right way.
In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers,
reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted
readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online
booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA
survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction.
Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own
books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder
whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with
due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical
message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the
intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such
people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and
much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so
without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of
the Bible. In contrast to the more
methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book
(1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully
irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one
aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the
book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading
responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices.
Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The
Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all
readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands
seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as
children.
