The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nicholas Carr: “The problem today is not that we multitask. We’ve always multitasked. The problem is that we’re always in multitasking mode. The natural busyness of our lives is being amplified by the networked gadgets that constantly send us messages and alerts, bombard us with other bits of important and trivial information, and generally interru

Fitzgerald’s tender recollection of being “approved of by everyone” may be found in her essay “Why I Write,” which is included in the collection of her occasional prose A House of Air (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009 [2003]).

Many of us form profound attachments when we read. Sometimes we attach ourselves to characters, imagining them as our friends or lovers or most profound enemies; sometimes a book’s author draws us, perhaps because of a persona he or she projects, perhaps—especially if we are writers or would-be writers ourselves—because we admire and envy.

Sir Francis Bacon—it comes from his essay “Of Studies”—concerns the reading of books: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

CommentPress allows readers to comment on a whole book, on a chapter of that book, on a paragraph in that chapter, and, of course, on other comments. It requires a little more thought to participate in a CommentPress conversation than to fire off a reply to a blog post, but that’s probably a good thing: the time it takes to think about whether what

“For the reader there are three lessons taught by humility that are particularly important: First, that he hold no knowledge or writing whatsoever in contempt. Second, that he not blush to learn from any man. Third, that when he has attained learning himself, he not look down upon anyone else.”

Peter Norvig was quoted on the coexistence of concentrating and skimming in an article by Nate Anderson on the Ars Technica website with the unfortunate title “Sorry, English Major, the Engineers Have Triumphed”: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/sorry-english-major-the-engineers-have-triumphed.ars.

rereading a book can often be a more significant, dramatic, and, yes, new experience than encountering an unfamiliar work.