The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

And so, belatedly, haltingly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education. I wasn’t sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or how long it might take to complete (forever, I had an inkling), but for once those weren’t my first concerns. Alone in my room, congested and exhausted, I forgot my obs

book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It’s asking us to stop calculating. It’s asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (lik

So this is what I say to my petitioners: for heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the “calories burned”

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]).

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African was published in 1789

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

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

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.

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