Graham Ormiston

Melvyn Bragg on the dealing with depression and the part reading can play in healing. https://t.co/LGf0H1W0WW

“The point of books is to combat loneliness” — David Foster Wallace

reading class

Wolf’s concept of cognitive patience helps name a phenomenon central to the decline of meaningful discourse. We are not merely losing our capacity for deep reading, we are losing our tolerance for the conditions under which deep thought becomes possible.

Our phones and computers deliver unto each of us a personalized—or rather, algorithm-realized—distillation of headlines, anecdotes, jokes, and photographs. Even the ads we scroll past are not the same as our neighbor’s: a pair of boots has followed me from site to site for weeks. We call this endless, immaterial material a feed , though there’s... See more

Maryanne Wolf introduces a subtle but urgent concept into the discourse on reading: cognitive patience. It is, at heart, the willingness to linger in difficulty. The capacity to stay with a complex sentence, a knotty idea, a layered argument long enough for meaning to emerge.