The past few weeks I’ve been reading a bit on reading! James Sire’s little treatise entitled How to Read Slowly: Reading for 
Comprehension1 is a tasty treat, as is Gene Veith’s Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature.2 The book I’m reading now is Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction3 which I’m finding both charming and challenging!
Comprehension1 is a tasty treat, as is Gene Veith’s Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature.2 The book I’m reading now is Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction3 which I’m finding both charming and challenging!
At one point in his larger case, speaking to the trouble of trying to “read noninstrumental texts in an instrumental way,”4 Jacobs points out how the best features of artful writing—i.e. language that’s “unusually vivid or lovely, or if its presentation of ideas or images is subtle and surprising”—can just be missed by our reading too quickly with the wrong goals in view. And as an example he points to Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
- Shaw Books, 2nd ed., 2000, 192 pp. ↩
- Crossway, redesign ed., 2013, 256 pp. ↩
- Oxford University Press, 2011, 176 pp. ↩
- That is, for example, trying “to read fiction or poetry or history or theology or even what the bookstores call ‘current events’ as quickly as possible and with the goal of accurate transference of data.” Pp. 73-74. ↩
Reading time: 5 min