Coming Soon – “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction”

As I was thumbing through the newest catalog from Oxford University Press a title caught my eye–The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs. 

I read the catalog description and I was hooked.  Here’s what it says:

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.

I remember when I was just a small boy someone told my mother that if I wanted to read comic books to let me read them. It was from that, he told her, that I would learn that reading could be fun.  Well, I wasn’t a big fan of comics but I remember the first book I read which did it for me–The Valachi Papers by Peter Maas!  I know–go figure.  I don’t remember many details from the book except that it was a fun read (this was over 35 years ago).  After that I read everything I could get my hands on.  I then discovered that Christians wrote books–lots of them.  It was a little taste of heaven. It still is. 

 Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. His books include The Narnian, a biography of C.S. Lewis, Original Sin: A Cultural History, and a Theology of Reading. His literary and cultural criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, The American Scholar, and the Oxford American.

Watch for it this April/May.