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Vendor
Fletcher Agency
Melissa Chinchillo
Original language
English

THE PLEASURES OF READING IN AGE OF DISTRACTION

In "the digital age," most of us have grown ever more distracted and leisurely long-form reading often feels unfamiliar and even unnatural. People tend to assume that the digital age is the enemy of real reading. And further, that the catastrophe of people reading less and less is inevitable.

In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading. People 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. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. 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.


About the Author

Alan Jacobs is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University. Before that, he taught for many years at Wheaton College in Illinois. He writes for publications like The Atlantic, Harper’s, First Things, Books & Culture, the Christian Century, and the Wall Street Journal, and maintains a blog at the New Atlantis.