The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time [Hardcover]

For readers who care about where we're all going in this mad-media world of Internet highways and smart technology, this book is a necessary pit stop for refueling and refreshment.

Only 151 pages long, this totally chapterless work can be read in a sitting of three hours (as if it were one single, long paragraph), and it will not disappoint. The book is subtitled: Why Books Matter In a Distracted Time. One of the main and positive features of this work for me was the fact that the author, already a well-known critic for the "Los Angeles Times," confesses to a feeling lately (say, over the last two years) of being unable to concentrate and wonders, if it's not Alzheimer's or incipient old age, just what is happening to his brain. I completely identified with that situation and concern even though I, unlike the author, do not own a Blackberry or a Kindle. I am, just as the author describes himself-- as well as of nearly everyone today -- averse to tuning out the "buzz" that's on the Internet and in the media and am on the computer at work as well as at home.

David Ulin doesn't like to categorize books by way of fiction or non-fiction, personal or objective. He simply aims for and enjoys what is simply called "good writing." In this manner, the tale he unfolds here is both factual, literary, historical as well as personal, some vignettes touchingly involving his son, Noah. Suffice it to say Mr. Ulin has some trenchant observations to make not only about "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald but about Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" as well -- not to overlook the many writers he pulls up from the stream of words he so deftly pursues such that any reader will feel tempted to follow-up on those authors and works that are completely new to her or him.

Having covered a lot of ground that feels like "everything" that can be said about technology versus the book -- but actually isn't -- the author asserts that what reading good writing does for the reader -- unlike any other kind of technology -- is disconnect the reader from the harried noisy world of present storms and present crises and trivia and immerse her or him in a world transcending present time with others from previous ages, a world that facilitates empathy, blurring the boundaries between yourself and another, while allowing one's thoughts to gather some gravitas in the silence that follows from long bouts of concentration on the written word. He insists we need silence more than ever now. It's a kind of Wordsworthian plaint -- the world is too much with us. But he reminds us there's a solution: read good writing in the silence whenever you can.

One of the roads not undertaken in this multi-streamed river of a book full of consideration about the pros and cons of the traditional book versus electronic technology was audio book technology or the Read-to-Me feature available in many e-books -- and the cultural impact of a renewed orality about the printed word. Mr. Ulin evokes ideas about a "conversation that began in Mesopotamia ten thousand years ago," but seems to have forgotten Homer's oral impact in the process, concentrating on print and writing instead. While he tries to pluck the harp optimistically for the positive contributions of electronic media, Mr. Ulin, understandably in my opinion, argues finally to keep the art of reading books alive. I still want to know would his argument finally remain with books if he had considered the electronic orality of texts -- or paid any attention to them.

All in all, this was definitely a good read and a good piece of writing. It contains, as I've said, mentionings of writers and books I'm going to enjoy exploring further. I was so glad to find Mr. Ulin mention the writer Vardis Fisher, even if it was through a quotation by Frank Connor. As Mr. Ulin knows, good books have good writing and artfully put the reader in a "flow state" or trance from which she or he makes a self, and Vardis Fisher was just one of those writers for me. Mr. Ullin has, among others, Alexander Trocchi. Who? Read "The Lost Art of Reading" or read Trocchi's "Cain's Book." The point is -- read, in silence, good writing.

David Ulin expands an essay he had written on the status of reading in our world. He is correct, in that the electronic world is demanding. We tend to answer email and clear them away, e mails and messages of all sorts grow at an exponential rate. He also admits that literature does not have the influence it once did. So he muses on the place of reading and books today. Those of us that are unrepentant readers can identify with his descriptions of rooms of books, books as an escape, carrying them everywhere to read during waiting times.

He defines in many ways the purpose of books, the reading of them. There are other thoughts in here, musings on the 2008 elections, his son's assignment to read The Great Gatsby..
His thoughts on blogs, the internet, electronic comments and cyberspace and the change in books- e-books and I pods are included. He points out that kindle is private, no one can share the book unless you loan out your apparatus and not even you can stand in front of your book collection and peruse your titles. The new is not condemned, it just is not embraced wholeheartedly.

So join the revolution of the written page. This little book will make a great gift or a recollection to yourself of what reading is in this world. This book is a love poem to reading, books and the readers among us.

Here's a thoughtful, sometimes troubling essay about the pleasures of traditional reading, which seems to be in danger of being lost. Oh, there are still some who read actual books; but more & more, many prefer their reading material delivered digitally. And many ask, "Well, what's the difference? People are still reading, aren't they?"

David Ulin, while not entirely dismissing the digital out of hand, makes a very strong case that there is indeed a difference. Some of what he offers is factual, some of it anecdotal; but above all else, it's deeply personal, as he explains why reading in depth matters so much to him. And by extension, why it should matter equally as much to the rest of us.

What he's getting at here, it seems to me, is the notion of reading as a sort of sacred space, set apart from the demands & distractions of the everyday world. It's a space that's intensely private, a place of engagement between the reader & the written, where the individual mind (and perhaps soul) is shaped by the encounter with words, images & ideas. The book is presented as a separate world of its own, a construct made out of the writer's own life experience, education & psyche, into which the reader enters & is changed ... presumably for the better.

Here's where the doubts about the digital come in, as we consider just how many distractions are available to the online or plugged-in reader. We tell ourselves that we can multitask without any loss of focus or understanding -- we may even tell ourselves that we get more out of reading that way -- but the evidence for that seems to be lacking. A place apart from the everyday world is getting harder to find as the digital invades everything -- often quite willingly invited in, let's be honest! Yet it's in that place apart that we can truly become individuals, or at least the sort of people we once defined as civilized & reasonably whole human beings.

The true danger of the digital lies in its very ease & ubiquity, I would think. With everything so readily available, with the capacity to continuously leap from one thing to another in a second, anything of depth must necessarily be flattened out, presented as being of equal worth (or non-worth) as the most trivial factoid. It's almost the Gresham's Law of Reading: bad (or empty) content drives out good.

Is this a fair assessment, though? My own feeling is that it's all too accurate. Whether or not you agree, Ulin will make you think about what you read & how you read it. At the very least, you won't take reading for granted after you finish the last page of this worthy little book. Most highly recommended!