Sunday, December 5, 2010

WORLD OF LEARNING: MY REVIEW OF "THE LOST ART OF READING"

THE LOST ART OF READING: WHY BOOKS MATTER IN A DISTRACTED TIME. By David L. Ulin. Sasquatch Books, 2010. 151 pages.

In The Shallows, a book quoted from liberally in The Lost Art of Reading, Nicholas Carr notes the way that older technologies are changing because of digital computers. Newspapers and magazines feature shorter articles, more color, more graphics, pull quotes, navigational aids, summaries. "Crawls" and "flippers" clutter TV screens. DVD viewers jump into online conversations about scenes as they watch them. Tweets explain musical reference points to concertgoers who are encouraged to text message back.

It’s true, it’s true. But I’m not so sure about Carr’s take on libraries. Perhaps in the initial days of digital mania, their "most popular service" quickly became internet access. At my local library, there has been a steady increase in the number of internet stations, and they are heavily used. But unlike the old days, it’s not that hard to find one that’s open.

As more and more people carry along their own laptops, their own digital phones and pads everywhere they go, they could care less about using someone else’s. It might be true, as Carr says, that "the predominant sound in the modern library is the tapping of keys, not the turning of pages." But the primary reason people are going to my library is its stock in trade: books.

There’s no doubt that the way we read and even, perhaps, the amount of books we read, is changing. But fading out altogether? Maybe I’m myopic, but I don’t think so. There’s something you get from a book that you can’t get from any other medium.

Books by nature eliminate distractions, rather than multiplying them. They have what Ulin calls a "nearly magical power to transport us to other landscapes, other lives." Books demand total engagement, and that is why they have such paradoxical force. It’s rather odd that the quiet act of reading a book may be more interactive than looking at the most noisy and colorful web site. Instead of pulling us toward the next and then the next exciting image, they demand that we make our own images.

What is becoming harder, as Ulin notes, is finding the time and place for that total engagement. "Language is internal," he says. "And yet, what do we do in a culture where we are constantly invited to step out of the frame, to externalize imagination and to rethink how the process works?"

That is what The Lost Art of Reading is all about. It’s not an obituary at all, and Ulin is quite realistic about what is happening. He is not saying we have to adjust for new technology; as Nicholas Carr points out, the new technology has already adjusted us. Ulin is searching for a way we can incorporate the old, because we need it.

Beyond the attractions of books as "ripcords, escape hatches, portals out of…life," the deep reading they require engenders the deep thought that we have to do to face a forbidding future. The polarized debate that keeps us glued to screens just perpetuates confirmation bias. Resolving problems means focusing on them longer than a soundbite.

"If we frame every situation in terms of right and wrong," Ulin writes, "we never have to wrestle with complexity; if we define the world in narrow bands of black and white, we don’t have to parse out endless shades of gray." He effectively quotes Fitzgerald: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Books push us beyond our preconceptions.

Reading books, of course, is hardly a silver bullet, but Ulin makes an impassioned case for finding the space in our distractible culture for what has become, thanks to the book, an elemental part of our humanity.

Ulin doesn’t believe "that anything is lasting; all of it will be taken from us at the end. Chaos, entropy…the best that we can hope for are a few transcendent moments, in which we bridge the gap of our loneliness and come together with another human being. That is what reading has always meant to me and what, even more, it means to me now."

Highly recommended.

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