I was scurrying along in the January gloom early the other morning when I noticed among the pedestrians a schoolgirl engrossed in the book she was reading as she walked. It lifted my heart. And then that afternoon, as I passed along the same street, I happened on a schoolboy doing the same thing as he walked home.
This time I had the nerve to address him. He smiled and said he’d been given the first chapter of the novel to read for homework, but it was so good he couldn’t stop.
Both of these children were 12 or 13, and I hope their ability to get lost in a good book stays with them despite the increasing temptations they will meet from other sources of information and entertainment.
It appears that our constant skimming of information as we scroll through our Twitter accounts and land for a few seconds here, a few minutes there, is affecting our ability to delve with any depth into written text, be it fact or fiction, not to mention our ability to retain much of what we read.
If that is a problem for those of us who are not digital natives, and who have to adjust our Neanderthal brains to handle the explosion of information we’re exposed to every day, what is happening to the brains of those who are accustomed, before they can even speak, to prodding at screens for new images every few seconds, or to those who are used to bouncing from one hyperlink to another? Will they ever be able to curl up with a good book for any length of time? One hears stories about university students who find it impossible to read the long, beautifully crafted sentences or complex syntax of writers such as Henry James or George Eliot.
David Mikics, an American literary scholar and author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age, says that how you read is much more important than how much you read. As a book lover and a naturally slow reader who doesn't manage to read half as much as many others, I find this very cheering.
Slow reading, says Mikics, is an active discipline that brings considerable cognitive and psychological rewards. Is it not worrying, though, that he has found a market for a book that teaches people how to read?
He is targeting those who are drowning in what he calls the “digital tsunami” of online information. He argues that old-fashioned reading is still essential because it teaches lessons about human identity that we can get nowhere else – certainly not by looking at a three-minute YouTube video.
If you are a skimmer and a scanner, fear not, help is at hand. The slow-reading movement, which I gather was inspired by the slow-food movement, is the latest reader-support phenomenon.
In Wellington, in New Zealand, there’s a slow-reading club where people gather in a peaceful environment to read uninterrupted and away from pinging devices. There are others in London, the US, Canada and Japan, and there’s a website: slowreadingco.com.
You can start your own. It could be at home, in a cosy bookshop or at a library. I’m hoping I still have the self-discipline to go it alone. I’ll start by turning off the phone and the tablet, pulling the curtains, closing the door, climbing into the bed, opening the book. Pure bliss.
Doireann Ní Bhriain is a voice coach
