Fantastic piece that resonates very deeply with me. It feels like there is a fundamental tension between modern life and the quiet contemplation that comes along with deeply engaging in great books.
Over the last several years, I've made a concerted effort to minimize distraction as much as possible, but it's something I need to constantly fight against. There are always notifications buzzing, new shows on Netflix, and tweets or Instagram posts that my friends text me, each trying to grab hold of my attention. I've taken to blocking as much functionality of my phone as I can, disabling all social media apps and preventing myself from download any new apps. It has worked fairly well, but I can't help but feel that my attention is still more fractured than I would like it to be.
Hi Carl---excellent post! As an addendum, this opinion piece by Seth Bruggeman, a public history professor at Temple University in Philadelphia is very much worth the time--about halfway through (after addressing the issues of rampant academic dishonesty) he says this:
"By far, though, the most striking and maybe most troubling lesson I gathered during our unconference was this: Students do not know how to read. Technically they can understand printed text, and surely more than a few can do better than that. But the Path A students confirmed my sense that most if not a majority of my students were unable to reliably discern key concepts and big-picture meaning from, say, a 20-page essay written for an educated though nonspecialist audience."
Great piece. I think we introverts love deep reading because we get to dwell in the comfort zone (mostly!) of our heads. Very timely for me as I was catching up on the excellent series of Planet Word talks about reading on YouTube yesterday and caught Maryanne Wolf's spirited (!) presentation. https://youtu.be/1wfiPTs_rV0?si=pjAserVHPAlXSUlT
I have a seventh grade student who addressed this question earlier this school year. For whatever undiagnosed but observable pattern, she requires a lot of time to read text, like three times as long as her peers. Her higher order thinking around the text is quite advanced and is a close observer and contributor to socratic discussions. I asked her to try audio books and she can't stand them, there is no space for thought. I have the same problem and subscribe to "the author is dead" idea. Audio books don't work except as an introduction to a chapter I want to later deep read. Podcasts work, but I often screenshot to time stamp moments where I have flurries of thought I want to unpack. Reading for my student, is engaging in the long conversation, with the author and with oneself.
I think you are painting with too broad a brush. I love audiobooks because I can listen to them while I'm doing something else. They also keep me focused while I find it way too easy to wander off when reading a physical book. The books I read are mostly about economics and history and because I find the topics so interesting, I can't help myself from taking notes when something interesting comes up. Im usually doing the dishes or eating or doing laundry etc so I just pause the book and take my notes on my phone then unpause. I cannot vouch for audiobooks when reading fiction though. I read the whole mistborn saga in a couple of days and barely remember anything though maybe I just don't like fiction as much. I try to pick a speed in between my maximum and my minimum which is usually around 1.85x. This allows my mind to wander fairly frequently making connections to other things I have learned and forming new ideas while (most of the time) not missing a beat because I can just replay whatever I missed in my head while I was thinking. One thing is for sure, I would absolutely not have been able to read the 20 something books I read in the last year if not for audiobooks and on net I am sure I would have been dumber as a result.
I do too, love audiobooks, and use them for the kind of reading that is about surveying or sifting for ideas. I see yo have a work around which is critical, stopping the stream and "enacting" with the text. I drive, a lot, back and forth between work site and capital city, and listen to things constantly. I use the screenshot and return to things for a more careful reflection. So I use your method, and that is what I would like the students to learn as well, how to stop and parse the parts of the text that spark thought. Also, there is a threshold to cognitive load, like watching too much TV as a kid, it creates a passive numbness where things afterward are familiar in a vibe kind of way, but lead to very little articulation of thought. Unplug from TV for too long and when I try to watch it for an hour it is totally exhausting, the mind keeps trying to insert thought and reflection, but the stream won't allow it. This kind of digital/media literacy is what I believe we have to teach, not just turn off the devices, but learn how powerful their influence is on our thinking, and in turn, learn how to control them for our own mindful purposes. It's complex and I don't think there is a binary debate, it is more a question where we are on the spectrum of digital/media literacy.
The "wandering off" in thought, and the need to take notes of secondary thoughts generated from the text, are aspects of deep reading that are best served with physical books, and sometimes impossible with any other mode.
"I can just replay whatever I missed in my head while I was thinking." With a physical book, it's always right there for you. The reading speed automatically and continuously adjusts to your processing.
Very interesting. I too have found that audiobooks are a mixed blessing. On the occasion I am driving for hours they can be stimulating, but you're right - I have to stop and listen in chunks because it can be overwhelming. This happened specifically while listening to H.G. Wells book "History of the World". I loved the narrators voice bringing a long ago forgotten way of expressing thought to life, but the depth of what was being said needed to be consumed in small bites. Eventually I bought the book so I could "rewind" to the parts I wanted to consider more deeply.
Yeah, I think I know what you mean. For previewing juvenile fiction, a Hunger Games for example, audio is amazing. For news, especially well packaged audio, The Economist or The New Yorker, it is highly stimulating. It is when I get to something dense, Dewey's Art as Experience, that my cognitive load breaks down. Sometimes I'll just listen to the same chapter multiple times on a drive surfing through the concepts, screenshotting critical points. That kind of text requires a deeper reflection, parsing text into a workspace, interacting with it, before I can construct my own meaning for it.
Like the other commentors in this thread I am a devoted reader. Unlike most of the other commentors I was not a natural reader. I loved books from before I can remember, but I was always behind my classmates when actually reading. It was a long, slow (but in no way unpleasant) time before I could read the books that I wanted to. I had good teachers and parents who read to me, but in the 80s "dyslexia" was a pretty new idea. I also remember that general literacy in a population is also a recent phenomenon. The nature of thinking changed when the ability to read became commonplace, the nature of thinking is changing again and I am curious about what a "deep thinking" person will be like in a hundred years.
When people ask why I’m moving my content here, I often struggle to articulate my reasons. In short, it is because I feel the need to practice reading and writing in long form–and I don’t think I’m alone. You've expressed my thoughts beautifully. I hope to become just as clear and eloquent in my explanation after spending more time here, digesting and producing more unprocessed writing.
Unfortunately, Substack, as all other social-media-types of platforms does not help. Due to its digital format, intensive reading of long texts is not conducive and shorter texts are preferred format.
I notice the palpable difference between dopamine hits on Substacks and ploughing through a book. The medium is the message.
But I do benefit from new ideas and reading suggestions on Substack.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece. I’ve been an avid reader since preschool (hyperlexia) and my educator parents encouraged me to read as much and widely as I wanted growing up. I read daily to my kiddo when she was young, and in 3rd grade she developed her own “reading wings” and has had her nose in one book or another ever since. She attended a mixture of private and public schools until 8th grade when we decided to homeschool to help her prepare for high school (the deficits from 5-7th grade instruction are tldr;), as she was going into high school the pandemic hit and we ended up doing an accredited high school distance learning program that encouraged reading and thinking critically about whole books. The contrast between her ability/attitude toward reading and that of her peers is shocking…she’s reading and writing at a college/graduate school level now and hoping to attend college abroad. I think one of the contributing factors to her love of and proficiency in deep reading is that we had a “no screens” rule until she was about 8 years old, we introduced movies and tv shows gradually and she did not start using computers until 6th grade, didn’t have a smartphone until 8th grade. It really is unnecessary and damaging to introduce screens early on to kids before they have developed their reading and writing skills using analog methods. Lest you think we’re Luddites, she is quite tech savvy now at 19 and I pay her consulting fees to help me with tech issues in my business, and she plans to study astrophysics in college. She also is able to understand complex political and social issues that many people three times her age can’t get. I credit this to A LOT of deep reading and also discussions we’ve had about what she’s reading. It’s a lot of work for parents, but totally worth it.
I did it. I read to the end so I could thank you and myself. It is all true and yet I wonder if it is also a lament. Times change and people with them, so what we have now is different to when you read Faulkner and I Tolstoy, not the same. It can't be. There are benefits to lateral and to balance.
I agree with this essay that it is a shame that young people, being trained on social media and web surfing, cannot enjoy interesting, challenging texts. In the end, this will probably be the end of literature. However, let me pose another hypothesis: that this will be the end not of literature, but of a period that began about a hundred years ago, where difficulty in literature began to be fetishized for various reasons (the shock of the new, universities, subjectivity). Before that period, writers were not expected to baffle us. Keats does not baffle me, for instance, like Faulkner does, or pretty much any published poet does nowadays. And maybe after this period, starting now, they will not be expected to baffle us. Just yesterday I read a sonnet on substack that I understood after two quick reads: https://substack.com/home/post/p-161558504. It is a good poem, with plenty to think about--and yet, it is relatively easy to read. What's the problem with that? If literature has a chance, and realistically it doesn't have much of one, it will be with writers like this.
The Faulkner reference and description, right on, and the later Faulkner quote. Explaining what the long conversation is, how reading one book is to read all books, and how "the author is dead", how our constructions around reading are the main event.
I struggle with the binary, that the future of reading must be non-digital. As an educator working in a remote area, we have to embrace the digital. Even though all my students would prefer physical books, they are learning how to control their digital spaces, and learning the affordances of parsing text, enacting with it, comparing across literary works, and incorporating audio discussions of text transcribed into written reflections, to then revise and re-articulate. They still write analysis in physical notebooks for everything, but we try to blend the oral, analogue, and digital.
I worry about the separation of the digital and physical, that we sort of leave young people even more victim to manipulative algorithms without them even understanding what agency they have against them.
Fantastic piece that resonates very deeply with me. It feels like there is a fundamental tension between modern life and the quiet contemplation that comes along with deeply engaging in great books.
Over the last several years, I've made a concerted effort to minimize distraction as much as possible, but it's something I need to constantly fight against. There are always notifications buzzing, new shows on Netflix, and tweets or Instagram posts that my friends text me, each trying to grab hold of my attention. I've taken to blocking as much functionality of my phone as I can, disabling all social media apps and preventing myself from download any new apps. It has worked fairly well, but I can't help but feel that my attention is still more fractured than I would like it to be.
Hi Carl---excellent post! As an addendum, this opinion piece by Seth Bruggeman, a public history professor at Temple University in Philadelphia is very much worth the time--about halfway through (after addressing the issues of rampant academic dishonesty) he says this:
"By far, though, the most striking and maybe most troubling lesson I gathered during our unconference was this: Students do not know how to read. Technically they can understand printed text, and surely more than a few can do better than that. But the Path A students confirmed my sense that most if not a majority of my students were unable to reliably discern key concepts and big-picture meaning from, say, a 20-page essay written for an educated though nonspecialist audience."
https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/01/14/crisis-trust-classroom-opinion#
Great piece. I think we introverts love deep reading because we get to dwell in the comfort zone (mostly!) of our heads. Very timely for me as I was catching up on the excellent series of Planet Word talks about reading on YouTube yesterday and caught Maryanne Wolf's spirited (!) presentation. https://youtu.be/1wfiPTs_rV0?si=pjAserVHPAlXSUlT
Ah. I was just thinking about this. My spin is here: https://open.substack.com/pub/mdcbowen/p/word-speed?r=7br8e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Excellent synthesis of the current state of affairs
I’m curious about how audiobooks fit in to this. I love listening but do wonder if focus is improved from reading with your eyes
I have a seventh grade student who addressed this question earlier this school year. For whatever undiagnosed but observable pattern, she requires a lot of time to read text, like three times as long as her peers. Her higher order thinking around the text is quite advanced and is a close observer and contributor to socratic discussions. I asked her to try audio books and she can't stand them, there is no space for thought. I have the same problem and subscribe to "the author is dead" idea. Audio books don't work except as an introduction to a chapter I want to later deep read. Podcasts work, but I often screenshot to time stamp moments where I have flurries of thought I want to unpack. Reading for my student, is engaging in the long conversation, with the author and with oneself.
I think you are painting with too broad a brush. I love audiobooks because I can listen to them while I'm doing something else. They also keep me focused while I find it way too easy to wander off when reading a physical book. The books I read are mostly about economics and history and because I find the topics so interesting, I can't help myself from taking notes when something interesting comes up. Im usually doing the dishes or eating or doing laundry etc so I just pause the book and take my notes on my phone then unpause. I cannot vouch for audiobooks when reading fiction though. I read the whole mistborn saga in a couple of days and barely remember anything though maybe I just don't like fiction as much. I try to pick a speed in between my maximum and my minimum which is usually around 1.85x. This allows my mind to wander fairly frequently making connections to other things I have learned and forming new ideas while (most of the time) not missing a beat because I can just replay whatever I missed in my head while I was thinking. One thing is for sure, I would absolutely not have been able to read the 20 something books I read in the last year if not for audiobooks and on net I am sure I would have been dumber as a result.
I do too, love audiobooks, and use them for the kind of reading that is about surveying or sifting for ideas. I see yo have a work around which is critical, stopping the stream and "enacting" with the text. I drive, a lot, back and forth between work site and capital city, and listen to things constantly. I use the screenshot and return to things for a more careful reflection. So I use your method, and that is what I would like the students to learn as well, how to stop and parse the parts of the text that spark thought. Also, there is a threshold to cognitive load, like watching too much TV as a kid, it creates a passive numbness where things afterward are familiar in a vibe kind of way, but lead to very little articulation of thought. Unplug from TV for too long and when I try to watch it for an hour it is totally exhausting, the mind keeps trying to insert thought and reflection, but the stream won't allow it. This kind of digital/media literacy is what I believe we have to teach, not just turn off the devices, but learn how powerful their influence is on our thinking, and in turn, learn how to control them for our own mindful purposes. It's complex and I don't think there is a binary debate, it is more a question where we are on the spectrum of digital/media literacy.
The "wandering off" in thought, and the need to take notes of secondary thoughts generated from the text, are aspects of deep reading that are best served with physical books, and sometimes impossible with any other mode.
"I can just replay whatever I missed in my head while I was thinking." With a physical book, it's always right there for you. The reading speed automatically and continuously adjusts to your processing.
Very interesting. I too have found that audiobooks are a mixed blessing. On the occasion I am driving for hours they can be stimulating, but you're right - I have to stop and listen in chunks because it can be overwhelming. This happened specifically while listening to H.G. Wells book "History of the World". I loved the narrators voice bringing a long ago forgotten way of expressing thought to life, but the depth of what was being said needed to be consumed in small bites. Eventually I bought the book so I could "rewind" to the parts I wanted to consider more deeply.
Yeah, I think I know what you mean. For previewing juvenile fiction, a Hunger Games for example, audio is amazing. For news, especially well packaged audio, The Economist or The New Yorker, it is highly stimulating. It is when I get to something dense, Dewey's Art as Experience, that my cognitive load breaks down. Sometimes I'll just listen to the same chapter multiple times on a drive surfing through the concepts, screenshotting critical points. That kind of text requires a deeper reflection, parsing text into a workspace, interacting with it, before I can construct my own meaning for it.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment.
Like the other commentors in this thread I am a devoted reader. Unlike most of the other commentors I was not a natural reader. I loved books from before I can remember, but I was always behind my classmates when actually reading. It was a long, slow (but in no way unpleasant) time before I could read the books that I wanted to. I had good teachers and parents who read to me, but in the 80s "dyslexia" was a pretty new idea. I also remember that general literacy in a population is also a recent phenomenon. The nature of thinking changed when the ability to read became commonplace, the nature of thinking is changing again and I am curious about what a "deep thinking" person will be like in a hundred years.
Also - I loved the essay! A thought provoking look at what it means when we talk about both reading and thinking.
Great piece - thank you
Superb
Great, how can get a copy? Thanks
Sorry my email ie, bobpris12@gmail.com. Bob Sawyer
Sorry, a copy of what?
The report that you did about reading
When people ask why I’m moving my content here, I often struggle to articulate my reasons. In short, it is because I feel the need to practice reading and writing in long form–and I don’t think I’m alone. You've expressed my thoughts beautifully. I hope to become just as clear and eloquent in my explanation after spending more time here, digesting and producing more unprocessed writing.
Unfortunately, Substack, as all other social-media-types of platforms does not help. Due to its digital format, intensive reading of long texts is not conducive and shorter texts are preferred format.
I notice the palpable difference between dopamine hits on Substacks and ploughing through a book. The medium is the message.
But I do benefit from new ideas and reading suggestions on Substack.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece. I’ve been an avid reader since preschool (hyperlexia) and my educator parents encouraged me to read as much and widely as I wanted growing up. I read daily to my kiddo when she was young, and in 3rd grade she developed her own “reading wings” and has had her nose in one book or another ever since. She attended a mixture of private and public schools until 8th grade when we decided to homeschool to help her prepare for high school (the deficits from 5-7th grade instruction are tldr;), as she was going into high school the pandemic hit and we ended up doing an accredited high school distance learning program that encouraged reading and thinking critically about whole books. The contrast between her ability/attitude toward reading and that of her peers is shocking…she’s reading and writing at a college/graduate school level now and hoping to attend college abroad. I think one of the contributing factors to her love of and proficiency in deep reading is that we had a “no screens” rule until she was about 8 years old, we introduced movies and tv shows gradually and she did not start using computers until 6th grade, didn’t have a smartphone until 8th grade. It really is unnecessary and damaging to introduce screens early on to kids before they have developed their reading and writing skills using analog methods. Lest you think we’re Luddites, she is quite tech savvy now at 19 and I pay her consulting fees to help me with tech issues in my business, and she plans to study astrophysics in college. She also is able to understand complex political and social issues that many people three times her age can’t get. I credit this to A LOT of deep reading and also discussions we’ve had about what she’s reading. It’s a lot of work for parents, but totally worth it.
I did it. I read to the end so I could thank you and myself. It is all true and yet I wonder if it is also a lament. Times change and people with them, so what we have now is different to when you read Faulkner and I Tolstoy, not the same. It can't be. There are benefits to lateral and to balance.
Great piece.
I agree with this essay that it is a shame that young people, being trained on social media and web surfing, cannot enjoy interesting, challenging texts. In the end, this will probably be the end of literature. However, let me pose another hypothesis: that this will be the end not of literature, but of a period that began about a hundred years ago, where difficulty in literature began to be fetishized for various reasons (the shock of the new, universities, subjectivity). Before that period, writers were not expected to baffle us. Keats does not baffle me, for instance, like Faulkner does, or pretty much any published poet does nowadays. And maybe after this period, starting now, they will not be expected to baffle us. Just yesterday I read a sonnet on substack that I understood after two quick reads: https://substack.com/home/post/p-161558504. It is a good poem, with plenty to think about--and yet, it is relatively easy to read. What's the problem with that? If literature has a chance, and realistically it doesn't have much of one, it will be with writers like this.
Yes!
No!
The Faulkner reference and description, right on, and the later Faulkner quote. Explaining what the long conversation is, how reading one book is to read all books, and how "the author is dead", how our constructions around reading are the main event.
I struggle with the binary, that the future of reading must be non-digital. As an educator working in a remote area, we have to embrace the digital. Even though all my students would prefer physical books, they are learning how to control their digital spaces, and learning the affordances of parsing text, enacting with it, comparing across literary works, and incorporating audio discussions of text transcribed into written reflections, to then revise and re-articulate. They still write analysis in physical notebooks for everything, but we try to blend the oral, analogue, and digital.
I worry about the separation of the digital and physical, that we sort of leave young people even more victim to manipulative algorithms without them even understanding what agency they have against them.
Agreed. Technology can be reclaimed as a tool by students.