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Library | Material Type | Item Barcode | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Richard A. Tucker Memorial Library | Hardback Book | 0118612350348 | 372.47 MIK | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Wrapped in the glow of the computer or phone screen, we cruise websites; we skim and skip. We glance for a brief moment at whatever catches our eye and then move on. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age reminds us of another mode of reading--the kind that requires our full attention and that has as its goal not the mere gathering of information but the deeper understanding that only good books can offer.
Slow Reading in a Hurried Age is a practical guide for anyone who yearns for a more meaningful and satisfying reading experience, and who wants to sharpen reading skills and improve concentration. David Mikics, a noted literary scholar, demonstrates exactly how the tried-and-true methods of slow reading can provide a more immersive, fulfilling experience. He begins with fourteen preliminary rules for slow reading and shows us how to apply them. The rules are followed by excursions into key genres, including short stories, novels, poems, plays, and essays.
Reading, Mikics says, should not be drudgery, and not mere escape either, but a way to live life at a higher pitch. A good book is a pathway to finding ourselves, by getting lost in the words and works of others.
Reviews (2)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Mikics here updates Charles Lamb's nineteenth-century protest against magazine-mongers pushing readers to pant and toil . . . at a sickening rate as they frantically cull facts from the latest publications and bid farewell to reading for its own sake. Like Lamb, Mikics understands how modern culture discourages reading for pleasure especially in an Internet world of short-lived but insistent information. Inviting readers into a less frenetic, more rewarding world, Mikics explores a series of literary masterpieces, showing how getting lost in a book is still the best way to find joys we really want. These joys, readers quickly realize, come more abundantly to those who follow the 14 rules Mikics expounds rules fostering patience in dealing with novels' tangled plots, canniness in interrogating dialogues in plays, perceptiveness in discerning poets' styles and themes, acumen in identifying constituent elements of short stories, and imagination in conceiving alternative constructions of those same elements. Readers acquire stimulating perspectives on individual works by Homer and Whitman, Dickens and Cather, Shakespeare and Chekov. But they also develop the intellectual poise to set one work into play with others, across boundaries of nationality, style, and history. An exceptional book whetting readers' appetites for the savoring of many more.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Although in the first two chapters of this book Mikics (Univ. of Houston) provides a poignant critique of how digital technologies have eroded contemporary reading habits, his overall condemnation of such distractions turns this into a nostalgic defense of books and book-based reading traditions. Many of his concerns regarding the value of slow, close, deep reading methods are thought provoking, but the either/or opposition he establishes between print and digital platforms prevents him from exploring ways to combine old and new habits. Consequently, the rest of this book variously resembles a love letter to book-based Western literature, notes for a first-year literature survey course, and a self-help manual for digital addictions. Mikics offers 14 rules for redeeming slow reading practices (e.g., "Be patient") and follows these with discussions of the particular nuances of short stories, novels, poetry, drama, and essays. Although Mikics tries to model, elevate, and preserve more rewarding reading practices, the ironies related to this attempt include preaching to distracted digital sinners in a 300-plus-page book that they will likely never read and promoting close, devoted reading while summarizing primary literary sources in ways that allow one to follow his lectures without ever encountering these sources directly. Not valuable for postsecondary use. Summing Up: Optional. General readers only. J. A. Saklofske Acadia University