Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University, 2011), 17:
For heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the “calories burned” readout—some assiduous and taxing exercise that allows you to look back on your conquest of Middlemarch with grim satisfaction. How depressing. This kind of thing is not reading at all.
AWESOME quote! One that I need to keep in mind when I begin my next batch of reading projects. I was beginning to feel the “grim satisfaction” that Alan wrote of.
Does your upcoming book deal with how to avoid the “calories burned” mentality in reading?
Thanks!
The Doug
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