The Lost Art of Reading (2010) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Quotes edit see section history

• “The key is to think about reading as a journey of discovery, an excavation of the inner world.”

  David L. Ulin (pp. 13)

• “It’s no coincidence that <Frank> Conroy ends his reverie on reading by admitting, “It was around this time that I first thought of becoming a writer. In a cheap novel the hero was asked his profession at a cocktail party. ‘I’m a novelist,’ he said, and I remember putting the book down and thinking, my God, what a beautiful thing to be able to say.” Yes, indeed, a beautiful thing: to enter into that conversation, not just to map the territory, but to participate in its creation as well.”

  David L. Ulin (pp. 15-16)

• “Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.”

  David L. Ulin (pp. 16)

• “Kurt Vonnegut once described literature as the only art in which the audience plays the score ...”

  David L. Ulin (pg. 16)

• “... I'm thinking more of literature as a voice of pure expression, a cry in the dark. Its futility is what makes it noble: nothing will come of this, no one will be saved, but it is worth your attention anyway.”

  David L. Ulin (pg. 25)

• “Over the years, I've met many of the writers whose work helped to transform me ... ... In almost every instance, it's been gripping, although event he best of these encounters has felt glancing when compared to the imminence, the interiority, of their books. Now, I take for granted that the real relationship is not with the writer but with the writing, that it's on the page where we find the deepest sympathies.”

  David L. Ulin (pg. 28)

• “... this is what language, at its most acute, can do. It can collapse the distances, bring us into not just the thoughts but also the perceptions of a writer, allow us, however fleetingly, to inhabit, literally, his or her eyes. ... This is what the postmodernists don't get, that if literature is a game, it is a game of serious consequences, in which we communicate across an irreconcilable divide. ... the tension, the balance, the sense of being somehow within the world and at the same time without it, the push-and-pull between writer and reader, the unlikely process by which literature works.”

  David L. Ulin (pg. 33)

• “We come to books (or, at least, I do) to see beneath the cover story, to be challenged and confounded, made to question our assumptions, even as the writers we read are compelled to question their own. ... Stories, after all--whether aesthetic or political--require sustained concentration; we need to approach them as one side of a conversation in which we also play a part. ... by not asking questions, by reacting rather than thiking, we allow ourselves to be susceptible to all manner of lies.”

  David L. Ulin (pg. 45)

• “Rereading can be a tricky process, in which, for better or worse, you're brought face-to-face with both the present and the past. It's different than reading, more layered, more nuanced, with implications about how we've changed. In her 2005 book "Rereadings", Anne Fadiman traces the distinction between reading and rereading: "The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was the ait contained the former: even while, as with the upper half of a set of bifocals, I saw the book through the complicating lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I'd read it."”

  David L. Ulin (pg. 51) and Anne Fadiman

• “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.”

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (from The Crack-Up) pg 67

• “...the most essential distinction between books and pictures, moving or otherwise--the way the former gets at the outside from the inside, while for the latter it's the other way around. Language is internal; it asks us to create our images, our movies, our realities from someone else's words. This is the source of its power, that it is interactive in the truest sense.”

• “The reader becomes the book. ... Reading is a form of self-identification that works, paradoxically, by encouraging us to identify with others, an abstract process that changes us in the most concrete of ways.”

  pg 102

• “When we talk about the death of the novel, what we are really talking about is the possibility that empathy, however minimal, would no longer be attainable by those for whom the novel has died. ... My guess is that mere technology will not kill the novel. ... But novels can be sidelined--dismissed to the seraglioo, where they are read by women and children and have no effect on those in power. When that happens, our society will be brutalized and coarsened by people who speak rather like us and look rather like us but who have no way of understanding us or each other.”

  Jane Smiley (from 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel) pg 102-3

• “The best books ... seem to grow along with us, allowing us to inhabit them in different ways at different times. "Stop-Time", "On the Road", "The Sound and the Fury", "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", "The Metamorphosis": I've read and reread these books, as a teenager and in my twenties, thirties, and forties, and each time I do, they illuminate something new for me, some new point of view or perspective, not just about the authors or their stories but about myself.”

  David L. Ulin (pg. 115)

• “Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn't involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was--and is--the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading.”

  Nicholas Carr (in The Shallows) pg 134

• “...when you wake up at 3 AM and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind. ... Hold it a few inches from your face with the words enlarged and the screen's brightness slider bar slid to its lowest setting, and read for ten or fifteen minutes ... After a while, your thoughts will drift off to the unused siding where the old tall weeds are, and the string of curving words will toot a mournful toot and pull ahead.”

  Baker (pg 136)

• “... all writing is (must be) changing to reflect the exigencies of the digital world.”

  David L. Ulin (pg. 137)

• “...the real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than my own. ...”

  Pat Conroy (pg 149)

• “... if e-books privatize the public elements of reading, then the physical library effectively does the reverse.”

  David L. Ulin (pg. 128)

• “As always, I am reading several books at a time--actually, several stacks. One is the stack of heirloom books by my bed... ... And then there is a virtual stack of e-books. ... In one way or another, I've been reading on a computer ever since it meant looking at green phosphor pixels against a black background. And I love the prospect of e-reading--the immediacy it offers, the increasing wealth of its resources. But I'm discovering, too, a hidden property in printed books, one of the reasons I will always prefer them. They do nothing.”

  Verlyn Klinkenborg (in "Editorial Notebook" piece in NY Times 4/15/2010) pg 130

• “In November 2009, Rick Moody ... published a story called "Some Contemporary Characters" in 153 increments on Twitter, one tweet per hour for nearly a week.”

  David L. Ulin (pg. 131)

• “Sophie is an open-source program designed to allow writers and other artists "to combine text, images, video, and sound quickly and simply, but with precision and sophistication." ... Imagine a text in which, rather than footnotes, hyperlinks take us to sources and other secondary material. Imagine that, instead of static images, we can embed video or audio directly in the work. Such a project would look like a book--designed, laid out in pages, linearly structured, to be read front to back--yet it would also incorporate the best of technological innovation, not for its own sake but in the service of the narrative. The catch, of course, is that it would not exist in print, but only digitally.”

  David L. Ulin (pg. 132)

• “Looking back, it is almost with a measure of relief-not that he was dead but that he was inaccessible- that there was no person to interfere with the idea of him I had built out of his books.”

  David L. Ulin

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being.

  Highlighted by 31 Kindle customers

• The key is to think about reading as a journey of discovery, an excavation of the inner world.

  Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers

• Reading, after all, is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage. It connects us at the deepest levels; it is slow, rather than fast. That is its beauty and its challenge: in a culture of instant information, it requires us to pace ourselves.

  Highlighted by 19 Kindle customers

• “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.”

  Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers

• to read, we need a certain kind of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. That seems increasingly elusive in our overnetworked society, where every buzz and rumor is instantly blogged and tweeted, and it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know.

  Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers

• And yet, reading is, by its nature, a strategy for displacement, for pulling back from the circumstances of the present and immersing in the textures of a different life.

  Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers

• How do things stick to us in a culture where information and ideas flare up so quickly that we have no time to assess one before another takes its place?

  Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers

• “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear,” Joan Didion notes in her essay “Why I Write,”

  Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers

• We live in an era when everyone wants to tell his or her story, but there is no real sense of what story means anymore.

  Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers

• The solution? “To cultivate unhurried activities and quiet places, sanctuaries in time and space for reflection and contemplation.”

  Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers

First Sentence edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• informational environmentalism: Coined by David Levy. "Just as we fight to save marshlands and old-growth forests from development and pollution, ... so we need to fight to save ourselves from the 'pollutants' of communications overload: the overabundance of information that turns us into triagers and managers, rather than readers; the proliferation of bad or useless ersatz information; the forces that push us to process quickly rather than thoughtfully."

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. David L. Ulin (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Z1003 U45 2010
• Dewey: 028.9

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Books & Reading