Slow reading in fast times

The novelist Gary Shteyngart, interviewed this week on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air," was asked about writing books in the age of tweets and text messages.

"I feel like I'm insane to write novels," he said. "I'm like one of those, you know, those last Japanese soldiers on one of those islands who's like hiding in a cave and still shooting at the Americans who are advancing, and he still hasn't heard that the emperor has surrendered."

Shteyngart's new novel, "Super Sad True Love Story," is a funny and foreboding satire of a near-future world consumed by technology and security. In his dystopian vision, most people no longer read "bound, printed, nonstreaming media artifacts," they only scan them on computer screens. It's a future that Shteyngart fears is already coming true.

"How is literature supposed to survive when our brain has been pummeled with information, sliced and diced with it all day long at work, if we're white-collar workers? We go home. Are we really going to open a thick text with 350 pages and try to waddle through it?"

Fortunately, some of us still manage to read 350-page books, but Shteyngart is far from alone in fearing that a fundamental change is occurring in the way people digest information. Nicholas Carr's new book, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," argues that the digital revolution is altering how our minds function.

"I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article," Carr writes. "My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

Carr attributes this to his extensive exposure to the Internet over the past decade. It's an incredible tool for research, he says, but there's a price. "What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," he writes.

Ironically, people are reading more than ever, but they aren't doing a whole lot of deep reading. We read status updates on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, text messages on our phones and news alerts in our e-mail. Two research projects indicate that "many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion," according to Patrick Kingsley of The Guardian newspaper in London.

But get ready for the counter-revolution.

"First we had slow food, then slow travel," Kingsley writes. "Now, those campaigns are joined by the slow-reading movement -- a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading."

Count me in. I'm a believer in slow reading, of sustained concentration and critical contemplation of serious writing. Search engines and Wikipedia are marvels of the modern age, but they're no substitute for focus on complex subjects and narratives.

For me, digesting a good novel over a few weeks' time is like living two parallel lives. There is my real life, of course, and then there's the consciousness I enter each time I open the novel. This is pleasurable, yes, but it's more than that: If it's an engrossing, thought-provoking novel, I learn things from it that can be useful in shaping my real life. It widens my perspective. I'm able to see the world through multiple sets of eyes, to contemplate how people from other places and backgrounds see the things I'm seeing in reality. Reading works of history, biography, science and philosophy have the effect of deepening our understanding of the world in ways that a status update, a tweet or a YouTube video could never accomplish.

I don't think it's any surprise that the plummeting quality of our public discourse coincides with a decline in deep reading. Geared to the velocity of the times, we make snap judgments and utter smart ripostes rather than taking time to think things through before reaching a conclusion.

It's neither realistic nor desirable to shun the Internet. But it ought not replace the time-honored practice of sitting down in a comfortable chair and reading for a good long stretch. The key, I think, is to find a healthy balance between the time spent on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube and the time dedicated to reading books and in-depth magazine and newspaper articles. There is value in both pursuits, but the former is no substitute for the latter.

What I really hope will evolve from today's scattershot digital environment are new forms of media that offer the depth of a book and demand our full, sustained concentration but that take advantage of technology to actually enhance the traditional reading experience. The melding of old and new media -- not one replacing the other -- is likely to be the sweet spot for the culture.

Geoff Schumacher (gschumacher@reviewjournal.com) is the Review-Journal's director of community publications. His column appears Friday.