The Facets of Voluntary Slow Reading II: The Meaning of Slow
- The Facets of Voluntary Slow Reading I: The Voluntary Aspect
- The Facets of Voluntary Slow Reading II: The Meaning of Slow
- The Facets of Voluntary Slow Reading III: What it is Not, What it is
- The Facets of Voluntary Slow Reading IV: 10 Reading Techniques
The “slow” aspect in Voluntary Slow Reading is perhaps the most philosophical, taking my facet analysis into the domains of time, space, and even mind. Sounds like an episode of the Twilight Zone. I will not go in too deep. My aim is an examination of the facets of voluntary slow reading, as aid to developing a broad search plan for literature on the subject.
1. Slow in a temporal sense. The most obvious meaning of slow is the temporal sense, taking more time to read. One can read as slowly as possible to savour the full meaning of each word, like enjoying a good dinner, or vary the rate of reading, slowing down for selected passages (as mentioned yesterday). One may choose to slow down, or one may be forced to slow down, e.g., for thick philosophical works such as Heidegger’s Being and Time; is that still voluntary slow reading?
2. Slow in a spatial and social sense: distance. A more recent sense of “slow” comes from the Slow movement that started with Slow Food, an effort to resist fast food. A primary theme in the Slow Food movement is that of locality: eating local foods and encouraging local food systems. The idea can be applied to slow reading. Reading materials about one’s home is bound to engage personal memories, adding dimension to the story and slowing it down (there is a tie-in with Reader-Response theory here). Reading materials by local authors encourages the local storytelling industry (there is a tie-in here with the long-tail of Web 2.0).
This sense of slow may also be tied to Birkets’ notion of deep reading: “Birkerts points out that the arrival of the printing press resulted in the production of far more books on many topics for far more people, a change which made possible what he calls ‘horizontal reading’ – a far ranging kind of information harvesting which can work very effectively to inform the kinds of thinking associated with Deep (or vertical) Reading.” Horizontal reading takes us outward, laterally, to learn new ideas, whereas vertical reading takes us inward to learn more about what is at hand, that which is local. I may be stretching it a bit, but there’s something to work with here.
3. Slow in another physical sense: aesthetics. Publishers know that leisure readers continue to purchase print books over eBooks and audiobooks because of the look and feel, even the smell. Readers often take books to a preferred setting, e.g., an armchair in a coffee house, to enhance the overall experience. Engaging the senses in this way requires more mental processing, slowing down the reading.
4. Slow in a physical and psychological sense: fixity. One of the advantages of digital formats is that the content is separated from the presentation, allowing content to be rendered in many different ways, including different formats, e.g., Word, PDF, and on different devices, e.g., monitor, cell phone. Other advantages include rapid updates and the application of tools such as a find function. These advantages allow for creative re-mixing of ideas in ways the author did not consider, for reading in any number of conditions, and for current and quick analysis. I am certain that digital materials increase our ability to think in a non-linear fashion, and that is a good thing. The same characteristics tend to fragment our reading experience, causing abstract or subtle patterns to be lost. Print, by contrast, binds content to presentation, has fixed content, and compels the reader to experience the text in the linear manner presented by the author. Linear thinking is a vital skill for connecting the present to the past, for understanding how present actions have consequences in the future, and for solving complex problems that require extended logic. Print and books are slower forms that lend themselves to linear thinking.
5. Slow in another psychological sense: nostalgia. The attachment people feel for books is often dismissed as nostalgia, a yearning for an unreachable past, or sentimentality, a feeling not grounded in reality. It is treated as some sort of reverse thinking, like going “back-to-the-land”. Is this nostalgia silly? No, but it is misplaced. I used a typewriter even as a child, growing up in my father’s printing shop; despite those pleasant memories, I feel no nostalgia for the typewriter. Time again, we see articles declaring the inevitable but regrettable passage of books. Why regrettable? Likely because of a feeling that something good is being lost. If this was indeed the case, we should think twice about leaving the book behind. But the feeling is misplaced. As often as we find a (commercially motivated) report announcing the end of the book, we find another (more reputable) report showing statistical increases in our use of print and in book sales. Nostalgia is a clue to the importance of the slower format of print and books.
P.S. See this great article on Close Reading by Jim Murdoch.
John,
if you choose to read Being and Time, then you choose all that comes with it
On a more serious note, I wouldn’t want to link the localism of slow food with slow reading too strongly. Much of the reading I do is about other places and times precisely because they are different. And being different they engage me more as I try to understand the context.
I do read local history, but as part of my reading. Books indeed offer a chance to move beyond locality without (some of) the ecological concerns behind slow food.
E-reading is part of a broader issue with author vs reader focus, going right back to deconstruction. The hyperlinked text makes the reader part of a broader process of commentary and can allow them to participate in that commentary. And when ‘the text’ is extended to include that commentary, the reader becomes in a way an author. The physical text has links to other texts via footnotes and bibliographies, but these are seen as ‘closed’ links to other authoritative texts, separate from ‘the text’ at hand. Such a text is one you read and participate in in wuite a different way from many online texts.
On your last point, there is an image of the writer’s desk that comes to mind, of a man barely able to write due to his desk being covered in so many books in fact my wife has a photograph of a friend of hers in such a setting where it looks like the books are going to overwhelm him completely. My desk, on the other hand, is practically empty. These days I no longer need physical books the way I once did. I have dozens of dictionaries but almost always find what I need on-line. In this respect I’m nostalgic for the past but I’ve also become used to accessing information at a much greater speed. Doing research the old-fashioned way annoys me. I think this has contributed considerably to the difficulty I find reading for pleasure these days. I’m so used to multi-tasking – I never just listen to music for example and I’ve started catching up on news feeds and e-mails on a laptop whilst watching TV – that simply sitting and reading a book feels like I’m not using my time efficiently. Christ, I hate the modern world sometimes.
Hi Pete, I did actually have a good go at Being and Time some years back. Made it about 200 pages through before letting it go in favour of a shorter summary by another philosopher.
Your point about localism is an interesting one. I have been thinking about the role of reading in developing empathy precisely because reading helps people imagine lives other than their own. Reading books may be far better at achieving this than watching tv since text lends itself to revealing inner dialogue. I am currently reading Alberto Manguel’s City of Words, which is about the role of stories and language in revealing “Other”; will likely post a review in a few weeks. But maybe this is not slow reading, from the distance angle. Taking us outside of our own world, time and mind is an acceleration of sorts, and a good one. Not everything slow is good; slow reading, in a local sense, may be a form of navel gazing. One might read slowly about other worlds, times and people, but now we are talking about slow in a temporal sense.
Thanks for the Stephen Krashen links. I’ve updated yesterday’s post.
Hi Jim, my desk is tidy too, and I prefer it that way. I too have no yearning for doing research via paper indexes and photocopying. In my view, the Internet is the optimal tool for finding the research I want. If the content is a snippet, I will also read it on-line, but if the content is of any substance I want the print copy. It allows for deeper reading and thinking. People can get by without the print copy, but they may be forfeiting quality. The stats indicate people are not getting by without print. Every computer is hooked to a printer and people are using them.
Leave your response!
Slow Reading
Available from Litwin Books | Read a chapter online
OpenBook WordPress Plugin
Inserts a book cover image, title, author, and other book data from Open Library into a WordPress post.
Download the Plugin | Read More | Report an Issue | Join the Discussion List
Series
Other posts belonging to this series
Archives