The irony about performing my search on slow reading was that I had to read the materials very quickly, often scanning. Now I hope to step back a bit from the results gathered and read them more slowly, including new ones along the way. I do not expect to break much new ground on the subject. In fact, this blog will be shifting gears in the near future. However, I will maintain the material on slow reading here, and revise it over time.

Thanks again for your material, and I look forward to ongoing dialog with you.

Thought I’d mention two books by Louise Rosenblatt whose research on reading addresses many of the specific aspects of reading included in your VSR table of contents. Her books Literature as Exploration and The Reader, the Text, the Poem focus on, among other things, the lived-through experience of the individual reader as s/he recreates the text in the act of reading it. While she is very much concerned with a close, attentive reading of the text, Rosenblatt also recognizes that the reader (as well as the writer) comes to the text from the real world, and that each reading is a unique experience — with the book being evoked in the context of the reader’s present concerns, past experiences and familiarity with other texts. She has studied both avid and naive readers; she’s concerned with both the pedagogical approaches to reading as well as the ways people actually do read; she emphasizes literary reading and the literary work of art; and she highlights how literary reading can broaden the reader’s perspective and its potential role in developing abilities of discernment that can lead to informed decision-making in support of a democracy.

I am including a link to an article of my own that melds some of Rosenblatt’s ideas with those of library educator Catherine Sheldrick Ross regarding the reading experience, and contrasting the reader’s experience with the ways in which reading is commonly viewed from within library science: “The Reader and the Librarian” — http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/2007/

I’d also like to mention the book Why Read? by Mark Edmundson. I’m not prepared to summarize it here, but his larger concerns connect literature with liberal arts education, humanism and democracy. I refer to his work briefly in another piece I’ve written which also looks at reading in the context of librarianship, called “The Librarian Who Reads Is Lost” (Public Libraries, May/June, 2006, pg. 10-15). It is troubling to me that the reading experience — and slow reading — has received so little attention from library educators and practitioners, even though reading is considered overwhelmingly to be at the center of what libraries are all about.

I will continue to follow your research with interest,

Scott Condon