Slow Reading in a Hurried Age
*Starred Review* Mikics here updates Charles Lamb’s nineteenth-century protest against magazine-mongers pushing readers to “pant and toil . . . at a sickening rate” as they frantically cull facts from the latest publications and bid “farewell to reading for its own sake.” Like Lamb, Mikics understands how modern culture discourages reading for pleasure—especially in an Internet world of short-lived but insistent information. Inviting readers into a less frenetic, more rewarding world, Mikics explores a series of literary masterpieces, showing how getting lost in a book is still the best way to find joys we really want. These joys, readers quickly realize, come more abundantly to those who follow the 14 rules Mikics expounds—rules fostering patience in dealing with novels’ tangled plots, canniness in interrogating dialogues in plays, perceptiveness in discerning poets’ styles and themes, acumen in identifying constituent elements of short stories, and imagination in conceiving alternative constructions of those same elements. Readers acquire stimulating perspectives on individual works by Homer and Whitman, Dickens and Cather, Shakespeare and Chekov. But they also develop the intellectual poise to set one work into play with others, across boundaries of nationality, style, and history. An exceptional book whetting readers’ appetites for the savoring of many more. --Bryce Christensen