The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time Review

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(More customer reviews)For readers who care about where we're all going in this mad-media world of Internet highways and smart technology, this book is a necessary pit stop for refueling and refreshment.
Only 151 pages long, this totally chapterless work can be read in a sitting of three hours (as if it were one single, long paragraph), and it will not disappoint. The book is subtitled: Why Books Matter In a Distracted Time. One of the main and positive features of this work for me was the fact that the author, already a well-known critic for the "Los Angeles Times," confesses to a feeling lately (say, over the last two years) of being unable to concentrate and wonders, if it's not Alzheimer's or incipient old age, just what is happening to his brain. I completely identified with that situation and concern even though I, unlike the author, do not own a Blackberry or a Kindle. I am, just as the author describes himself-- as well as of nearly everyone today -- averse to tuning out the "buzz" that's on the Internet and in the media and am on the computer at work as well as at home.
David Ulin doesn't like to categorize books by way of fiction or non-fiction, personal or objective. He simply aims for and enjoys what is simply called "good writing." In this manner, the tale he unfolds here is both factual, literary, historical as well as personal, some vignettes touchingly involving his son, Noah. Suffice it to say Mr. Ulin has some trenchant observations to make not only about "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald but about Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" as well -- not to overlook the many writers he pulls up from the stream of words he so deftly pursues such that any reader will feel tempted to follow-up on those authors and works that are completely new to her or him.
Having covered a lot of ground that feels like "everything" that can be said about technology versus the book -- but actually isn't -- the author asserts that what reading good writing does for the reader -- unlike any other kind of technology -- is disconnect the reader from the harried noisy world of present storms and present crises and trivia and immerse her or him in a world transcending present time with others from previous ages, a world that facilitates empathy, blurring the boundaries between yourself and another, while allowing one's thoughts to gather some gravitas in the silence that follows from long bouts of concentration on the written word. He insists we need silence more than ever now. It's a kind of Wordsworthian plaint -- the world is too much with us. But he reminds us there's a solution: read good writing in the silence whenever you can.
One of the roads not undertaken in this multi-streamed river of a book full of consideration about the pros and cons of the traditional book versus electronic technology was audio book technology or the Read-to-Me feature available in many e-books -- and the cultural impact of a renewed orality about the printed word. Mr. Ulin evokes ideas about a "conversation that began in Mesopotamia ten thousand years ago," but seems to have forgotten Homer's oral impact in the process, concentrating on print and writing instead. While he tries to pluck the harp optimistically for the positive contributions of electronic media, Mr. Ulin, understandably in my opinion, argues finally to keep the art of reading books alive. I still want to know would his argument finally remain with books if he had considered the electronic orality of texts -- or paid any attention to them.
All in all, this was definitely a good read and a good piece of writing. It contains, as I've said, mentionings of writers and books I'm going to enjoy exploring further. I was so glad to find Mr. Ulin mention the writer Vardis Fisher, even if it was through a quotation by Frank Connor. As Mr. Ulin knows, good books have good writing and artfully put the reader in a "flow state" or trance from which she or he makes a self, and Vardis Fisher was just one of those writers for me. Mr. Ullin has, among others, Alexander Trocchi. Who? Read "The Lost Art of Reading" or read Trocchi's "Cain's Book." The point is -- read, in silence, good writing.

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