In the shallows

LAST year, I listed the books I read and finished. I finished less than two dozen titles of fiction; I read nonfiction books but none from cover to cover. I reread five.

In contrast, I acquired easily more than this number. The disparity between the intent to read and the actual dispatch concerns not just parents and teachers. It gnaws even at readers who maintain a habit of reading but still wonder if we are just wading in the shallows.

Distractions are no longer just excuses not to open a book. Checking out every alert from Messenger and tending to our 101 online personas do more than divide our attention. This digital hyperactivity also prevents us from taking what William Landay refers to as the “deep dive” demanded to immerse in an imagined world or explore new ideas.

“Linear deep-focus reading” is only possible when one sits down with a traditional book and follows a single narrative or argument without undertaking the multitasking that reading online or e-books eases us into, argues Steven Johnson.

Technology has altered us as readers. We are more impatient for our rewards and less trusting when a writer digresses into and meanders among the dense undergrowth of imagination before leading us down the path of narrative clarity, as in the days when an open book did not compete in one-sided competition with a smart phone.

Old-school reading is as different from watching as scanning or browsing. More than time is warped when has followed all seven seasons of the HBO series of “Game of Thrones;” binged on YouTube 10-minute rewinds and 30-minute GoT recaps; or sat still for hours running into days and weeks with “A Song of Fire and Ice,” the first five tomes, each as weighty and as dense as the sheets of steel folded and folded over in a Valyrian sword, in the planned seven-volume heptalogy, written by George R. R. Martin, which existed long before the television series.

A collaboration between a literature scholar and neuroscientists discovered in the MRI results of college undergraduates that “close reading,” as opposed to browsing or surfing, of a chapter in Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” showed an increase in blood flow to the parts of the brain associated with touch, movement, and spatial coordination.

According to Elizabeth Randolph in the Winter 2015 issue of “Vassar: The Alumnae/i Quarterly,” the results show that focused reading makes readers think “as though (they) were actually experiencing being in the story”.

Paradoxically, getting lost in fictive worlds demands we are in touch with the present one with all its, yes, distractions.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 27, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”