Reading as paying attention

from Powell's Books: Review-A-Day

The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time by David L. Ulin, a review from Rain Taxi by Kevin Smokler.

 

What do you pay attention to?  What can capture your attention so that you are immune from distraction, perhaps for hours at a time?  Is there anything?

• A conversation with a dear friend about topics deep or trivial?
• An exciting movie watched in the theater?
• A long run along a country road?
• Maybe, if you are like me, a book to read on a Saturday afternoon?

When I was an elementary  school child I could easily lose myself in a book.  I would pay such deep attention to one of those blue-covered biographies of figures from American history that I would not hear the bell signaling time for recess.  Today is happens less often, but it still can.  A book can transport me out of the present time and place, directing all my attention through the page to another life.

Smokler's review suggests that Ulin's book helps us to think about the importance of this possibility primarily using Ulin's experiences of it. So, the book is not an exhaustive exploration of the ways that reading might promote paying attention.  Nonetheless, it appears to invite us to consider how reading could combat our frequent experience of distraction.