The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

Short review: This is an enjoyable short book about the pleasures of reading. The point that gets the most play is that we should be reading more at Whim. By that he means reading should be more about pleasure and less about reading what others say is important. So if we are interested in it, we should go ahead and read it. Great books are great because they have a lot of intellectual content, while intellectual content is good, our brains can only process so much. We should revel in the intellectual content and if we are reading primarily because one says we should and not because we really want to, we are likely to read too quickly, without enough desire and in the end we would probably be better off just reading a summary to get the point instead of pretending to ourselves that we were actually reading to gain something from the book.

Jacobs has a meandering style that I like. He has some of the best quotes about reading. It is only about 150 pages of real content so it won't take long to read.

It is a lendable book on kindle, so if you want to borrow it, leave a comment on my blog and I will set it up.


My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/reading-jacobs/