I say it's better to be read deeply by one person than skimmed by a hundred. In the kitchen, the slow food movement is gaining traction; people are increasingly finding value in food that is rooted in culture and history, food that often takes a long time to make and is meant to be savored. Now we need a slow book movement. We need books that are actual physical objects, books that are carried around and read and reread over the course of a lifetime. My mom taught me that "everybody else is doing it" is not an excuse for shoddy anything, so I'm not about to take a fast train to quasi-literacy now just because it's popular. Resist, brave writers, resist!
I love this! Another point that Wolf made, and you're pointing to it here, is that with a physical book, people tend to read and then go back and re-read a passage for deeper understanding. Though that's possible on a screen, rarely do it. A Slow Book Movement. That's it.
I have felt this change in myself. I’m “following” so many good writers but I find I will only “scroll” 2-3 times and then I lose interest. I don’t like it about myself but being self aware is a start. I can see the triangle of parenting, menopause, and getting COVID twice causing some of the focus issue. But I am encouraged that neuro plasticity means I can work to change it. I forget sometimes that Nathaniel Hawthorne was my favorite author in high school/college -- I loved the 3 page sentence. I hold out hope that I can get back to enjoying that deep reading of complex, nourishing sentences.
I think you're right that the first step is becoming aware. Then the next step is a conscious decision: how do I want to read this? For the newspaper, scanning headlines seems fine, unless you find an article that is significant to you. For reading fiction, to get the full experience, to make that big brain glow, now you're in the realm of deep reading.
I'd recommend Faulkner as a good author to begin and practice deep reading. Currently, I'm reading Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg in the original, which deep reading is requisite if I expect to understand his nuances sufficiently.
Thank you! Yes, Faulkner's sentences often involve nesting modifiers, and he likes the correlative conjunction, "not/but." Here's the second sentence of "Barn Burning." (maybe we'll look closely at this next week):
The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the
crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat
he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat,
dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the
lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils
and the silver curve of fish–this, the cheese which he knew he smelled
and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming
in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant
one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair
For me, deep reading is a kind of flow space where I’m in conversation with the writer and the text and often many other texts as well. It’s the space where my own thoughts form.
Or as you put it: “When we read deeply, we make new neural connections and those are the basis of new thought. As Proust noted, the heart of reading is the place where we go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover our own.”
That's what happens to me, too. And this might be why I'm always surprised when someone loves a book that I love. There is a sense I've been in an intimate relationship with the book and the author, a closed room where we've talked, explored, and wondered together.
Beautifully said, Nina. Without deep reading, we could never go on or understand the journey the author has set out for us. I am always amazed, perhaps more suspicious, when someone boasts reading a book, a well-written, craft-infused book, in an afternoon. One might as well read CliffsNotes instead.
This is a really encouraging piece for me because I've always felt bad about not reading novels quickly; instead, I prefer to immerse myself in the words, go slow, and occasionally read a paragraph several times. I often have to put the book down and just process what I've read before I can continue. Maybe I was made for deep reading!
There's one thing I've been thinking about, though. I'm not sure if words should be the goal in and of themselves or just a means to it.
Normally, a great sentence will captivate me for all the things it arouses (sounds, smells, emotions, ideas). Other times, it's the language itself (rhythm, technique, flow, texture) that makes reading so captivating.
I wonder, though, if words sometimes draw undue attention to themselves, like an actor winking at the camera instead of focusing on the performance. They might be beautiful, but are they breaking the immersion?
That's a great inquiry. Here are some thoughts. I agree that the goal isn't to write a long sentence in order to create a certain number of words. For me, a revision will include making sure I have a variety of sentence lengths to create different rhythms. A long sentence, followed by a shorter one, for instance. If something or someone is flowing or falling or running, I want a longer sentence to mimic this movement. If the sentence is not from an omniscient narrator, but a character, I'll consider whether this character would think like this, in a long sentence, or speak like this. Sometimes I want to create more intense music to please my ear, so I'll write a longer sentence.
I've been taught that some writers pen sentences that are unabashedly performative, as if the writer was saying "look at me," while others strive for invisibility on the page. I don't think one way is necessarily better than the other. Perhaps it's a stylistic choice.
I know this to be true! Thank you for putting the science to the experience. The number of times I started Mrs. Dalloway in the last month = 4x for this very reason.
I loved Proust and the Squid, so thanks for the heads up on Wolf's new book! But also, as you said: abundance. I just love to luxuriate in the abundance of a long sentence.
I love the long sentence, too! So much can happen in a long sentence. I value it, how it activates my concentration and attention. Then, I read it again, with the desire to understand how it was constructed.
I’ve always been a slow reader, and felt ashamed for being so...but you just helped me understand. I read the way I eat ice cream—one lick at a time until it melts into me.
I think it comes from high school SAT- that was the source of scarring for me. Not the internet. We were shamed for reading slow. That was the root of the problem.
Awful! My prediction is that people will demand to have their attention span back. I hope that education can support that.
Gloria Mark in her book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, found that in 2004, the average time spent on a screen was 2.5 minutes. In 2014, it was 75 seconds. Now it's 47 seconds. It takes 25 minutes to bring our attention back to a task after an interruption. And we interrupt ourselves more than we're interrupted by others.
I'm so thankful for this post, Nina. I can't wait to dive into Maryanne Wolf’s work.
I'm currently reading Johann Hari’s “Stolen Focus,” which explores the ways our attention levels are being decimated by the speed of society and our constant switching between inputs. (I also learned of this book through Ezra Klein’s podcast!) A lot of Hari’s book resonates with what you presented here, and I'm excited to put Wolf’s idea of “biliteracy” training to work as Hari’s book helps me to redevelop my brain’s monotasking muscle.
All of this affirms what I love about Stunning Sentences and the time you take to sit with us and slowly unpack the beauty and craft of a single sentence. Without even realizing, I’ve been redeveloping biliteracy by engaging with your work here!
I don’t know of anyone who is responsible for anything important - work, family, society, friends - and doesn’t read deeply and carefully. I guess the question then is, who are you writing for? Or what moments are you writing for? And therefore, by extension, what moments do you want to be forgotten or remembered by.
I really appreciate the sentiments here and I'd like to encourage writers of fiction, and non-fiction, not to give up on longer sentences. There is such richness available in our language and if we compromise for the internet-trained reader-brain by avoiding sentences with additional clauses etc we are robbing them and ourselves of a precious tradition. It used to upset me greatly when younger students in my literature classes were 'unable' to read Virginia Woolf's novels. They simply seemed unable to navigate the sentences, and yet Woolf is the absolute master of sentence construction: it's like witnessing a virtuoso musician. The essay Street Haunting is my absolute favourite and when I feel my brain is being fragmented by the jerky style of a lot of online writing I always go back and read it. I recommend this!!
I loved this pause for reading: deep and not so much. It made me reflect on the fact that there are no true shortcuts in life. Few of us can shortchange sleep or, say, the time commitment and practice it takes to learn something new or master a craft such as writing. We have to do the work and the result is more times than not commensurate with our effort. We’re fooling ourselves if we think otherwise. The post also made me reflect on observation: how powerful a tool it can be in self-fulfillment and all facets of life and how it’s a dying skill. Thank you, Nina, for an insightful post and always taking the time to teach us. Also, CONGRATULATIONS on the W.S. Porter Prize!
I say it's better to be read deeply by one person than skimmed by a hundred. In the kitchen, the slow food movement is gaining traction; people are increasingly finding value in food that is rooted in culture and history, food that often takes a long time to make and is meant to be savored. Now we need a slow book movement. We need books that are actual physical objects, books that are carried around and read and reread over the course of a lifetime. My mom taught me that "everybody else is doing it" is not an excuse for shoddy anything, so I'm not about to take a fast train to quasi-literacy now just because it's popular. Resist, brave writers, resist!
I love this! Another point that Wolf made, and you're pointing to it here, is that with a physical book, people tend to read and then go back and re-read a passage for deeper understanding. Though that's possible on a screen, rarely do it. A Slow Book Movement. That's it.
Yes, whenever possible I'm reading books, not screens. It leads to a better experience for sure.
I have felt this change in myself. I’m “following” so many good writers but I find I will only “scroll” 2-3 times and then I lose interest. I don’t like it about myself but being self aware is a start. I can see the triangle of parenting, menopause, and getting COVID twice causing some of the focus issue. But I am encouraged that neuro plasticity means I can work to change it. I forget sometimes that Nathaniel Hawthorne was my favorite author in high school/college -- I loved the 3 page sentence. I hold out hope that I can get back to enjoying that deep reading of complex, nourishing sentences.
I think you're right that the first step is becoming aware. Then the next step is a conscious decision: how do I want to read this? For the newspaper, scanning headlines seems fine, unless you find an article that is significant to you. For reading fiction, to get the full experience, to make that big brain glow, now you're in the realm of deep reading.
I'd recommend Faulkner as a good author to begin and practice deep reading. Currently, I'm reading Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg in the original, which deep reading is requisite if I expect to understand his nuances sufficiently.
Thank you! Yes, Faulkner's sentences often involve nesting modifiers, and he likes the correlative conjunction, "not/but." Here's the second sentence of "Barn Burning." (maybe we'll look closely at this next week):
The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the
crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat
he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat,
dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the
lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils
and the silver curve of fish–this, the cheese which he knew he smelled
and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming
in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant
one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair
and grief, the old fierce pull of blood
For me, deep reading is a kind of flow space where I’m in conversation with the writer and the text and often many other texts as well. It’s the space where my own thoughts form.
Or as you put it: “When we read deeply, we make new neural connections and those are the basis of new thought. As Proust noted, the heart of reading is the place where we go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover our own.”
That's what happens to me, too. And this might be why I'm always surprised when someone loves a book that I love. There is a sense I've been in an intimate relationship with the book and the author, a closed room where we've talked, explored, and wondered together.
Thank you for this! I agree with this and feel this deep reading is often missing in my own life. To restore it, as a practice, is a wonderful idea!
Yes, I'm going to do more of this too.
Beautifully said, Nina. Without deep reading, we could never go on or understand the journey the author has set out for us. I am always amazed, perhaps more suspicious, when someone boasts reading a book, a well-written, craft-infused book, in an afternoon. One might as well read CliffsNotes instead.
I agree. I've never understood the boast-post of reading 100 books in a year.
This is a really encouraging piece for me because I've always felt bad about not reading novels quickly; instead, I prefer to immerse myself in the words, go slow, and occasionally read a paragraph several times. I often have to put the book down and just process what I've read before I can continue. Maybe I was made for deep reading!
There's one thing I've been thinking about, though. I'm not sure if words should be the goal in and of themselves or just a means to it.
Normally, a great sentence will captivate me for all the things it arouses (sounds, smells, emotions, ideas). Other times, it's the language itself (rhythm, technique, flow, texture) that makes reading so captivating.
I wonder, though, if words sometimes draw undue attention to themselves, like an actor winking at the camera instead of focusing on the performance. They might be beautiful, but are they breaking the immersion?
Things that are on my mind...
That's a great inquiry. Here are some thoughts. I agree that the goal isn't to write a long sentence in order to create a certain number of words. For me, a revision will include making sure I have a variety of sentence lengths to create different rhythms. A long sentence, followed by a shorter one, for instance. If something or someone is flowing or falling or running, I want a longer sentence to mimic this movement. If the sentence is not from an omniscient narrator, but a character, I'll consider whether this character would think like this, in a long sentence, or speak like this. Sometimes I want to create more intense music to please my ear, so I'll write a longer sentence.
I've been taught that some writers pen sentences that are unabashedly performative, as if the writer was saying "look at me," while others strive for invisibility on the page. I don't think one way is necessarily better than the other. Perhaps it's a stylistic choice.
I know this to be true! Thank you for putting the science to the experience. The number of times I started Mrs. Dalloway in the last month = 4x for this very reason.
I need to read more deeply
I loved Proust and the Squid, so thanks for the heads up on Wolf's new book! But also, as you said: abundance. I just love to luxuriate in the abundance of a long sentence.
I love the long sentence, too! So much can happen in a long sentence. I value it, how it activates my concentration and attention. Then, I read it again, with the desire to understand how it was constructed.
I do really love a long sentence!
I’ve always been a slow reader, and felt ashamed for being so...but you just helped me understand. I read the way I eat ice cream—one lick at a time until it melts into me.
Oh, this is lovely!
I think it comes from high school SAT- that was the source of scarring for me. Not the internet. We were shamed for reading slow. That was the root of the problem.
Awful! My prediction is that people will demand to have their attention span back. I hope that education can support that.
Gloria Mark in her book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, found that in 2004, the average time spent on a screen was 2.5 minutes. In 2014, it was 75 seconds. Now it's 47 seconds. It takes 25 minutes to bring our attention back to a task after an interruption. And we interrupt ourselves more than we're interrupted by others.
I'm so thankful for this post, Nina. I can't wait to dive into Maryanne Wolf’s work.
I'm currently reading Johann Hari’s “Stolen Focus,” which explores the ways our attention levels are being decimated by the speed of society and our constant switching between inputs. (I also learned of this book through Ezra Klein’s podcast!) A lot of Hari’s book resonates with what you presented here, and I'm excited to put Wolf’s idea of “biliteracy” training to work as Hari’s book helps me to redevelop my brain’s monotasking muscle.
All of this affirms what I love about Stunning Sentences and the time you take to sit with us and slowly unpack the beauty and craft of a single sentence. Without even realizing, I’ve been redeveloping biliteracy by engaging with your work here!
I don’t know of anyone who is responsible for anything important - work, family, society, friends - and doesn’t read deeply and carefully. I guess the question then is, who are you writing for? Or what moments are you writing for? And therefore, by extension, what moments do you want to be forgotten or remembered by.
I really appreciate the sentiments here and I'd like to encourage writers of fiction, and non-fiction, not to give up on longer sentences. There is such richness available in our language and if we compromise for the internet-trained reader-brain by avoiding sentences with additional clauses etc we are robbing them and ourselves of a precious tradition. It used to upset me greatly when younger students in my literature classes were 'unable' to read Virginia Woolf's novels. They simply seemed unable to navigate the sentences, and yet Woolf is the absolute master of sentence construction: it's like witnessing a virtuoso musician. The essay Street Haunting is my absolute favourite and when I feel my brain is being fragmented by the jerky style of a lot of online writing I always go back and read it. I recommend this!!
I loved this pause for reading: deep and not so much. It made me reflect on the fact that there are no true shortcuts in life. Few of us can shortchange sleep or, say, the time commitment and practice it takes to learn something new or master a craft such as writing. We have to do the work and the result is more times than not commensurate with our effort. We’re fooling ourselves if we think otherwise. The post also made me reflect on observation: how powerful a tool it can be in self-fulfillment and all facets of life and how it’s a dying skill. Thank you, Nina, for an insightful post and always taking the time to teach us. Also, CONGRATULATIONS on the W.S. Porter Prize!