Types of reading

Table of Contents

Types of reading

I love reading. Now, there are many forms of “reading,” and you can spend your whole day doing “reading” and not actually do the kind of reading we love. The kind we love is focused, challenging, sustained, with a pen in hand, making note of new turns of phrase and peculiar, precise words, and feeling our brains get ever-so-slightly reconfigured by the text. The kind of reading we love requires a piece of text be worked over so many times that the author probably never wants to see it again. The kind of text that has been squeezed through a dozen gates of betterness and its darlings have been serial killed and it has benefited from the acute eye of a shrewd editor. And if you were to compare that text to its first draft, you’d be made woozy by how far it had come.

The easiest way to do this kind of reading? Pick up a physical book published by a publishing house that cares without compromise.

This is all a prelude to consider digital reading which, quite frankly, has been in a pretty bad state for a while. At least for the kind of reading we’re talking about — sustained, unbroken-concentration reading. Largely, this is a container issue, in that our containers are just so deliciously optimized for not reading. Our phones, tablets, laptops — all great at doing everything but reading. Which is why E Ink devices like Kindles were so seductive and promising. They contain all the good of digital (lots of books on hand, portable, easy highlighting, note-taking, etc) with, usually, none of the non-reading nonsense (apps, social media, streaming services) and even some of the affordances of a physical book (reflective non-backlit surface, long battery life, etc).

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