Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age
Rachel B. Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel M. De Smith Roberts. Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024. Pp. 240 $24.99.
The authors deliver a clarion call for a close, evaluative, and careful attention to texts that eschews both personal and tribal hostilities while avoiding the consumerist chasm at the center of our culture. This is what they call “deep reading.” Deep calls unto deep, in the vein of Cal Newport’s Deep Work. Everyone, it seems, recognizes that the world at large has become deeply distracting and its people distracted. This may be the primary motif of our age. We have moved beyond Postman’s amusement unto death, into this spiral of blurred images delivered with amazing clarity. We have an abundance of resources and technological innovations that our ancestors could only regard as marvel, but the one thing that we lack is focus.
Along come Griffis, Ooms, & Roberts with their deliciously subtitled book that promises “practices to subvert the vices.” These holy rollers bring their wagon loaded with 42 practices commended over the course of 6 chapters. Theirs is a Temperance Movement of a different sort, seeking to stamp out the evils of distraction, hostility, and consumerism. It’s almost as if they believe that “reading well’ could make us into better people. They most definitely believe that we must become better people if we are to become better readers. They recognize that the best medicine for these pernicious vices is the development of virtues: “the habits and practices that lead to deep and formative reading.”
Despair is rampant when it comes to reading nowadays.[1] Educators at every level lament the state of reading. Most everyone, it seems, is quite literate in a basic way (over 75% of U.S. adults possess medium to high levels of literacy), but few of those capable readers are engaging in the actual reading of books. The most recent NEA “Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” (2022) tells us that less than 50% of American adults read a book in the last year, while fiction reading is plunging to the lowest levels in several decades. The most shocking finding was that only 42% of nine-year olds read for fun in 2022.[2] These are the undergraduates of 2031.
If those future college students are to be wooed into the cult of reading, there will be a great need for evangelism, spreading the gospel of reading. The authors of Deep Reading do well to lead with joy. “Reading for enjoyment” is an important factor for them. Their crusade of righteousness is less the literary puritanism of Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren (“eat your vegetables”) and more the tenor of Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. They do not provide us with lists of “must-read” books for self-flagellation; rather they call us to the exquisite joys of reading.
And their path to these pleasures is not ambiguous. Over six chapters, they detail the ways that the modern reader can handle the obstacles to better reading. Speaking of obstacles, it appears that these are not hurdles along the way, but rather tasks that need tending before the journey begins. In many ways, this is a book about “pre-reading.” The authors are looking to inculcate practices, rather than skills, to make life-long learners, forming dispositions that put the reader in good stead to receive maximal pleasure and benefit from the reading experience. Indeed, they aspire “to complement recent guides on virtue ethics and reading.”
Each of the three vices (distraction, hostility, consumerism) receive two chapters of attention. Each of the vices that detract from optimal reading experiences are countered by “practices,” in the classical mode of “habit-forming.” The authors are not attempting a Christian worldview treatment of reading, with concerns for content and orthodoxy in the foreground. Rather, they adopt the educational philosophy promoted most prominently by James K. A. Smith, that education is “not primarily about the absorption of ideas and information, but rather about the formation of hearts and desires.” They are also tapping into David I. Smith’s summation of “teaching Christianly”: “teaching in such a way that faith somehow informs the processes, the moves, the practices, the pedagogy, and not just the ideas that are conveyed or the spirit in which they are offered.”[3]
The section on distraction brings forth many excellent processes, moves, etc. that will assist both teacher and reader in the fight for attentiveness. Field trips and material engagements assist the philosophical move toward embodiment while engaging in an abstract activity. Slowing the speed of reading and the quantity imbibed, “chewing on the text,” encourages deeper absorption and understanding. The final questions addressed in this section deal with neurodiversity in readers and alternate ways of engaging with written text, including audio and digital forms, as well as community reading.
While there are many good practices encouraged in the section on hostility, including self-forgetfulness and moving on from constant back and forth on unbiblical practices portrayed in fiction, some of the authors’ recommendations are unhelpfully bound up in the jargon of the guild. It would seem that the Christian tradition provides ample ammunition to destroy hostility (see Ephesians 2, etc.), so that the use of boilerplate references to antiracism and DEI constructs would be unnecessary. They have done well to draw attention to this vice, since we are living in particularly contentious times (though admittedly this is something of an evergreen issue, unfortunately).
Entire books have been given to the discussion of Christianity and consumerism, at least back to Rodney Clapp in 1998. The current rub in academia is the “necessity” of producing graduates with “skills.” Schools need to appear that they have something to offer to the world of business and industry. The final section indulges the privilege of teaching in the liberal arts, where both teacher and student have the “liberty” to step out of the centrifuge of consumerism to read and think communally. These tiny armies of leisure, assembled in the classrooms and reading groups of our country, can provide a leavening influence on the unrelenting competition of daily life.
A good use of this book might be for a retreat. A serious reader might take the six chapters for six days, working with a chapter each day, particularly with the suggested practices and reflection and discussion questions at the end of each one. We have writers’ workshops; how about readers’ workshops? Of course, the book should find its way into the curriculum of reader education in schools of education. Literature faculty in Christian schools at all levels would benefit from reading it. If you read books seriously, you should grapple with the ideas here. You might find a missing component in your literary battleplan.
The authors have accomplished their goal in giving us “resources to resist the vices that thwart our attention to the written word, that draw us into hateful postures toward others, and that cause us to prioritize monetary investments above all other goods.” Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts are owed our deep appreciation.
[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-comprehension-college.html
[2] https://www.arts.gov/impact/research/publications/arts-participation-patterns-2022-highlights-survey-public-participation-arts
[3] Deep Reading, 12-13.
J. Michael Garrett
Director & Librarian | Ryan Center for Biblical Studies | Union University