Excerpt: The Oakland apartment of Martha Mueller and her daughter, Nora, teems with books and magazines. Their library consists of fiction and nonfiction books, cookbooks and teen novels. Martha, a librarian, says she'll read just about anything.
"It can be the subject matter that attracts me or that perfectly written first sentence," she says.
She comprehends what she reads, too. Ask for her thoughts on the Millennium Trilogy by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson, for example, and she'll weave a tale about how the books, while interesting reads, seem overly violent. The main character is a victim, she says, and a sad one at that.
While Mueller loves sitting down with a good book, she may represent a vanishing breed. There is some concern in literary circles that, even though electronic readers grow increasingly popular and book sales are still strong, many people are finding it difficult to sit alone with one book and simply read to comprehend.
"Deep reading," or slow reading, is a sophisticated process in which people can critically think, reflect and understand the words they are looking at. With most, that means slowing down -- even stopping and rereading a page or paragraph if it doesn't sink in -- to really capture what the author is trying to say. Experts warn that without reading and really understanding what's being said, it is impossible to be an educated citizen of the world, a knowledgeable voter or even an imaginative thinker.
Related articles:
The art of slow reading. (The Guardian, 7/15/2010)
Thomas Newkirk makes the case for "slow reading". (6/18/2010)
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