There are three distinct and very real benefits to deep reading, asserts Ms. Wolf. These are increased empathy, reflection, and critical thinking. To C.S. Lewis, she reminds us, has been attributed the saying “We read to know that we are not alone.” E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End begins with the command “Only connect.” By sympathetic identification with others we meet in books, particularly with those who suffer, we make that connection, we share that suffering. We know we are not alone, and that we have a responsibility in life to engage with others. This is empathy or “compassionate imagination.” “When we read fiction,” the author tells us, “the brain actively simulates the consciousness of another person…It allows us to try on…what it means to be another person.” We become Hamlet. We become Anna Karenina, Scout Finch, or Pooh Bear.
Reflection is the ability after reading a text to draw upon and add to what the reader already knows from earlier reading and life experience, to see it all with “a quiet eye,” in order to lead readers “even deeper into insights from the text or beyond them … to the invisible presence of the mind that reads behind, within, and between the words.” This of course assumes that we already have a storehouse of experience to build upon, and it is for this reason that Ms. Wolf advocates early and repeated immersion in the reading pool, so as to increase what she calls the “internalized knowledge” acquired by the reader herself on her own initiative. She recalls the time when reading opened up new horizons for her that were wider than the “two-room eight-grade schoolhouse” of her childhood in rural Eldorado, Illinois. There is a becoming humility in her recollections of how little she once knew, and how indebted she realizes she later became to what she read. It explains why she says that “the last thing” our society needs is “what Socrates feared: young people thinking they know the truth before they ever begin the arduous practice of searching for it.” A life of reflection is “one in which—whatever genre we are reading—we enter a totally invisible realm… where we can contemplate all manner of human existence and ponder a universe whose real mysteries dwarf any of our imagination.”
Critical thinking, the third benefit of deep reading, requires a skeptical reader to examine a writer’s words carefully and dispassionately for “manipulative” or “superficial” information. He must also be open to changing his own mind. Mark Edmundson, whom Wolf quotes, again approvingly, asks “What good is this power of critical thought if you do not yourself believe something and are not open to having these beliefs modified?” Too many young people, Edmundson says, lack any such belief system. Perhaps they have not read and reflected enough. Ms. Wolf warns that, as a result, “their ability to learn the kind of critical thinking necessary for deeper understanding can become stunted. Intellectual rudderlessness and adherence to a way of thought that allows no questions are threats to critical thinking in us all.” Jordan Peterson, author of the best-selling Twelve Rules for Life has repeatedly made the same point—but that is the subject for another review.
Sir Francis Bacon memorably wrote “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Popcorn is not nutritious enough to constitute a good diet. Entertaining but eminently forgettable romances or thrillers likewise lack nutrition, and are best swallowed whole. The two books reviewed here, however, are to be chewed and digested. If we have an appetite for thoughtful reading, they will satisfy our hunger for clarity, common sense, and insight. They are good for our digestion—and for our direction.
