The art of slow reading

Still reading? You’re probably in a dwindling minority. But no matter: a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.
“If you want the deep experience of a book, if you want to internalise it, to mix an author’s ideas with your own and make it a more personal experience, you have to read it slowly,” says Ottowa-based John Miedema, author of Slow Reading (2009). —Patrick Kingsley, The Guardian

it’s really quite easy, when I’m teaching a literature class, to spot the students who have not read the texts, but who are instead trying to depend on Spark Notes.  But I don’t want to penalize the students who haven’t done the readings… I want to recognize and encourage the students who do, and I want to encourage more students to want to do the readings.