Alison Garwood Jones

Marcel Proust (above) defined deep reading as the moment when,

“That which is the end of [the author’s] wisdom appears to us as the beginning of ours.” (1906)

Book editor Peter Dimock took it one step further, calling deep reading,

“A time of internal solitary consciousness.” (2010)

Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust & The Squid, pulled these quotes together in an article for “Nieman Reports” on reading in the digital age.

My friend Jonathan Menon, a fellow writer and loyal reader of this blog, kindly pointed me to this and several key sources I couldn’t find during the writing of my last blog post. Thanks Jonathan!

To recap: in my last blog post, Warp Speed, I tried to describe why I thought a balanced diet of breathless internet search and solitary deep reading (on paper) was essential to my happiness, sanity and the continued good health of my intellectual curiosity. If you feel the same way, I recommend printing out and studying the following articles:

• “Your paper brain and your Kindle brain aren’t the same thing”

(This article is based on a radio interview by Manoush Zomorodi, managing editor and host of WNYC’s New Tech City, with the Washington Post’s Mike Rosenwald. The podcast is embedded in the article)

• “Paper beats computer screens”

• “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens”