Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

David Mikics

“Like [Charles] Lamb, Mikics understands how modern culture discourages reading for pleasure—especially in an Internet world of short-lived but insistent information. Inviting readers into a less frenetic, more rewarding world, Mikics explores a series of literary masterpieces, showing how getting lost in a book is still the best way to find joys we really want… Readers acquire stimulating perspectives on individual works by Homer and Whitman, Dickens and Cather, Shakespeare and Chekov. But they also develop the intellectual poise to set one work into play with others, across boundaries of nationality, style, and history. An exceptional book whetting readers’ appetites for the savoring of many more.”—Bryce Christensen, Booklist (starred review)

“Mikics writes accessibly and with infectious enthusiasm on an impressively eclectic range of classic and contemporary texts. The reader who picks up this volume will likely already have been won over to Mikics’s argument, but the book’s pedagogical value for students is considerable.”—Publishers Weekly

“There is nothing else like Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. Mikics’s fourteen rules are quite wonderful, and I will in teaching adopt them myself.”—Harold Bloom

“There is much solid wisdom and penetrating advice in these pages. David Mikics is an inspired teacher, and he has brought his rich pedagogic imagination to life in this book, which teaches us to fall in love again with great literature. The examples are wonderfully apt and wide-ranging.”—Phillip Lopate, Hofstra University

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