But to come full circle, where does all of this “tiny reading” take us? Is it
a sign of trouble in the world of publishing—or, more importantly, in the
world of reading itself, even, maybe, in the mind of the reader—that the
very objects that are the vessels of our reading are shrinking physically
or portioning themselves into more manageable sections for our flag-
ging attention? Is this part of a larger process that is already in motion or
simply a short-term trend with less far-reaching—and unsettling—im-
plications? An article in the Guardian from August 25, 2018, titled “Skim
reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound” suggests
some possible answers. Describing a recent academic study of how read-
ing habits are changing in the digital age, Maryanne Wolf writes,
The “new norm” in reading is skimming, with word-spotting and brows-
ing through the text. Many readers now use an F or Z pattern when
reading in which they sample the first line and then word-spot through
the rest of the text. When the reading brain skims like this, it reduces
time allocated to deep reading processes. In other words, we don’t have
time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings, to perceive
beauty, and to create thoughts of the reader’s own.
I read the article on a smartphone while idly scrolling through Facebook. It had been shared in a post by a friend and fellow college English professor, which meant we were both either posting to or reading from our smartphones rather than reading any physical books, not
even tiny ones. What hope was there for the fate of reading if even we
with advanced degrees in literature had ceded so much territory to digital reading? The article opens with a nightmarish but all-too-familiar
description of sitting on an airplane and looking up only to discover
that nearly everyone around you—from the youngest child to the oldest
grown-up—is holding a screen in their hands, most displaying something other than a book.
But if, like Wolf in the Guardian, I begin to despair when I contemplate such a dystopic, book-free future—when I consider what may
become of the vast and delicate structures of the reading brain when
we begin to tamper with what the article points out is the 6,000-year-
old circuit that developed in tandem with literacy acquisition, enabling “some of our most important intellectual and affective processes
[such as] internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference;
