Summer is a Great Time For a Return to Slow Reading

An intriguing radio program came on the other day while I was driving: NPR’s 1A was doing a deep dive into the literacy gains in two states as reported on the most recent Nation’s Report Card. While most other states scored as terribly as usual, both Louisiana and Mississippi—poor, historically low-literacy states—made impressive gains between 2022 and 2024. The interviewees chalk this up to a return to phonics-based instruction and an increase in standardization. We’ve known that whole-language approaches are mostly bosh for a while now, so the former at least is good to see, even if the march toward standardization is somewhat worrisome for a localist like me.

Ineffective reading instruction is a major problem in the United States. The radio program made note of some other problems with reading in the US; in particular, that personal reading has gone down in general in the country. Not only are children not learning to read well, but their parents and grandparents are reading less and less. Since a family culture of reading is instrumental in building habits of reading in children, this is a problem in terms of literacy education, but it’s also a problem in terms of ongoing personal self-education, culture, and enjoyment of the written word. For many of us, reading is a joy. And for many of us, reading has also been the foundation of our engagement with our common culture.

I have had reason to reflect on reading of late, due to an extended hiccup in my vision, a problem which involved two separate incompetent optometrists, a twisted neck, and my personal introduction, at age 41, to presbyopia and the need for a new approach to seeing. For many months, I could barely read at all, and when I did try, I had to read extremely slowly. This was new for me, since I hadn’t read slowly since 2007 when I started graduate school. In that year, like most academics, I learned to skim strategically so that I could “read” a page, a chapter, or a whole book without actually casting my eyes upon every single word. 

Such fast-paced reading is effective, but alas, it is also rather frantic. And in the decade since I finished my degree, I’ve only become worse at the habit of fast reading. I noticed at some point that I had not only ceased reading every word but no longer seemed to be able to read every word even when I intended to do so. It just didn’t feel fast enough. 

For the first time since graduate school, I am really reading a book. I’m reading it in a way that will not allow me to forget details, or to read 150 pages at a time and finish in three days.

I am reading very differently these days, however. Having “saved my eyes” for only professional reading as much as possible in recent months, a few weeks ago I picked out a new pleasure read, Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway. Reading it—and I’m currently only about two-thirds of the way through after six weeks—has been an exercise in humility, in pain, in surrender, and in relief. You see, the only way I can read with any comfort at all is if I relax absolutely everything: my eyes, my face, my neck, my shoulders, my mind. It actually works best if I lie flat on my back on the couch and hold the book above me. This is what it takes for me to read these days, and this makes for very slow reading.

But for the first time since graduate school, it also means that I am really reading a book. I’m reading it in a way that will not allow me to forget details, or to read 150 pages at a time and finish in three days. I am walking with the characters—or even sitting in the old blue Studebaker with them as they drive toward New York despite intending to go to San Francisco—and I’m entering into the characters themselves much more. 

The mind-body pain experts I am also reading—for much, perhaps even most of the suffering I am experiencing now falls into this category—say that the body sends us non-structural pain to distract us from the unbearable feelings inside us. Amor Towles’ characters certainly have unbearable feelings. In walking with these characters through my slow, upside-down, flat-on-my-back read, will I be helped to enter more fully into myself? Is this why I could almost fall down crying with gratitude for every successful session of slow reading?

I do not know the answer to this yet, but I do know that the slow read is something worth reconsidering. Proper reading requires leisure, but those who read as part of their work rarely read leisurely, I think. And those who read merely on the internet may intend it as leisure, but how often does that leisure become co-opted by inflammation and outrage? That type of reading is surely not leisurely.

So I am glad to hear that the teaching of phonics is making a comeback, as children need to be fluent readers in order to ever experience the fullness of the literate world. But children also need their parents to read in a leisurely way, both to encourage the children to read and to make the parents less frenetic beings. Are you doing this kind of reading? Was I? What will it take to get us to slow down and “be,” whether with a book or otherwise?

In The Lincoln Highway, the main characters can never seem to turn in quite the right direction. I, trying to develop a leisurely, warm family culture and enrich my mind and career, turned to books for the past many years in entirely the wrong direction. Turns out you can’t get to California by driving East—at least, not until you turn around. Sometimes, we turn around willingly, and other times, life forces us into the right direction. 

For many of us, a return to slow reading might be a first step in that direction.

Dixie Dillon Lane is an American historian and essayist living in Virginia. Her writing can be found at Hearth & Field, Current, and Front Porch Republic, among other publications, as well as at her newsletter, TheHollow.substack.com.