Why do we value reading? What do we mean when we say "reading" in academia?

As a librarian, I often find myself being engaged by people who want to talk about books and reading. Sometimes e-books and e-readers come up. Sometimes people LOVE their nook or Kindle or (insert latest thing here). Other people talk about how much they like the feel and smell of a paper book (which might be more accurately be referred to as a codex).

There are pros and cons to both. But as Ranganathan says "every book has a reader" and "every reader has a book".

But, there is something that seems to me is left out in the discussion. And that is that not all reading is the same. Reading billboards doesn't count in my public library's summer reading program. I doubt reading facebook statuses (even long ones) counts. And I have no concrete statistics that I'm going to look up to support this point, but I think it is almost self-evident. If you are talking about reading as interacting with text, then students today are, must be, reading more than ever. Text messages are written. They are reading them.

But that's not the right sort of reading, is it? There is something more that we must be talking about when we are talking about capital-R Reading.

I think that additional piece we are missing is "focused concentration on one topic". That's not a great phrase. Sometimes a good reader is struggling with a stream-of-consciousness piece that is doing everything but staying on topic, but they are focused on it. Somehow that is different than reading a twitter feed, even if sometimes they might look similar.

So, at essence, I think that "focus" is the thing. We are listening to, interacting with, decrypting the prose or poetry of one piece (usually one person). And deciding not to do anything else. Or if we notice our eyes have slipped down the page or screen while we were thinking about what to have for dinner, we either re-read or go eat dinner and come back to the book.

So the Reading we are looking for is not just exercising our literacy skills, but entering at least a semi-meditative state. Where we are consciously focusing on just one thing, if only for a little while. Which for me is different than reading facebook/twitter/reddit, or even most short magazine articles. The short bursts of text are diverting, and sometimes interesting, but if it says "you aren't going to believe number 7 on this list", they changes are that you forget what the list was even about within 30 minutes of finishing it.

So if communing with good, long, thoughtful fiction or non-fiction is like well-balanced meals for the mind, the "short burst" reading is like junk food. Yes, it was tasty/interesting, and I did read it, but I didn't have time to savour the ideas, digest them, and have them nurish me. So, take 15-20 minutes to read a monograph today. You may have already read hundreds or thousands of words, but you haven't really done your reading yet. Give yourself the gift of being transported to a place, in a codex or electronic book, where you only have one thing to focus on at a time. The world can wait, and you will be better prepared to deal with it, having taken time to Read.