In a clip that resurfaced recently, the polarizing influencer explained why. Books, he argued, are too slow. His brain is “far too advanced” to enjoy such a low-velocity medium: “I need action. I need constant chaos in my life to feel content.”
But what if the slowness of books is not a weakness but their virtue—and one that we, in this digital age, are at risk of losing?
The history of reading is a story of technological disruption, in which revolutionary innovations in the design and availability of books have yielded sweeping changes to how they are read.
As a scholar of the history of Christianity, I see again and again how cultural practices, including reading, depend on their material conditions. Until about the year 1000 C.E., most books were written in a style known as scriptio continua, which presented text as an unbroken stream of letters with no cues for where one word ended and the next began. These texts could not be skimmed. They had to be read aloud to “allow the ear to disentangle what to the eye seemed a continuous string of signs,” as the essayist and novelist Alberto Manguel put it.
In early medieval Europe, monasteries were the principal sites of both reading and book production. Monks and nuns read out loud for hours each day—slowly, contemplatively, and prayerfully, in a mode known as lectio divina. The absence of spacing between words compelled readers to linger and reread with care, rolling each syllable in the mouth like a sip of wine, attentive to every nuance. Reading the Bible and other spiritual classics in this way, explained the 12th-century Carthusian monk Guigo, offered “a ladder for monks by which they are lifted up from earth to heaven.”
But starting in the 11th century, a series of changes made silent reading more natural, and with that came faster reading. Spaces between words, along with chapter headings, indexes, and tables of contents, helped organize the expanding body of knowledge and made it all more readily accessible. Academics and bureaucrats welcomed the ability to consult books at a glance and extract information without reading them from beginning to end. Yet the ability to skim texts did not obviate the intellectual habits of critical reflection, contemplation, and discernment that came from slow, deep reading.
The printing press of the 15th century transformed our relationship with books by widening access to them. This triggered the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, and placed new pressure on intellectual life. Skimming was not just possible but necessary for anyone who wished to stay abreast of scholarly, political, or theological conversations.
By 1597, the scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon advised readers to reserve deep reading for a few, select books: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau duly lamented in 1761 that “the Frenchman reads a lot, but only new books; or to be precise, he leafs through them, not in order to read them but to be able to say that he has read them.” The rise and spread of magazines, journals, and newspapers increased the need to read with speed.
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Digitization is merely the latest innovation in reading, and we are still coming to terms with the cultural consequences. If skimming seemed necessary at the dawn of the Renaissance, it now feels unavoidable. The gains in information are undeniable, but the costs to attention, contemplation, and reflection are no less profound. As the economist and Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon famously observed: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
When everything is a click away, focusing on whatever is at hand is a struggle. Digital pages are cluttered with distractions—advertisements, video clips, pop-ups—and embedded links invite readers to move on not just mid-text, but mid-sentence. Studies show that even resisting a link extracts a cognitive cost.
The erosion of deep reading weakens our capacity to grasp complex ideas. This shallowing effect reshapes the public square, allowing brief snippets of emotionally charged content to crowd out nuance, and algorithms to reinforce preferences and prejudices. If deep reading cultivates empathy, the attention-fracturing, dopamine-hitting, scroll-spurring design of digital media often undermines it.
Designated e-readers can mitigate some of these problems, but research suggests that the absence of a third dimension—the fact that we do not physically turn pages—makes remembering what we read harder. The materiality of a printed book acts as a kind of memory aid. Think about the fact that we often recall where on a page we have read something; whether it was on the right or left, top or bottom.
Today, digital reading does not complement print so much as replace it. The result is a world in which, to borrow the literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf’s phrase, “skim reading is the new normal.” A growing proportion of people never engage with print, and many admit that they struggle to read deeply at all—even when they really want to. In a study of devotional digital reading among evangelical Christians, conducted by John Dyer of the Dallas Theological Seminary, one participant confessed: “It felt a little more like skimming an email to get it done rather than really studying God’s word.”
Anyone hoping to inspire more attentive reading must do more than invoke its cognitive or moral benefits, which reduces the act to “the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens,” the literary scholar Alan Jacobs has cautioned. Lost in this debate is the fact that slow and careful reading is a genuine pleasure. Indeed, it is one of the activities most associated with a state of focused immersion known as “flow.” Recently, while reading the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest novel, I found myself so immersed in the story that time and space seemed to dissolve. This kind of absorption, when the world recedes and the mind is wholly captured, is an experience not unlike religious ecstasy. And, as both historical evidence and neurological studies suggest, it is a state better facilitated by printed books than digital screens.
Even so, I often catch myself glancing at that stack of books on my desk, then at my watch, thinking there is hardly enough time to make a dent in the pile. So I send off a few emails instead, which feels productive. But in my anxiety about to-do lists and opportunity costs, I overlook the real pleasure of communing with text on a page. If I can indulge in this for even a few minutes, why wouldn’t I?
So I try to see reading not as a plate of vegetables, but as a glass of wine. Just as we don’t sip an earthy red in order to work our way through the stocks in a cellar, we shouldn’t read just to diminish the pile of books on our desk. There is pleasure in an attentive sip.
This kind of gratification is rather different from that which Andrew Tate tends to celebrate. But as a Dominican monk whom I met in Lund once told me: It is not the glutton who truly loves food, but the connoisseur. The richness of reading grows when we give it that most precious resource: time. Like rushing through the Louvre, skimming misses the point.
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