Why praise silent reading?

Because silent reading is how all solitary reading is done.

And for some of us, the enjoyment of reading and the enjoyment of silence go hand in hand.

This is an idle enjoyment that springs from our youth. 

But certainly do not let having a large family stop you. Steal the time where you can find it.

The twin siblings of reading and silence are there for any idle pleasure seeker wishing for an empty house and a day alone in bed.

Let’s be lovers of silence.

More silence, more reading.

Amen, amen, amen.

If I have overemphasized the solitary and silent aspects of reading in this book, that may be because I am myself temperamentally inclined to value solitude and silence more than most people, but it is also because they are endangered species of mental experience and because genuine reading is simply impossible without them.

-Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction (Amazon)

I will always be a lover of silence.

How can you not be?

I know, I know – I type this knowing of many extroverts that abhor silence in general, and solitude in particular – recharging themselves in ineration and relationship.

But I will never truly understand any of that.

More than four or five people feels like a draining chaos and confusion.

I want the occasional one-on-one interaction, but most of my days would look like this:

It’s cold outside. There is a fire going. And a pot of coffee is about to finish brewing. My laptop is open and plugged in on the couch. A stack of unread books is on the coffee table. And until the kids get home from school, and I devote my time completely to them, the house is empty.

The psychology of it all probably goes back to the only child thing.

Did a love of reading lead to enjoying silence?

Or did a love of silence lead me to reading? 

In explaining why he wrote his book In Pursuit of Silence, George Prochnik offers a telling statement: “I’ve always been a lover of silence, and this love is bound up with my passion for books. The writer Stefan Zweig once defined a book as a ‘handful of silence that assuages torment and unrest.’ For years before I began writing about the subject, I’d been feeling that silence was a diminishing natural resource. I wanted to understand whether this was more than a subjective impression. If so, why had the world become louder, and what could be done to reinstate silence as a value in our culture?” For Prochnik, then, the constancy of the sheer racket in our culture is a threat centrally, if not primarily, to books and reading. Zweig’s “handful of silence” slips through our hands when our ears are too frequently and too harshly assaulted.

-Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction