Deep reading: 'an island in the sea of technology'

The Slow Reading Movement, a ramshackle bunch of writers and neuroscientists worried that the internet is destroying our ability to read books, has been the subject of much derision. The Guardian's Steven Poole dismissed the group as "old-school littérateurs", their "fantastically condescending" pronouncements out of touch with the fashion for doorstep novels. Part of me, the part that wants to believe in civilisation's forward march, is dying to agree. Don't countless surveys show that we're reading more and buying more books than ever?

And yet I can't help sighing at my own bookcase, stuffed with unread or part-read books. As a reader, I am fickle, promiscuous and easily distracted. Sitting at home, I can't concentrate for the pull of text messages and emails. Waiting at a bus stop I will invariably check Twitter before resuming Great Expectations. Has the internet affected my brain or was I born with the attention span of a flea?

In desperation, I turned to Slow Reading in a Hurried Age by David Mikics, a professor at the University of Houston. He claims to have written a handbook for how to survive what he portentously terms "the Age of Digital Distraction". Actually, the bulk of the book is an old-fashioned primer in how to read a literary text. Mikics's prescriptions for the act of reading – shut your laptop, don't answer your phone, go on an aeroplane – are disappointingly prosaic. The first part, however, is a thrilling polemic that had me nodding away in recognition. Far from being an anti-internet rant, this is a paean to deep reading and rereading. According to Mikics: "Reading should be a refuge, an island in the sea of technology that engulfs us all day long." I gave up his book before the end, but only so I could dive back into Dickens.