Literary Hub:  “…In the author’s estimation, the ceding of material books to the ephemeral gauze of the online posed a threat to our attention, to the ability of immersing ourselves within complex narrative or engaging in the almost-transcendent flow of reading. “Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority,” writes Birkerts. “More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away from ourselves.” If true in 1994, how much more accurate today? As an antidote to the virtual obliteration of the self, Birkerts returns to literature, arguing that in the “slow and meditative possession of a book,” what he calls “deep reading,” we are able to “keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.”