Wasted energy?

So I've slacked on my posting the past few days.  Work, Cubs game (Go Sox!), sermon preparation, and being the world's greatest dad pushed blogging to the wayside.  I still hope to write a review of Total Church within the next day or two.  Till then, the first paragraph of Trevor Logan's review of Alan Jacobs' new book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, the contents of which might mean that all my hard work creating my list of classics was wasted energy.  

It seems a rare accomplishment that a book on the pleasures of reading could actually pull off being pleasurable itself. But Alan Jacobs’ newest book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, does just that. It is a marvelous manifesto of sanity in an age of jeremiads about the modern predicament of attention loss on one hand, and those proud champions of distraction singing the hallelujah chorus of a world devoid of long-form books on the other. “Read at Whim” is Jacob’s advice and motto for a new generation of readers. Read, Jacobs proclaims, for the sheer pleasure of reading; simply for the hell of it. And by all means, don’t get bogged down by the authoritarians who smugly look down their noses at those who aren’t reading the “right” books on the “list.” 

Read the whole review.  By the way, I've read three other books by Alan Jacobs (The Narnian:  The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, Original Sin:  A Cultural History, Shaming the Devil:  Essays in Truth Telling) and thoroughly enjoyed all of them.  Jacobs is an English prof at Wheaton College (heads up Ann Curry:  the one in IL not MA) and a native Alabamian.  He's practically my cousin or something.