Devouring vs Digesting

20th-century commentators attacked the social discrimination of ‘consumption’ language [devouring, digesting]. Janice Radway’s ‘Reading is Not Eating’ (1986), for example, exposed elitist attitudes towards readers of popular romance, showing how metaphors can structure contemporary prejudice. The opposition between digesting and devouring became an unfashionable one after the 1980s, laden with politically incorrect connotations.

This defensiveness about popular reading now coincides with another phenomenon: the fear that reading might lose its cultural potency completely. This is why the language of reading-as-devouring is rehabilitated, with its unprecedented positive spin. ‘Devouring’ is reclaimed because, at its base, it signifies interest. And in a world where Facebook, WhatsApp and Netflix compete for our attention, any interest in good old-fashioned reading is encouraged at all costs.

Ironically, however, the tendency to endorse any kind of reading as good reading fosters new assumptions about what good reading entails. ‘Devouring’ implies a certain tempo – it idealises the fast-paced reading experience. It also promotes a certain kind of writing, as the Guardian’s description of the Booker panel shows. If a book grips us, if it sucks us in like a Hollywood thriller, it’s doing its ‘job’. Any work that elicits a slower, more ruminative reading experience is cast as defective. Any reading strategy that resists or disrupts the linear drive of the page-turner is dismissed.  

https://aeon.co/ideas/is-devouring-books-a-sign-of-superficiality-in-a-reader