I've seen this in two recent essays. First, David Ulin, in a widely-circulated essay on "The Lost Art of Reading," which draws a link between reading and contemplation. He begins by recalling how

Sometime late last year — I don't remember when, exactly — I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read…. It isn't a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else's world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine.

So what was going on?

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

Reading matters, Ulin argues, because it "is an act of contemplation,"

perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves….

Contemplation is not only possible but necessary, especially in light of all the overload… [in an age where] time collapses into an ever-present now. How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect? This is where real reading comes in — because it demands that space, because by drawing us back from the present, it restores time to us in a fundamental way.

Second is Sven Birket's recent American Scholar essay on reading in the digital age.

I read novels in order to indulge in a concentrated and directed sort of inner activity that is not available in most of my daily transactions. This reading, more than anything else I do, parallels—and thereby tunes up, accentuates—my own inner life, which is ever associative, a shuttling between observation, memory, reflection, emotional recognition, and so forth. A good novel puts all these elements into play in its own unique fashion.

WE ALWAYS HEAR arguments about how the original time-passing function of the triple-decker novel has been rendered obsolete by competing media. What we hear less is the idea that the novel serves and embodies a certain interior pace, and that this has been shouted down (but not eliminated) by the transformations of modern life. Reading requires a synchronization of one’s reflective rhythms to those of the work.

Concentration is no longer a given; it has to be strategized, fought for. But when it is achieved it can yield experiences that are more rewarding for being singular and hard-won.