On Reading
I often get comments, from people who “don’t read” about how they can “read more” , the things they should read and they might like, even…
I often get comments, from people who “don’t read” about how they can “read more” , the things they should read and they might like, even how to develop “a habit of reading”. Here are some thoughts -
When the phrase “a habit of reading” is used, maybe you’re thinking of all those things that people like to call “good habit” — they tell you about them in a saint-like tone — like going to the gym, or flossing your teeth or drinking loads of water everyday, and it can definitely be something like that, with all the associated friction that carries with it, all the troublesomeness. I wouldn’t recommend thinking of it that way if you struggle to get up and exercise everyday. F0r me though, its more like an addiction, more a bad habit, and so it is for a lot of my friends who are readers. I almost can’t help reading. It is impossible to tell you an exact age when I started or why I started or whether I read early, as far back as I remember I was always reading. Everything was fair game. The stranger the better. Books were everything. Escape, adventure, knowledge. Then something happened *cue dramatic music* -the onset of adulthood (I like the words onset of — makes it sound like a disease which it kind of is, but that’s in another post maybe).
Between the ages of 21 and 25 I pretty much stopped reading. Maybe a novel here and there but not a single *serious* book was read. Don’t know why. Possibly, I was now required to go out in the world, find a job and a large part of that is being around people, meeting them, listening to them, talking to them. And people…are quite exhausting. Although time lost is always regretted, I have begun to view this period in a kinder light now. This time spent not reading has been useful in gaining exposure and experience and has provided something that is critical — context. It is difficult to get inspired by James Baldwin if you haven’t experienced racism, management textbooks make no sense till you’ve worked for a corporation, economics make no sense till you see the taxes that’ve been cut from your paycheck, relationship and psychology books seem like so much flowery nonsense till your colleague who you thought was a friend takes a shit on you in front of the boss, till your heart has been broken or you find yourself repeating the same mistakes again and again. There must be skin in the game — you have to be hurt or impacted by your experiences sufficiently to be able to empathize with other perspectives.
So I’m back in school, getting a Masters degree and there’s a lot of reading to be done for homework and such but I find my way to my old guilty pleasure — fiction, quite easily. This time, looking for matters meatier than exploding spaceships, I find the school library to be an amazing source of curation and discovery. I was also discouraged in class as complex philosophical issues were bottled down to power points, where the form had become more important than content, and where my classmates seemed to be at pains to avoid reading as much as possible. Here is also where I hear the same things again. “You read a lot right?”, “Man, I wish I had the habit of reading” etc.
My first reaction was — no you really don’t. There seems to be no relation between amount, quality of books a person has read and their success. I assure you, you can be immensely successful in the world, in every way, without ever having picked up a single book besides those necessary for literacy. I mean, look at Donald Trump or Salman Khan. Sure, you might miss a few jokes and references, but really, you’re not at a big loss.
Secondly — you’re reading a LOT already. If you’re on twitter, facebook, heck, even buzzfeed, the amount of text you’re consuming I wager is far higher than someone in your position 20, or even 10 years ago. Reams and reams of text. I’ve been on twitter a little less than 2 years and it tells me I have favorited 26000 tweets. At 140 chars/tweet and average word length of 5.1 words for English, that’s 700,000 words that were read, processed and liked, let alone the tweets I scroll through and ignore. That’s at least 10 books worth of text.
And yes, its all “legitimate” reading. Medium itself has some incredible text content and it doesn’t matter if you learnt something or gained a new insight from a blog post or a book. In fact, most of my learning has been from people writing about their experiences or insights on their blogs and we have current shared context. So you’re reading, you probably just don’t take it into account.
Third — and this goes back a little to the first point — people tend to conflate things. Do Bill Gates and Elon Musk read a lot? Probably. In fact, they do and they talk about it, and frequently refer to the books they’ve liked. They also play a lot of video games and refer to those as well. Do *all* extremely successful, creative people read? Nope. In fact, if you’re really good at things that make money, or just at the act of making money, you’re probably way better off being good with people skills than being aware of history or abstract theories. Books can help of course, they can provide information, help with learning new mental models, spark some new ideas about personality profiles and human behavior but there’s no better teacher than experience and a real mentor.
However — books are important —
If you want to think deeply about broad issues that run the world today, discrimination, the origins of money, geopolitics, the importance of culture, the emergence of technologies. Books provide, relatively quickly, what it would take you quite some time at learning from people, provided you can find those people in the first place and that they’re willing to talk to you. If you’re black, you’d be hard pressed to find a KKK member to explain what the hell is going on in person. Maybe you have other questions — what is bitcoin and is it the future (maybe), is climate change real? (yes), is intolerance in India on the rise (no, and more importantly what is “intolerance” anyway?) The best way to grapple with and digest these things remains books.
If you truly want your opinion to carry weight and for people who really know stuff to take you seriously. This isn’t over-the-drinks kinda stuff that you argue about that is fun to argue about. Talking to people who know things is always fun, but unless you can show that you’ve put in the time and effort to understand the material, you’ll miss out on a lot.
Apart from just the knowledge and information density of books, getting into the habit of reading extremely long and detailed analyses is an extremely useful skill when you’re trying to wrap your head around something new and complex. Maybe it is the international security situation (trying to figure out how things got this way), poverty levels, why the iPhone keeps getting better but doesn’t get cheaper, etc. — you will have to keep learning new ideas over the course of your lifetime.
Often, you might want to learn something from a writer offering insight to your industry, but the best writers par none read a whole lot more than they write, and they’ll say it too. It can be used as a reliable heuristic — if a writer writes more than they’ve read, they’re probably a terrible writer (This also explains a lot of the garbage on social media- straw man arguments, ad hominem attacks, anecdotal data, or just general terrible use of language that hurts the writer because they end up communicating the wrong idea). If this person has some value to offer to you, they’re going to end up using a lot of references that comes from their reading, which you might miss out on, or appreciate the nuance of an argument.
The trouble with having read a little bit is that then you must read more or you fall into the dangerous half knowledge trap. If you read The Secret and maybe a few books on positive psychology, initially, every new idea will feel like a revelation. That’s a trap. You’re better off not reading in that case. Like my man Mark Twain said — “if you don’t read, you’re no better off than someone who can’t” — except now you have more of a burden
Communication is oh so much easier. While I like to whine about jargon as much as the next person, familiarity with certain phrases involves books, peoples, events, entire ideas. If you’ve read Antifragile by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, I don’t have to explain black swans, fat tails, fat tony, I can just say X is antifragile, and there will be a lot of information packed in it. The more you read, the fewer words you will need to express things, information density keeps going up!
More ideas! As someone who isn’t really creative, I appreciate being able to mix and match ideas, especially from fiction. Cryptonomicon was required reading for anyone looking to get into the early Paypal team, Arthur C Clarke inspired scientists to invent satellites!
So in the continuum of my own evolving opinions, I find myself once again firmly on the side of encouraging more reading. You definitely have the time. There are so many great recommendation websites now. Most people who read are more than happy to make recommendations about books if you ask (nicely) and they really appreciate it if you then actually follow up on that recommendation at least enough to be able to say why you didn’t like the book and so dropped it.
Dropping books — that’s another idea. From feeling extremely guilty at being unable to finish books after starting them multiple times, I now find it extremely natural. Maybe it’s not the right time for your interest to be sufficiently piqued by the book, maybe the book is useful but dry and doesn’t have good flow. No guilt necessary. Just move on to another book and wait patiently, it’ll come back. Or not. You’ve got to avoid the sunk cost fallacy too. Sometimes the book is terrible and although it may have received many awards and many smart people recommend it, if you can’t get through it and are not enjoying the material, drop the damn thing and move on. Booker schnooker. Also, don’t get too caught up on the number of books you’ve read. There’s always that one person who will talk about how many books he’s read, or blah blah, or the tendency to set goals like “I’ll read one book a week” — if that works for you, great. If it doesn’t, don’t worry, keep on reading.
Read everywhere, on your phone, computer, on a kindle, on apps, hell, even real paper if your puny arms can still hold the weight. Read till your eyes ache and your head feels heavy. That’s probably because you’re grappling with concepts and doing things that your mind hasn’t in a long time — you’ll catch up pretty soon and then you won’t be able to stop. If you can open a brand new world — why wouldn’t you? Also, forget about speed reading. Maybe to skim through reports and short papers to get an idea of what they’re about. Speed reading is quite useless for actual learning unless you’re a legitimate savant.
So there you have it folks, some short thoughts on reading that’ve been floating around in my head for some time now. It’s easy to be in a bubble and surround yourself with people like you, especially in grad school so if there’s something I’ve missed here please let me know.
Enjoy!
PS- I finally wrote this down after reading an exchange between Ta Nehisi-Coates and Thomas Chatterton Williams regarding the latters reviews (yep, two reviews of the same book) of Coates’ book Between the World and Me which are very well written and can be found here -
LRB · Thomas Chatterton Williams · Loaded Dice: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Soon after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was…www.lrb.co.uk
A black man's stark, visceral experience of racism
Thomas Chatterton Williams is an American writer in Paris and the author of a memoir, "Losing My Cool." Between the…www.washingtonpost.com