The Reading Obsession
neckar.substack.com
neckar.substack.com
Against this background, we forget that reading is ultimately a form of consumption. It doesn’t inherently make the world a better place. It doesn’t, by itself, produce anything.
It matters a lot what you read. Reading can be a gateway to learning and fulfilment, but it can also be an addictive time-sink that leads nowhere. It’s a particular trap for those with an intellectual or introverted bent.
I fear that the good intentions of teachers trying to get kids to read more at all costs risks only doing half the job, and leaving a population without the media literacy to choose wisely which books to consume, or without the restraint to know when it’s time to stop reading and start acting.
It strikes me that one advantage of the written word is that the information density is so much higher than in other mediums. I generally watch the videos at 2x speed and still feel like I'm not learning as much when I read for an equivalent time.
However your point about "what" you read is well taken. Just as in watching youtube or movies you can read trash just as you can watch trash.
This is true, but it also goes beyond density. Long-form written works tend to have more room for breadth, depth and nuance. I find that's where much of the value sometimes comes from, e.g., I didn't get anything much out of the main text of the last non-fiction book I read, but three of the footnotes introduced me to other sources that did turn out to be useful for my work.
All of this is why I strongly favor reading. Well written books are just so worth sinking the time into, and then you have references/bibliographies. Yeah, you need to do something instead of "reading all the time" (stramwan from the article), but sometimes doing it correctly, or even just better, starts with a good book.
However, if you want to learn something, you gotta go at it from every direction: maybe first of all just try head on, try & fail. Then read books if available, of course, but search online, look for YouTube videos, seek out mentors, and so on. Just like everything else you can only read effectively for so many hours per day.
In the end I can only really speak for myself: reading books feels TO ME like one of the best possible uses of time. You would have to pry the books out of my cold dead hands, etc. So just out of fellow feeling I try to encourage others to read more. But whatever works for you!
For instance, watching Cosmos is probably a more intellectual pursuit than reading Twilight.
The other real problem is that even that pulp can sometimes have value above the material itself. Sometimes, even the most mass-marketed media can propose decent hypothetical questions and give cause for self-reflection.
Is there a good source to teach me that skill?
Edmund Burke
I think the best explanation of how this all works is to liken it to listening to music: everyone can listen to music. Not everyone understands or appreciates a wide variety of music, or gets as much out of it as some do. One encounters "jazz is just noise" or "hip-hop is just noise", et c., opinions with some frequency—much as one encounters "the 'classics' are overrated, boring crap", when it comes to fiction, for example. A major part of learning to read well is internalizing the process of experiencing new genres or ways of expression, which one may not enjoy at first, just as many experience some discomfort and very little pleasure the first time they deliberately try to broaden their musical-appreciation horizons. This may mean reading texts about the texts to better understand them, or watching lectures, but it also means a whole lot of sheer exposure to the works themselves, just as it does with music.
If there's a single piece of advice I could give, it'd be to ask more questions, more often. Interrogate the text. What's wrong with this assertion, if anything? Does the text go on to address any problems I can see? If it does, is that satisfying? Do others see this problem? If not, what did I miss? Is this confidently-stated premise or postulate reasonable? If not, can the argument stand without it? Why is this character in this story? What's the structural reason this scene exists? If it seems pointless, but this work is very well-regarded, I'm probably missing something—what might that be? Does it have thematic or textural import that I'm failing to spot, and so, perhaps, missing much of the message of the work? Et c.
However, a lot of reading failures I see among Web posters are so basic that all the above is almost too advanced, and I don't know exactly how to address those problems. Simple reading comprehension failures that, incredibly, persist even when pointed out; misunderstanding how human language works, often taking the form of excessively literal readings that become weirdly and unhelpfully adversarial while failing to engage what the text was actually expressing; that kind of thing. This is part of what's behind the extreme over-explaining and frequent shouldn't-be-necessary disclaimers in writing by seasoned Web forum posters—I have a suspicion that readers who are that bad are not, in fact, extremely common, but are just, for whatever reason, unusually likely to engage in Web discussions, leading to the standard, gratingly-poor writing style of Web forums, aimed at pre-empting bad readers from posting useless flames or diversions from the topic, which efforts are still, often, insufficient.
I see you, too, have seen people not understanding that Humbert Humbert is not supposed to be liked, and that the whole book is him trying to justify his actions. God, the number of people who misunderstand Lolita because they can't accept anything about it except at face value is way too high.
> I have a suspicion that readers who are that bad are not, in fact, extremely common, but are just, for whatever reason, unusually likely to engage in Web discussions
Sadly, bad readers are that common. I taught at a high school, and even some of the other teachers were bad readers, and most the students couldn't get anything but a very literal interpretation out of any text they read.
Books are no exception.
I particularly dislike the common belief that nonfiction is inherently superior as a form of media. Most nonfiction reads like an NYT article that ran a little too long. Even worse are pop-nonfiction books that read like a VOX article that ran too long. A lot of fiction captures ideas around antropology, sociology, politics and philosophy better than non-fiction books explicitly abput them.
Even books with good content tend to be either too fictionalized to facilitate readability or drab to the point of becoming a text book. Infact, I'd say that on the balance a random well reviewed fiction novel can be expected to be a lot more intellectually rewarding.
That being said, every once in a while I run into a book like 'why the west rules for now' and it somehow manages to be all of informative, entertaining, relevant and academically rigorous. I wish goodreads had a filter that allowed me exclusively find such books. Talk about pipe dreams.
Ha, my hot take - book lovers love to have an item/collectible rather than the content. It's mostly signaling and, for some people, reading is quite fun (a nice bonus!).
No wonder - the numbers of active readers are very low, but all those self-help gurus and experts praising books are doing a disservice to the point of reading books - enjoying them, highlighting, making it your own. Later a problem arises - some of my friends complained that they don't remember a lot from read books. Of course, since reading is A RiTuAl!
It's amusing when I say that 'I hate books'. But usually I read more (books) than my peers, I just don't like the form factor of the book. It's heavy, making notes is clunky compared to Kindle or any other ereader. I don't care about all that fluff and 'smell of paper'.
Reminds me of this funny twitter drama when one author was cutting big books into smaller pieces: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvgmxd/cutting-books-in-half...
I think it's that they (I guess I'd say we) love to have the item _in addition_ to the content. I read books because I like to read. I will happily acknowledge that I buy physical books for mostly nostalgic reasons, and for the added benefit that I can give/lend them to people easily. Physical books were such a massive part of my childhood that the experience of reading one conjures up decades of positive memories and emotions.
That said I don't think it's a signaling thing, really. At least not for most folks. I mean I don't think there are very many people out there accumulating books in the hopes that people who come to their house will see them and think something about them.
Now I have two young children, and I've gradually started to build up a collection of physical books at home - not just children's books, but books for myself as well. I realized at some point that:
* I want them to know (I would even say "take for granted") that we value reading
* I want them to have easy access to lots of good books at or slightly above their current reading/maturity level
* I want them to see the sort of things their parents are interested in (they rarely see me reading for pleasure, even though it's one of my favorite things to do, because I mostly do that when they're asleep).
There is definitely an intentional signalling component to this, but it's not about signalling to the outside world for status, it's about signalling to our kids/each other about the kinds of things that we value.
In addition:
> Physical books were such a massive part of my childhood that the experience of reading one conjures up decades of positive memories and emotions
My hope is that we can create an environment for them that is conducive to exactly this sort of experience.
As for the third point: when I was a kid I stumbled upon a collection of books at my grandmother's house, mostly sci-fi (Dune, Asimov, some Vonnegut), that my Dad had read when he was young. It introduced me to a whole world of literature that would become very important to me, and also gave me a glimpse into a side of his personality that I wasn't aware of.
This is one thing smartphones have destroyed and no one ever mentions. From the ouside you can't know what someone is doing when they are on their phone. That's ok when it's strangers in the underground.
But at home 90% of what my wife does is on her phone whether it be reading, watching photos, shopping, ... and to me it's a sort of inaccessible world.
Paper books are a very different form factor, with some definite UI benefits over ebooks—though how important those are depends on the book, and what the reader's doing with it. The size & weight cost of paper books is, undeniably, huge, though. (also, they're impossible to pirate in bulk at ~zero cost...)
Put it this way: if ebook readers—the devices themselves—cost the same as paper books, but each one could only hold one book, and that one book couldn't be replaced, I don't think many people would choose them over paper books. The size and weight factors are a huge benefit, but they're also nearly all of the benefit, so if that's much reduced, there's not a lot left to recommend ebooks over paper books. Whatever's left of their advantages wouldn't have been anywhere near enough to create a market for them. Paper book UI is really good—but damn, are they heavy and bulky.
The first commercially successful category of e-book was the e-dictionary, in the early 2000s. Being able to carry in your pocket the equivalent of a 2000-page tome and search it instantly was a gamechanger for language learners and translators, so people were willing to pay $200-$400 for it.
But, as a counterpoint - I buy physical books because (a) my eyes hurt when reading an e-reader; (b) paper-white are laggy so far, that's annoying; and (c) I am easily, EASILY distracted when on a device that faces the internet. The only way to get immediate response, no eye-strain, and no access to technology is a physical book.
You are not supposed to get eye strain with e-paper. There's no light source. I mean, newer ones have 'backlight', but you can just turn it off. For me it's good because I can make the font bigger, so less eye strain.
Also, at least for a kindle paperwhite (older 2018 model, I think), it's very slow to do anything on the internet, so I never used it save for checking the next volume of a book on the amazon store.
That's great! Guess what the vast majority of people don't have access to? Really great mentors. Unless, and hear me out here, those mentors wrote down their wisdom, say some great work of philosophy[0] or even a groundbreaking technical work[1]. Even better, you can access these founts of knowledge after their authors have passed on!
That's fair, and it might even lead to the truism that access to a mediocre mentor could actually have better results than reading books by the best mentors. But we must also take into account that different people learn best differently.
Me, I've never really gotten much out of the mentor/mentee model, possibly because I've never had a good mentor. But I feel it goes farther than that - even good lectures have problems holding my attention, and for reasons said elsewhere in the comments, I've found well-developed written sources to be immeasurably beneficial to my learning.
One thing that strikes me is I wonder if there's any correlation to those who can work well remotely and those who learn better from books. This whole "in-person is always better" smacks of the chauvinism the corporate world suffers from in regards to work sites.
That said, yeah, you have to apply and practice eventually. And having someone to imitate or model after, or better yet impart constructive criticism, is invaluable. But there's a whole heck of a lot that can be imparted from reading a book.
Here is a good succinct and practical advice from Naval:
"Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years" (https://mobile.twitter.com/naval/status/871415571551629312?l...)
Just one hour! Doing that consistently can be hard but very beneficial.
It might seem as not much, but today - when everyone and everything screams for your attention - devoting one hour for a particular activity and doing it consistently over a long period of time (7 years seems ridiculous) can be a very difficult task indeed.
As a professional athlete, you need to be constant watching film so you know how other players are playing and what they're doing.
However, at some point you also need to be on the court practicing and playing games so you can use that knowledge for something productive.
Being too obsessed with reading would be like a pro athlete who only watches film and never plays the game. At some point, you have to be playing the game. Otherwise, you're no different than just an obsessive sports fan.
If you spend the next 50 years just reading, you will realize you missed the opportunity to make an impact on the world, whatever your goals are. If you just act randomly, you probably won't get anywhere either. And if you only read and act alone, you probably are limiting both your opportunities to learn and your opportunities to leverage your efforts by working with others.
“I just sit in my office and read all day.” - Warren Buffett
Are people really taking this literally? Maybe they are, now that you at least get the impression can sit in your office and surf the web all day. You know that a lot of "journalists" actually do that, and that's why they're so shallow and prone to groupthink.
A real journalist, and a real investor, goes out and talks to people, and finds the information that hasn't made its way onto paper or the web yet.
No it's not. So maybe this is a worthwhile article after all.
> No it's not. So maybe this is a worthwhile article after all.
Shit, not even all written material is on the web. Nowhere close! Records and books alike. It's typical to hit a wall when researching on the web, beyond which one cannot progress without actual, paper books, or a visit to some particular physical institution or library, often only one step past Wikipedia's reference list for a topic, to give a sense of how shallow the Web's coverage of many topics is. Sometimes, even those first-tier references are only available on paper, without so much as an e-book available.
Part of what bothers me is that he lumps together all "reading" (in his defense, often defenders of reading do the same). If you're reading and not thinking, not asking questions, hell even just not vividly visualizing fiction, then yeah, "reading" won't be much better than TV.
And yeah, you can read too much; you can do too much of anything, which is why I feel strongly that the vast majority of people spend too much time consuming media in the form of TV/streaming and Internet, and not enough time reading well researched books/papers and thinking about them.
The "reading" I (and I suspect others) would recommend is:
1. Find really good material.
2. Read it deliberately, with an active mind.
3. Act on that material, let it change your life.Oh my god, there a few surer tells that I ought not engage a person in conversation about books than their identifying very publicly as a capital-R Reader. Especially if they're wearing or carrying something with a pro-reading message—"READING IS SEXY", "READ!". I don't get why reading, in particular, is like that. Fans of blockbuster films or Hallmark holiday movies don't go around putting bumper stickers on their car that read "FILM LOVER" or wearing shirts that read "WATCH MORE MOVIES".
To be clear, I absolutely and genuinely love all kinds of total garbage in a variety of media and it is entirely fine to enjoy that kind of thing—I just don't get why those become part of an I'm-a-Reader-and-that-matters-a-whole-bunch identity with reading, but not with other things.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/38019-reading-after-a-certa...
Why books don't work "In this section we’ve seen that, like lectures, non-fiction books don’t work because they lack a functioning cognitive model. Instead, like lectures, they’re (accidentally, invisibly) built on a faulty idea about how people learn: transmissionism. When books do work, it’s generally for readers who deploy skillful metacognition to engage effectively with the book’s ideas. This kind of metacognition is unavailable to many readers and taxing for the rest. Books aren’t pulling their weight. Textbooks do more to help, but they still foist most of the metacognition onto the reader, and they ignore many important ideas about how people learn."
Worth reading: https://andymatuschak.org/books/
I read about five hours a day (about a third of my waking hours) but have no illusion that it is of any specific value. It’s just a compulsion I’ve had all my life. I don’t consider it any different from others playing video games — not a virtue and perhaps tending towards vice.
therefore, for me, reading is soooo much better. though video lectures at least allow you to pause, its still too little signal density with too much noise, usually.
Also I am a very visual learner, and I use mental maps & 3D/4D system models inside my mind, and build/run little simulations in there as part of understanding and leveraging that knowledge. reading text & diagram inputs "fit" with that brain style better than traditional classroom lectures
pull (on demand, when ready) rather than push
In order to get any truly deep thinking (or masterful practice of anything for that matter) done, you need to have focus and that almost always means alone without interruptions, at your own pace. Yeah, yeah, you need input to correct mistakes, but that's mostly at the beginning anyway, before one develops the mental model to self-correct. And I learned that by reading Ericsson's "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise".
> Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius. - Edward Gibbon
Non fiction is also OK but generally less appropriate for reading cover to cover. Non fiction is great for just getting what you need and getting out. The way you learn physics, for example, is not by reading physics books, it's by solving problems. By experiencing the real thing.
Reading fiction has self contained benefit. Reading non fiction is only useful to the extent to which you can apply this information in your daily life.
One of the biggest emotional hits to me was "Der Untergang", or "Downfall" in English (aka: Angry Hitler Meme movie). Spending 1-week in Hitler's shoes, with an incredible amount of detail / historical accuracy, brought me a huge amount of appreciation for what was going on during WW2, in a way that few other stories (be it reading, anime, movies, TV-series) have ever affected me before.
Non-fiction, when done well, can give you a hugely different perspective on life.
* Technically, you spend ~1 week in Traudl Junge's shoes, who serves as Hitler's personal secretary. But she was in the room when all major events happened: from Hitler's Birthday (aka: when the Russians started shelling Berlin), to the final defense plans, to the Goring Telegram, to helping Hitler write his final will / testament. To the planning of Hitler's suicide (which wasn't easy in the circumstances). To helping write the last will/testament to Goebbel + those events. To the escape from the bunker while surrounded by Russian troops.
-----------
Since this story is "real", it just hits differently. Even though Hitler + Goebbel were probably the most evil people on Earth at that time... the perspective of "Downfall" was incredibly human. There's a story to be told here about the expectations of leadership, the stress of losing, the worries about your worldview going extinct, etc. etc.
> Reading non fiction is only useful to the extent to which you can apply this information in your daily life.
I hope I'll never be trapped in a bunker contemplating angry Soviet capture/torture vs Suicide. But the story that contemplates the two choices really gives you an understanding of the final WW2 events much better.
I am less certain that pure reading is the best way to get better at it. In general, using skills matters. If you just know the theory, you're already at a disadvantage. If you only know the basic ideas via indirect observation, it's worse.
All of these things - practice, theory, observation in the wild - reinforce each other.
Time and money … mannn … money and time and what we really want.
I was about to subscribe to Chris’ Atom feed – only to realise that would just add to the excessive consumption anxiety. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"“I just sit in my office and read all day.” - Warren Buffett"
I think they get the causality wrong.
It's not like he became so rich by reading, same for bill gates. He had to actually do the thing that which made him rich. Once you get billions then I guess you can spend all day reading.
If you are a dividend (re)investor for 90 years, you too could be rich one day!
But I just want to read (and play video games and socialize).
Reading 500 pages is a large undertaking. Proficient readers manage ~0.8 pages/minute. That is ~6.5 hours just reading, without any time taken to organize the knowledge. And reading at that speed is extremely hard mental effort, you're pretty much exhausted at the end of it.
Sure, they could be an extremely fast reader and get it done in 5 hours. Still, without deeper comprehension, or organization.
It very much matters to point out that the recommendation is fundamentally self-aggrandizement more than truth.
It is very difficult to be wrong while you're reading. It's much easier for someone who's actually talking to you to show you that an opinion you hold is incorrect. And you can't improve at anything without learning when you're wrong.