On pretending to have read books
thecritic.co.uk
thecritic.co.uk
Anyway, I think there are at least three kinds of reading.
The one where you skim some reviews and read twenty pages is one of them. You can do this in order to just be able to say you've read something without putting in the "work", but you can also do this as part of a serious study of some subject: For example, maybe I only need to read a specific chapter in a book to answer a question I have, or I only need to check every page that mentions a specific keyword related to what I'm studying.
Another way of reading is when you march through a book, page-by-page, as quickly as possible. When you get to the last page you say "done" and then you move on. A few months later, all you mat remember about the book is a outline of the plot, in a novel, or maybe one or two important points, in a non-fiction book.
(I think listening to books in audiobook format is another way of reading, but in practice it's often very close to this second form)
The last one is when you read the book, then think about it, then read it again, then read about it, then keep reading it over and over for the rest of your life.
The latter is much more rewarding, but my point is not that one is better than the other, but that all of these are separate activities that can legitimately be called reading. Maybe we need more words for reading.
It would rather negate the entertainment value, and would feel more like work, if I had to take notes for a book club style experience, though as evidenced by the popularity of book clubs, there's plenty of people who feel different.
Agree. Would love to see examples from people of books that fall in this category. I assume it is a short list for most people.
I got pulled into Dostoyevsky through Brothers K, which led me to Notes eventually.
Do you know what translation of Notes you read? I think I read P&V, and if I read it again I'd want to try something else
A nice comparison: https://web.archive.org/web/20131109182920/http://comparetra...
1984
Stranger In A Strange Land
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
Time Enough For Love
Friday
The Crying Of Lot 49
Seveneves
Neuromancer
I’ve read all of these at least 4 times, with reading-about-them in between.
I usually pick one up to re-read just a part of it, then I get sucked in and before I know it I’ve re-read the whole thing.
So far I have only re-read Inversions and Excession, the two that were the most fun the first time through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y83UkvHpYk
Why would you pretend to have read a ~300 page book, just read the bloody thing.
I read Seveneves once from the library and wouldn't mind reading it again though.
I've read The Sprawl books (trilogy?), but accidentally did it out of order and separated by years, so it took me an embarrassingly long time to make some connections. I should read them again in order this time!
There's some obvious stuff:
- Proust
- Tolstoy, Dostoevsky
- Joyce (although to be fair, how can you tell?)
- Probably David Foster Wallace
- Knuth :)But it's not uncommon for people to do this with religious texts, too. Reading for devotion, for understanding, out of a since of obligation, whatever. Doesn't matter: it's a distinct way of interacting with books, different from reading a potboiler mystery novel.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 triggered in me an abiding fascination with the operation of the political process.
I disagree that it's not better...
The "march through a book, page-by-page, as quickly as possible" method is wasteful of your time. That just seems like a task for the sake of being able to say "i've read it", and even if someone is that pretentious, it's a pretty low return on investment - I say screw that, you can only read so many books in your life, read the ones that genuinely interest you at that moment in time. Even if you don't finish or read it front to back contiguously without large breaks, at least the content is meaningful to you while you read it, so you get the most from your time spent reading.
This is something I learned the hard way back in school. Whenever I actually read the book/chapter/article I would almost invariably do way worse on the quiz or essay compared to when I "cheated" by only reading a couple of summaries or reviews.
In fact, I really enjoyed reading Eco's Name of the Rose, but I didn't get OP's palimpsest reference and even after looking it up I still don't remember the exact context where this came up. I remember the novel more for it's retelling of early Franciscan history and the proto-Protestant movements in medieval Europe, and not so much for the whodunit mystery plot.
The reason is that a book has so much content that every reader will have a completely different takeaway and will remember different parts of it. However, most of the so-called classics have an semi "official" interpretation and "memorable quotes" that you're supposed to bring up.
That's not to encourage people to skip reading books, though. Reading some books can be a very pleasurable experience in itself in the same way that you wouldn't get the same experience from just reading the plot of a musical play or watching it in fast-forward.
As an adult, I've now read a lot of the classics I was supposed to have read in High School, and wish I could go back and tell my knucklehead past self to just read them, as they are actually very good.
I doubt it would have done any good. There's so much in those great books that teenagers won't appreciate. You might read Moby Dick at that age and think it's a just story about a guy chasing a whale, with a lot of digressions.
I’m middle-aged, read a lot, but Moby Duck is just about chasing a whale to me. I just don’t recognise the metaphors and deeper meanings, unless somebody with a word rotator mind explains it (or I read the Cliff’s notes - which I didn’t get either).
I'm not going to be able to get that image out of my head all day long.
Ahab, for instance, is exactly what he appears to be: a person obsessed with getting revenge on a whale. But Melville's portrayal of Ahab is psychologically rich enough to contain many elements which are common to questionably-attainable obsessions in general, and this is what people are usually talking about when they talk about literary symbolism. Ahab's relationship with the whale isn't a metaphor for man's search for meaning any more than it's a metaphor for my struggle to get my coworkers to stop throwing denormalized garbage in the schema - but it resembles both of them, and many other things besides.
https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/editions/versions-of-...
The glory of English literature is that it varies widely. Want a swashbuckle? Got it--here's "Ivanhoe". Want a soap opera? "Tom Jones". All manner of surreal? Roald Dahl. Incredibly dark humor? Late Mark Twain.
Even when someone says "I don't like author <X>.", if someone explains what they don't like, you can often find a different story that they like just fine.
By contrast, forcing "Pride and Prejudice" or "Wuthering Heights" onto a ninth grade teenager who digs surreal humor is just going to make them want to give up on reading completely.
With the latter idea in mind, he argues that there's no solutions for these problems as most people do not believe it's a problem that needs cured and secondly it's a problem unlikely to be fixed, only to be innovated upon.
> "that [people] were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking"
Books can be some of the highest quality sources of information in today's age. Especially titles like Postman's who had warned about these issues in the 80s building upon the work of McLuhan regarding "The medium is the message" arguing that mediums are not neutral and can have us ignoring the shifting landscape underneath our feet by unwittingly consuming junk content.
I guess this is the shame hook of the article. I don't think we're illiterate, probably the opposite. The amount of knowledge I gain by reading things other than books far surpasses the amount of knowledge I've gained reading books, and I've read a lot of them.
What's the point of reading books? Gaining knowledge. What's the point of riding a horse? Travel. Just because one method of doing a thing is losing popularity doesn't mean we are illiterate or we don't travel.
In fact, I think it's the opposite. I can read a 500 page book about a topic and retain maybe 1/10th of it after a year. I can read a wikipedia article on the same subject and retain 90% of it a year later. The latter is certainly better for a broad base of knowledge for the curious.
He is stating we are becoming a non-reading society. Literacy is about being able to read or write, not the ability to learn new things. You may be correct we are learning a lot more about the world, but we aren't doing it so through the medium of books. I would suggest audio or visual mediums are the new deliverers of information, with context given by Wikipedia.
The value he is presenting, from my point of view, is not pure knowledge gaining, but communal knowledge. At the beginning, he is giving his perspective of a time when everyone read at least a certain set of books, but the island is vast and so has the wondrous coastline to a negative impact.
Also, I could read a Wikipedia article and retain nothing and read a 500 page book and think about it weekly. Interest in the topic is important to retention so is the quality of the book.
I say these things as I watch three hours of YouTube a day... smh.
I’ve reached an age where some books I’ve kept because I’ve read twice, I have accepted that I likely won’t read a fourth time (and also running out of places to put them) so I have made the possibly foolish possibly mature choice to start Mary Kondo’ing my book collection, with a send off. Read them once more, then surrender them to a young person or the used bookstore.
The last and main series I parted with was Dune, which I started reading when the first rumors of Villeneuve’s adaptation came out. My recollection of the last three books was quite different, perhaps a reflection of how uptight I was at the first reading, where I found the whole Matre story arc to be quite salacious. The reread was a quite different experience and I’ll be curious to see what happens with Foundation, and Thad Williams.
I continue pushing thought but I have to admit it's still hard. Especially because books that worth it are hard. They are not something you mindlessly consume like a movie or (in a lesser degree) a theater play. I don't know how people manage to read hard books when they also work on something even somewhat challenging on a day to day basis.
So yes, faking you read a book is stupid and easily recognizable to someone who actually did, but on the other hand, any way to shorten the effort needed to read books is welcomed. Especially when they are so many produced now with SEO-like content that just waste your time.
I used to read books (voraciously)/play games when I was younger (until lates 20s, getting married), but then I found it hard to invest time/emotions into a book/game that could be dreadful. It's a significant time sink, especially as I tend to be a completionist.
I'm slowly getting into games again, mainly because I realized it's a better use of my time that's passive activities like television, so perhaps there is still hope for books in my life.
The visualization of scenes in a book also push me away from drama and horror book, because it’s so realistic in my head. It’s feel like I watching some private scenes or in a nightmare.
[1]https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2019/introducing-the...
If they're aiming for a London Review of Books kind of space that makes sense - LRB is decidedly left wing if pretty heterodox and broad-minded - but for the political commentary space I would have thought the Spectator already covered a contrarian conservative perspective fairly well. But then I guess I'm not in their target market.
[Edit: I see they have got Toby Young on their editorial board. Definitely Conservative (as well as conservative), then.]
> Ossified thought and a lack of intellectual rigour are depressing features of all sides of our political and cultural debate.
It’s pretty clear they’re trying to dress up their agenda-ed editorials as “common sense” compromise but if middle-of-the-road were truly the publication’s aim I can’t imagine Haskings would have had any interest in funding it.
> You don’t have to go fully commando, of course. There are plenty of briefs available.
"And so (sorry, Orwell, but my guilt is too great to avoid the passive voice) certain strategies have evolved."
This sentence isn't in the passive voice. ("Have been evolved" would be.) I would expect a good editor to be a grammar expert and catch that error.
* "as easily remedied" seems to be an orphaned comparison to a parallel structure in an early paragraph that's been removed? At least, that's the way I can make it make most sense. As it stands: as easily remedied as what?
* "With genres such as “speculative fiction” that used to be for comics and cranks now taken seriously, and made-up genres like psycho-geography and ethnography sprouting all the time, not to mention the world’s back catalogue being available on one’s phone (and of course on-line titles like The Critic spewing essential verbiage like a broken main into the thoroughfare of discourse 24 hours a day), it is quite impossible to keep up or even to tread water." A decent editor doesn't let this sentence see the light of print. Even setting aside the Gish gallop of off-topic contrarian dinner-party remarks, you just... don't need that broken main simile. In a sentence that long, you just don't have the breath to spend.
* "maintaining well-articulated and informed opinions becomes ever more demanding on our time" Well-articulated has to do with writing rather than reading, and surely it's "demanding of" not "demanding on"? That latter would be one I'm trying to assume is a Briticism.
* "The diagnosis focuses on posited aromatic chemicals in ink or the ominous quiet that predominates and subconsciously reminds us of exam halls." "Predominates" is clear enough used on its own, but in this place in the structure, it almost seems like it's being applied transitively to "exam halls".
* "Now, over ten trillion new titles[...]" "Some, we’ve read." Not all ungrammatical conversational structures are bad, but those commas are just odd in places where the reading is far clearer without them. It's as if the advice that in English one should read a comma aloud with a pause had been taken as a bijective map...
* "When I mentioned the theme of this piece, for instance, my daughter immediately and shamelessly confessed to having recently completed an English essay on a text that she hadn’t even opened, based purely on the class discussion that she had attended on the first day back after a week off with Covid." Just split it into two sentences! It doesn't all have to go in one!
* "I affected to look disapproving but this, I venture, may well prove a more valuable skill set than the one ostensibly being tested." The "this" would naturally bind to "affected to look disapproving" without the object of the disapproval featuring somewhere in the first independent clause.
* "Students have long speculated whether the York Notes couldn’t tell them all there was to know about Crime and Punishment." I can't figure out why "couldn't" is there in the negative, since "whether" normally implies both positive and negative options.
* "Nowadays even that level of investment, financial and temporal, is unnecessary." Commas don't set this off enough from the rest of the sentence, so it doesn't read smoothly that "financial and temporal" applies to "investment" rather than "level".
* "one from say, the LRB or Prospect, just so you know what Lefty nonsense someone is likely to spout;" Given all the little asides set off with pairs of commas in this piece, how was the comma between "from" and "say" missed? Similarly, "There are thousands of these of course, but Amazon has" seems to be missing a comma between "these" and "of".
* "Pair this with the first twenty pages of the book itself, downloaded as a free Kindle “sample”, to familiarise oneself with the author’s stated intentions and stylistic irregularities and you are in a better place[...]" You can use a general "you", and you can use "one" for the same purpose, but to use both in the same sentence is sloppy as hell.
* If they're not using the serial comma, is it normal to still include a serial semicolon in the same place? Honest question.
* "It indicates an insightful, often amusing and pithy contribution — certainly pithier than the books that now emerge from the industrial bread-making approach taken by modern publishing, to get a decent magazine article up to 100,000 words." What are we to make of the comma after "publishing"? If the "to get a [...]" chunk was meant to attach to the "contribution", wouldn't the comma instead be another dash? If it's meant to attach to "approach", why is it there at all?
* "Once you’ve read the “Helpful” reviews, if you want to be really bulletproof, scan the three- and four-stars too." This is garden pathy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence) verging on ambiguously structured. Imagine you read just this sentence with the "too" chopped off. You wouldn't be able to tell whether "if you want to be really bulletproof" applies to "[reading]" the 'Helpful' reviews" or to "[scanning] the three- and four-stars too." One can understand it in context and with the "too", but the sentence feels clunky because the structure doesn't reflect its logic clearly.
* "Besides, if it weren’t for quotation books I doubt many of us would know Ralph Waldo from Fitipaldi, Almieri dos Santos or Keith." Why no comma to set off the counterfactual conditional? If the piece were generally written comma-light, I'd get it, but...
* "[...]currently struggling through — I wonder if you have already[...]" Is it a British thing to not use a semicolon in this kind of construction?
* "Books continue to flourish as a commodity, but to other purposes: as vectors of conversation, signalling and setters of agenda." "To other purposes" is unnatural but obviously permissible a la "to what purpose". In terms of the content, when people talk about books being a commodity, they're typically already contrasting that with "books are for reading." Also, the sequence there is uncomfortably close to a parallel structure but doesn't make it. "[...]as vectors of conversation, signals of X and setters of agenda" would read nicely, but you can almost get "as vectors of conversation, as vectors of signalling and as vectors of setters of agenda" from how the existing version parses out expanded.
* "Writing a book is mainly about conferring a degree of status on the author, getting her invited to literary festivals and onto Front Row." Said aloud it'd be fine, but that "getting [...]" just hangs off the sentence.
* "My physical bookshelves are double stacked, with a row of books who once had the shelves to themselves, now entirely obscured by new arrivals, like an unwelcome development spoiling their view." This sentence is structurally mushy. "My Xes are Y, with a Z who A to themselves, now B by C, like a D Eing their F." Even if we forgive the aroma of comma splice unseen, the pronoun resolution here is a mess.
* "A sort of three-dimensional version of the “palimpsest” that is well known to anyone who pretended to have read The Name of the Rose before seeing the movie adaptation." And here we give up on connecting way-too-many-clauses with commas and send a subject off into the world to survive sans predicate.
* "Meanwhile, I have some 2500 books in my kindle library, the vast majority unread. My Kindle library, incidentally, can be arranged in order of purchases." Even the worst editors correct Brand Capitalization, and here the author hasn't even bothered to match. (Also weird not to have a comma in that "2500" in the style I'd assume of this kind of publication, but it might be a choice)
* "Tellingly the first download was The Complete Works of Shakespeare[...]" Tellingly, I see no comma, despite many other such initial adverbs in the piece being given commas...
Anyway, this is on the editor (or absence of editor). There's very little here that I'd think the author should feel bad for not catching. Writing and rewriting your own prose – especially reading it aloud to yourself with the inflection you intend – numbs the eyeballs to many such things.
New Kindle Helps Readers Show Off By Shouting Title Of Book Loudly And Repeatedly
Say what? Ten trillion? That doesn't strike me as plausible. Which raises the question...what is the correct number? Ten billion new titles per month doesn't sound plausible either. Ten thousand sounds more reasonable. Maybe ten million but that seems like stretching it.
It seems like there’s going to be a generation of people who don’t have to pretend to read - they simply don’t care to, and it doesn’t confer the same status TikTok fame does.
Most people don’t read. This is not remotely new.
I wouldn't take the unpopularity of school-assigned reading to indicate much about how people would actually feel about reading, but of course there were plenty of classmates who only read the books assigned in school where it would have coloured their opinions on reading as a whole
I throw it aside exclaiming, "what crap!".
If it weren't for free blackmarket epubs I would have wasted a fortune.
Where have all the good sci fi writers gone?
Related example, on a different factor: yesterday, I paid $51 for a nonfiction non-DRM .epub form of a book that was also available for $27 in ereader-specific DRM form. Had I instead pirated the book, that wouldn't have contributed to publisher incentive to offer non-DRM form, but that presumably would've contributed to the publisher wanting hard DRM lockdown.
(Or, I suppose, might've contributed to the publisher focusing on other factors than high quality, such as large volume, to bring it back to the earlier question?)
There is no antimemetics division, fine structure, etc : https://qntm.org/fiction
Friendship is Optimal : https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal
I think it is is perfectly fine not to finish a book. Or read a few chapters to see if you like it. Or skip the introductions or the notes. Or even just read the notes (I have an awesome translation of the Odyssey - the notes are more enjoyable than the poem!). I usually don't finish long book series.
I have books that I've collected for another time where I would enjoy them. Perhaps a vacation or sick leave.
Point is, there are many ways to enjoy books, and we should feel more open about it and less judgemental of the way others enjoy them.
I know of a modern version of this: When K. A. Applegate was writing Everworld, she mentioned in an interview that whenever she wanted to introduce a new god or mythology, she made a point to never read the actual myths/stories and instead just get an overview. That way she wouldn't get stuck on how the various mythological characters were previously written and would be able to fit their abilities and personalities into the books, while still grounding them in what how the myths portrayed them.
On the left, they’ve never read it and mentioning will cause your brunch invite to get lost.
I did relate more to The Fountainhead and We The Living though. Atlas Shrugged is too damn preachy. It seems to me one needs a good deal of righteousness to think this a good book. Yeah, signaling goes a long way there.
Edit: Not disagreeing with what you say. It explains the situation of the author rather well. I live in blissful ignorance.
I watched John Carter the movie with my wife a while back, I know I read the books and shorts many years ago, I couldn't tell you anything about them other than "civil war era soldier" (I think), goes to Mars, does some stuff, saves the day, gets the girl (sort of). All I could think, after having read the Princess of Mars story was about were the plot holes for a few days post-reading. Ripping yarns. And then, after years, utterly forgotten. There was a few parts in the movie where I thought "Oh, I remember that from the book" and other scenes I thought "was that in the book." I have no desire to go find out. For all I know I could be confounding the John Carter stories with Danny Dunn.
I keep a spreadsheet of all the books I've read or started to read. Date started, date completed. There's more started dates than completed dates. Any initial thoughts. Sometimes some updated thoughts a little while later. Whenever one of the books comes up in conversation, I get this uneasy, vague recollection that I might have read that. I usually have to check my list. People want to show off how clever they are by quoting bits of it, or dissecting the story - either they read and re-read books for a living, or they don't read very many books, I can't decide which it is.
If someone were to question my knowledge on a book I claim to have read, I'd look incredibly suspicious. I've found, of the people who have tried this gambit, that it is usually someone trying to engage in a pissing contest and I'm not interested in engaging in that. It also makes tops of your shoes dirty.
P.S. Essayist is a) gatekeeping b) showing off his "I read books" Scout badge c) needs a damn editor.
That is a very uncharitable attitude: I suspect you are projecting your own abilities on others.
Many people are just interested in books for their own sake, and some people are effortlessly good at remembering and quoting books.
I do think there are many people that use literary references as part of their status signalling, and there are those that pretend ignorance (maybe a working class ingroup signalling they are not upper class twits). Someone quoting classical Greek literature, versus the οἱ πολλοί quoting page 3.
Ultimately, we need to have a little more faith in the younger generation, just like our boomer parents could have done with us. I bet there were articles in the 50s & 60s freaking out about how books are going to go extinct cause young people only want to watch TV. And that did happen to a certain extent (readership fell), but a percentage of the population kept reading good old fashioned books, and that will be true going forward as well.