Just Not For You
Dear Reader,
Sometimes, a read is just not for you. This isn’t the same as an ambivalent read, where you sort of leave with a shoulder shrug. A read that isn’t for you is typically one that is perfectly fine on its own, but you aren’t the right audience for it. It wasn’t intended for you, or maybe you just aren’t in the right stage of life or intellectual journey for it.
This is an important distinction because a read that isn’t for you isn’t the same as a read that is bad. A bad read is a bad read. But a read that’s just not for you can be a great read, even. It’s just not for you, for whatever reason.
As usual, a few case studies may offer some clarity on this. And first two may surprise you, as I’ve promoted both of them before, one of them to perhaps an excessive degree. (Although, I wasn’t really pumping it. I was making use of it for a different frame on the reading life.)
The two books that weren’t for me? The first is Francis Su’s Mathematics for Human Flourishing, which I literally gave to my mother for her birthday.
And the second? None other than Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought.
It’s perhaps amusing that the two are paired, as they are absolutely perfect paired reads. The reason that both are reads that are just not for me is that I am, indeed, the wrong audience for each book.
Mathematics for Human Flourishing
I had incredibly high hopes for this book, yet also some worriment. You see, Francis Su had delivered an inspirational address, and so many were moved by it that the request was made to turn it into a book.
As a few of you know, I’ve done some reading on human flourishing. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert on that subject, for so many reasons, but I’ve spent more time on that philosophical area than most. So while for many people Su’s book would be an introduction to that very language, I’m a rather old hand in comparison.
And so, although the book is worthwhile for so many people for the introduction to human flourishing alone, it wasn’t likely to do anything for me there. And it didn’t, and I don’t mind at all.
You see, that wasn’t the worriment. The worriment was that the address would get stretched too much, that the magic of it would be lost. And for me, Su’s book is indeed too stretched.
I don’t know if anyone else thinks this. Many reviewers, in fact, commented on how surprised they were that it didn’t feel too stretched. My perspective, then, is not one that is—or even should be—shared by others.
I found it too stretched for two reasons. First, I share with my father a slight distaste for extensive “case study” stories in nonfiction books. When Francis Su expanded his speech into a book, he fleshed it out with a number of personal stories. For many people, these are quite meaningful. (And I do not begrudge them this meaning. It is theirs and his, and thus a success of his book.) But the stories didn’t add anything for me. They felt as filler, an unnatural stretching from what had been a tight speech.
Of course, they largely felt as filler because of my second reason. The speech struck me as exceptional because of how much possibility it had, how much incompleteness it possessed. It was the work of the reader or hearer to finish it. Once turned into a book, the possibility was no longer there for the audience—little place was left for the audience to participate in that way. Instead, the original expansiveness that invited keen inquiry was changed to a limited frame.
These two reasons are failures for me, but only me. They are not, in actual fact, failures of the book. One of the things that make the expansion great makes it precisely not for me: Francis Su’s book is outstanding for two classes of readers. The first is university math professors and (some) math teachers who can’t understand why others don’t comprehend the magic of mathematics. For them, Su offers a language to converse with a culture that is fairly polarized about mathematics, and specifically words for the math-phobic pole.
The other class of readers is actually those math-phobic. Su’s book is not a mathy-math book, but rather a conversational jaunt. It is friendly, inspirational, and even calm. The greatness that can be found in Su’s exploration of grace in teaching is here for the weary, here for the fearful. The sincerity, generosity, and humility of a great teacher are in full effect, and I’m thrilled that Mathematics for Human Flourishing exists as a math book that can be read by those who’ve endured years of mathematical torment and nightmares.
Unfortunately for me, I’m neither at the math-elite side of the spectrum nor at the math-phobic end. Hell, I taught junior high math and even used some of the math games Su uses in his book. (Fives are fun to play with.) I’ve spent much time trying to encourage the math-phobic, working to bring them back to find some aspect of mathematics that is indeed for them.
I’m a quite comfortable tweener in mathematics—neither fearful nor a daily practitioner. (I am somewhat saddened by this latter, as there’s some research I’d like to do had I the time.) I still regularly work with a form of mathematics, training both the scared and the enthusiastic. And because I am a tweener, I land smack dab in between the genuinely diverse audiences Su’s book is fitting for.
Again, I gave Su’s book to my math-loving mother for her birthday. I like the book; I obviously delight in giving it to others dear to me. But it’s just not for me.
(I must admit that while I get Su’s criticism of Barbara Oakley, and I knew he was critiquing her specifically before I even checked the endnotes, I find that his criticism overlooks the possibility that her own considerations might assist the math-phobic. Yes, in other ways. And yes, perhaps in ways he doesn’t consider the best method of mathematics. But if the goal is restoring confidence in mathematics, or giving hope for improvement in mathematics, then Oakley’s writing has some purpose. I realize her book might help K-12 students more than university students, and I do not embrace most of her more public positions myself. And so while I don’t fault Su for overlooking where Oakley might serve a purpose—I can’t imagine why he’d even stumble into that possibility—I also can’t agree with the criticism in full. There’s a place for her. Perhaps her place exists mostly because of our country’s obsession with standardized testing, but that’s a different conversation. And it’s a reality regardless of the conversation.)
If you want a book that’s a playful exploration of human inquiry, read Su’s book. If you want a read that explores matters of justice and rehabilitation, read Su’s book. If you wish to observe a master teacher at work, read Su’s book. However much it’s just not for me, it’s one of the best human reads you could find, one that almost any reader would enjoy.
Lost in Thought
Once again, my tweener nature makes me precisely wrong for this book, as I am neither novice nor intellectual. This is, of course, not author Zena Hitz’s fault. I am neither exhausted by a life in our present-day university machine—a weariness justly earned by many academics—nor someone taking his first steps towards the life of the mind.
While the myriad stories she shares demonstrate careful archetypes, I’ve been fortunate enough to encounter such guides before. One of my college mentors told me the story of an ordinary man who spent all of his time studying one Mahler symphony. The man had no academic musical training and yet he became obsessed with that symphony, studying it endlessly. And eventually, he became known for his prowess.
I honestly don’t know whether that story is apocryphal or real. I never much cared. My friend—a seventy-one-year-old who taught our strength training class—had no reason to lie to me about it. It’s more he wondered if I had heard of this fellow, as music was among my studies.
Another story that could be apocryphal or real is that of my Granddad reading a dictionary from cover to cover when he was younger. The story was always stated matter-of-factly with the blue-collar curiosity of a farmer, insurance salesman, and ag teacher. While my grandfather was determinedly independent, he wasn’t exactly one for affectations or taking on airs. And so I grew up thinking it was perfectly normal that one might read a dictionary from cover to cover. (Sadly, I have not equaled this performance with any dictionary outside one on idioms.)
It was from my grandfather that I learned the steadfast hunting through boiling hot flea market after boiling hot flea market—I hated the dusty roiling heat—determined to find the missing books from my Hardy Boys collection, and later Zane Grey collection (this latter still sitting a few books incomplete). It was from my grandfather that my spinning top collection grew, and that I thought to read a mini book on the history of tops—a mini book that I practically memorized as my top collection grew. (It’s perhaps my grandfather who inspired both my joy of history and unfortunate habit of collecting every single book from favorite authors, sometimes in the interest of intellectual honesty, sometimes from collector’s mania.)
My Granddad wore his intellectual life lightly. It was more hobby than anything. My memories of him are never with a book, even though his home had many a book in it. He worked. He sold life insurance until he died at ninety-four. Aside from flea markets and card-game playing, I spent most of my youth around him by dodging his farm or office chores. (You can ask my family about my elite dodging skills.) So it’s odd the way in which his life of the mind impressed itself on me—it was casual, idiosyncratic, natural. It was also occasionally contrarian, as his collection of goat figurines demonstrated: he started collecting those only because no one else was.
Because of the good fortune of my experiences growing up, my excitement for Hitz’s book has been that of book recommender—I’ve been hunting for several years now for a book that accomplishes something of what Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture did for me after college. For some reason, that book doesn’t resonate with most college students, as I experienced myself in college. I used to give Pieper’s book as a gift, and readers were left confused. Only recently did I recommend it to someone again, and that’s because that individual has suffered under more than thirty reads of my recommendation, so the necessary build-up had already been handled. Hitz’s book operates in a similar space, though not as a clone or knock-off. Because of that similar space, one she's made entirely her own but also very much within an established tradition, I was excited by the prospect of her book and even more upon reading it. It’s rather nice to have a book you can recommend that doesn’t require thirty reads as a warm-up...
Still, if I were to re-read Lost in Thought, it would be for the style and formatting, to see if there’s anything I could emulate in my own writing. (Hitz does indeed "seamlessly weave together memoir, sharp philosophical analysis, literary and art criticism, and intellectual history," as philosopher Jennifer Frey well highlights.) The book leaves so much room for the reader to relax into parallel thinking before snapping back to the book’s own narrative. It’s a delight to read.
(The critiques aren’t many and aren’t necessarily deep. It’s a slow starter—I and a few other readers have noted that either the initial pages are unsteady or the reader has to adapt to Hitz’s cadence, and then the whole book flows. Just not over the first few pages.
Weirdly, the weakest part of Hitz’s book is when she attempts to integrate Elena Ferrante’s novels into her own narrative. I think this for two reasons, and they are interrelated. First, I read the novels before reading those sections of Lost in Thought, and so my familiarity with those characters’ intellectual depths was quite immediate. I thus saw that Hitz hadn’t captured the extent of their intellectual journeys. This, by the way, isn’t a fair critique. It’s the failure of any summary and why I generally don’t enjoy summaries of fiction books. I just found the interaction with their intellectual lives slightly deflating in comparison with interacting with those lives in the novels themselves.
And second, I read those sections after having read the entirety of Lost in Thought. That is, I went back to them, as I’d skipped them before while I waited for the novels to arrive. Well at that point, I’d seen the rest of Lost in Thought's landscape. While the Ferrante sections fit, the interwoven argument and the skill of the narrative had already been my experience—I didn’t need them. And so adding them felt additional and unnecessary.
I am not convinced, then, that this portion of my critique has merit—it probably has more to do with the idiosyncrasies of my particular read.)
Both of the above works ended up becoming forms of reading for others (well, Hitz’s I also had to read for interview prep). But not every just-not-for-you read has that end.
The intellectual that I had mentioned in “The Ongoing Conversation” with whom I was in, ahem, conversation has a newsletter that goes out, one I’m not interested in subscribing to. Now, perhaps I’m a bit of a hypocrite here, as I dislike newsletters in the main. It’s just that they rarely hit my interests and they usually link to things that are of no interest to me. (Cue many readers nodding their heads recognizing how they’ve felt reading this newsletter.)
Sometimes, though, writers do write on things of interest to me. And in the case of this intellectual, very much so. I don’t think any regular readers of my newsletter will be surprised that technology and society are interests of mine. Unfortunately, every essay from this intellectual is more or less a retread of thinking I’ve already done for myself, and the works cited ones I’ve already read.
And this intellectual’s newsletter (and pieces published in more public venues) even gets some of the peripheral material—say, about reading comprehension, where I have some reasonable expertise—quite wrong. This isn’t bad so far as it goes; it doesn’t ruin the pieces overall. But it does ruin them for me.
Put another way, for someone who hadn’t thought much about technology and society but had some preliminary interest, I might send them to this individual’s newsletter. For me, though, there’s nothing there. The writing is of the same quality as my newsletter—that is neither literary nor polished into something worth emulating. And unlike the essay on moleskins, I don’t leave these essays in appreciation but rather annoyance that I’ve wasted my attentions on something banal.
And I probably wouldn’t even send most people over to this individual’s newsletter. There are better materials at hand! So while I am happy this writer has a readership who benefit from the readings, I don’t need to interact with this writer’s material—there is nothing there for me, specifically.
This doesn’t make the writer dumb. (This individual certainly is not.) This doesn’t make the writer’s writing bad. (Intelligent people value it and benefit from it in socially healthy ways, so it would be a strange metric that could consider it bad.) It simply means the writer is not for me.
(This also doesn’t mean that I am in any way superior to this individual, I should note. I don’t write on tech and society, in any narrow sense. And if I did, I doubt I could do it better. I just don’t benefit from this individual’s insights. No more, no less. It’s just not for me.)
Part of the reason I wrote this piece and selected the specific examples I did was that I’ve discovered a curious habit among readers, however skilled. And that habit is that if they thought a read wasn’t for them, then the writing must have been bad. (Or that the thinking was bad, if separable.) I admit that I’ve had this habit, not least because I still find myself fighting it today.
Writing can be bad, absolutely. Writing can just not be for you, which is a different thing entirely. Keeping that distinction in mind is part of a healthier reading life—one where you can save your disgust for the occasions meriting it. The rest can occasion a shoulder shrug and acknowledgement that it’s just not for you.
To readings that are for you,
Kreigh
P.S. After this piece was already written, I stumbled across this blog post by philosopher Helen De Cruz on math books for children. It pairs quite nicely with Su’s book, if you’d like a pleasant read about mathematics or are looking for books to entertain younger learners.
P.P.S. Yes, this is a bonus piece this week. I figured since the other essays involving Lost in Thought were part of a double week, that this one should be as well, even if it's much different from the others. Look for "The Fallacy of Full Comprehension" on Wednesday! I might even get a little spirited in that one.