2019/3: I'm a shitty reader
I suck at reading. I’ve been noticing it for a long time, but it’s only recently that I’ve given serious thought to it.
I don’t mean I read too slowly (I’m not a fast reader either; I’m average in that sense, and I don’t care about speed reading). Nor I mean that I can’t read long or difficult books —if anything, I have a perverse fascination with long and difficult books.
What I mean is that during the act of reading, I don’t engage the way I would like. I said that the problem isn’t speed, but maybe it is: I found very hard to slow down or re-read. I don’t stop to ponder on what I’m reading. I don’t ask questions to the text (by far the main tip for active reading; check How to read a book, for example).
There are at least two reasons, I believe.
The first one is the obvious one: modern world, technology, excess of information, Twitter, etc. I won’t say a lot about this, because I am extremely unqualified and because there’s a huge amount of material on the subject (I would recomment Amusing Ourselves to Death but, again, not an expert, there probably are better entry points to the subject).
The second reason, and the one I think it’s stronger, is what I, for lack of a better term, call “consumerist reading”. With this I mean the act of reading just for adding an item to an imaginary list, and the associated idea that more is better. It goes without saying: I don’t consciously believe that superficially reading 1000 books is better than reading (and re-reading) 100 books well. Not even close. There’s a (maybe apocryphal?) story I like a lot: when someone asked Derrida if he had read all the books in his library, he answered «No, only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully.» My point here is that I don’t read as carefully as I’d like.
(Mandatory and maybe unnecessary clarification: not all books are meant to be read carefully. It’s perfectly fine to read, say, science fiction literature superficially. I don’t mean this as an insult: I love science fiction. But here I’m referring to other kind of books)
I have no idea if this is a generalized thing. Reading is such an intimate act and “how is your mental process while you read a book?” is not a normal subject in conversations. But if this happens to you, and you pay attention while you read, you’ll notice it: the force pulling you to the next sentence, paragraph, page. Not in the “page-turner” sense, but in the “I want to finish this and jump to the next thing” sense. Again: it’s not a conscious thing. Like all unpleasant parts of ourselves, is involuntary but real.
One could argue that maybe I just don’t care enough about what I’m reading to put the time and effort that’s necessary. But I don’t think that’s the case: I don’t find hard to recognize that something doesn’t interest me and abandoning it (two great and counterintuitive reading advices are to quit when you find you don’t care, and to skip parts that bore you; I’ve learned to abandon books a long time ago, but I could never do the skipping thing, I’m just too much of a completist).
What to do about this? Recognizing a problem may be the first step, but it’s hardly ever enough. The tech-bro in me thinks that this can be solved with software: what if your e-reader would show you a paragraph at a time, with forced intervals between them? Of course this is bullshit. What then?
I mentioned re-reading a couple of times already. Nabokov has this wonderful quote: «Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.» He was talking specifically about literature, about appreciating the little details; I have in mind non-fiction, expository works, when you have to engage with a series of ideas and arguments. Re-reading may be worth there too, but the book/reader dynamics are very different to those of (good) literature.
And yet, re-reading (the very few, shamefully few times I’ve done it) has this magic quality to it: you don’t care about finishing. You already finished it. Amazingly, it works even when you are rereading a book you barely remember, when it’s almost like the first time. It makes sense: it’s already on this idiotic, imaginary list, so there’s no pressure to add it. There might be something useful here. Maybe re-reading more often makes you appreciate the pleasure of reading without rush, and maybe a better appreciation of this mode of reading can make it easier to apply it to books you are reading for the first time.
I hate those forced, engage-your-audience, “What do you all think?” sentences at the end of articles, but I will make an exception here. I’m genuinely interested in the inner lives of other people when they are reading. So here it goes: what do you think about this?