What I Am Trying to Teach Myself About Reading, Part II: The First Hundred Pages and Some Other Suggestions.

So you have decided to read a book. Maybe it is the “Book You Always Avoid[ed] Starting.” How do you keep it from becoming a “Book You Always Avoid Finishing?” In just the last few years the number of books I read has increased dramatically. I remember the first time--my Freshman year in college--I set out to read 50 books in a year and balked at the task. Last year I read 100. This year I am on course to surpass last year. I have been asked recently what the secret is to consistently working through book after book. So I thought I would share a few of the things that have worked for me. Maybe they will prove helpful to some other people who have struggled, as I have, with being consistent and diligent in their reading goals.

Don’t speed read. Don’t do the obvious thing and just try and buzz through a 500-page book. In the end, you won’t feel any sense of accomplishment for swallowing a book like it was a very large pill even if you were able to do it in an impressively brief duration. Quite to the contrary, I believe it is deep engagement and investment in the text that will continue to keep you interested, not merely forcing your eyes to move over the words rapidly. I am quite a slow reader. If you are, don’t see it as a handicap; it may be your greatest strength. In fact, “slow motion” reading is itself a recognized critical technique.

Start a Goodreads page. Tracking your reading will give you a sense of accomplishment. Rating works, writing reviews, and sharing with others are all good ways to make your reading about much more than what happens when you stare into a book alone. Also Goodreads has an application that allows you set reading goals and periodically check your progress. 

Read authors, not works. I probably spent 10 hours reading the first Shakespeare play I ever tackled on my own. Now I could easily read a whole play in three hours. Sometimes the hardest part of reading a new work is developing your own technique of how to read the author’s work. The next work you read by that author will not only be much, much easier, it will also allow you to begin to understand an author’s entire body of work. Soon you will think about an author in terms of a nexus of different and complementary writings. Your reading will go faster and will be much more rewarding.

Make your book the most interesting thing in the room. Leave the house. Go to the library. Take nothing but your book, and maybe a pencil for underlining and making marginal notes to yourself. When it is set in front of a computer tapped into the internet a books looks like an musty clump of old papers. However, thing about how you feel when you are sitting in a waiting room with nothing to read. Suddenly even the back of a cereal box or your DVD player’s instruction manual would be a welcome diversion. Your task before you read is to recreate that waiting room and place yourself in it with a book in your hands. 

My best recommendation: read the first 100 pages of your book all in one sitting. When we watch a television show we experience an entire narrative with a beginning, middle, and end all in a half hour, or maybe even 20 minutes if you subtract time for commercials. It is not surprising that it is hard for us to sustain interest in a story that will take 10 hours or more to completely unfurl. The good news, however, is that it is worth it. The first time you read a particularly lengthy classic all the way through you might feel more like leaping from a cliff than reading another page of florid descriptions of one. Take heart! You will be glad the book is so long the next time you pick it up to read it, when it has become a good old friend and not bar after bar of ornate prose separating you from an “A” in English 218. 

What I am Trying to Teach Myself About Reading, Part I

An illustration of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges

(the story is about an infinite library)

Everybody has one: it sits on your shelf or in your amazon.com shopping cart, it stares you down, it is the the Book You Always Avoid Starting. Perhaps you pick it up each time you visit a bookstore and roll it over in your hands. You calibrate its thickness with your fingers, and try to reassure yourself by saying, “Well, a lot of this is probably the index...”.

Most of the time we don’t read the Book We Always Avoid Starting until it becomes so overwhelmingly embarrassing that we haven’t read it that we are forced to ingest it like an antibiotic. Otherwise, maybe we will read it when it becomes especially obvious that we can impress a few important people by having read it. This often happens when we have been pretending we had read it and are worried our disguise is wearing thin.

Here are two reasons why I will not be reading the Book I Always Avoid Starting this summer:

1. Good readers aren’t bluebook skimmers, they are project-focused. I have two major projects this summer: reading all of Kierkegaard, and reading all of Shakespeare. Confession: the main Book I Always Avoid Starting is Moby Dick. (Stop snickering, please; yes, I am an English major who has never read Moby Dick.) Is it cooler or more “important” to read Kierkegaard’s unpublished drafts for newspaper articles than  it is to read Moby Dick? No, definitely not. You get more canonicity points for Moby Dick, that is for sure, but ultimately I am going for depth and not breadth. I have found a few writers who are really speaking to me, who are changing who I am. My worry in attempting merely to “have read” some sort of Imagined Totality of Important Works (what I am equating here with an anthology) is that it would be like plastering over walls that were never built well in the first place.
2. A related reason: There is always another Book You Always Avoid Starting. After Moby Dick there would be Gulliver’s Travels, then Bleak House, then Anna Karenina, then Vanity Fair, then...and the list goes on. If I paid careful attention to lists and rating and that kind of thing, maybe by the time I die I could read something like the 1,000 Most Important Books according to most people. But then I would just be attempting to satisfy someone else’s list which was probably only created to impress someone else. On some level, I find the admission unavoidable that I can no more say that my favorite book is “the best book” than I can say that my foot is the best foot. It is what it is to me because it is a part of me, and I can’t remove it from that context just as I cannot remove my foot and take it around to compare with others’ feet.

In our culture and academic climate there is something scandalously subversive about clinging to one author or book to the exclusion of other perfectly good ones, but I believe that this is precisely what we must do. In an information-saturated world, we need to practice attention and love rather than intellectual consumership. We each have a finite capacity to love well. I am reminded of a question Jacques Derrida poses in The Gift of Death: how could I ever justify feeding only my cat while all other hungry cats are left to starve? I imagine all the Books I Always Avoid Starting as hungry cats pawing at my windows, meowing desperately at my front door. I could--maybe--manage to provide the paltriest possible level of nutrition for all of these cats, but none would flourish.

In part, I want to identify this realization as one that informs what we are doing on this blog: conversing. If we knew everything we wouldn’t realize that we need friends. Also, it is the experience of having friends that reminds us what we don’t (and will never) know. It reminds us that the idea of a totality of knowledge is bogus. We--and our minds--aren’t containers to fill, but dynamic actors that learn by riffing and recontextualization, as well as some good-natured sparring now and then. So hopefully we interact toward the utilization of the depths and particularities of one another’s knowledge, not in some feeble attempt to fill in the supposed “gaps” in what we know. Hopefully we will remind ourselves that our differently-depthed-ness (I just made that word up) is what makes learning powerful.


By the way, if you want to confess the Book You Always Avoid Starting please feel free to do so below. This is a safe environment.