Base image taken by George Milton
Base image taken by George Milton
I happen to read a lot of books.1 As a result, a bunch of friends have asked me for advice on reading books. Frankly I don’t know how useful my advice can be because I read books, I don’t teach people how to read books; similar to how Yngwie Malmsteen plays the guitar, he doesn’t teach people how to play the guitar (which probably explains the quality of many of his “tutorials”).2 So, it’s mostly willy-nilly, but since people seem to have found some of it useful over the years, I thought of jotting some of it down.
In the whole of this article I assume that reading books is a hobby of yours, not something you have to do (for any reason). If that’s not the case, I’m afraid much of it will be useless.
Since it is a hobby, it should have been self-evident that you do it only if you enjoy it. But I’m afraid that in today’s “self-helped, morning-routined, life-coached” daily lives, that’s just not true anymore. It seems more and more that people view hobbies they don’t have to do not as ends in themselves, but as means to something else. Personally I don’t get it, especially since many times I can barely do the things I have to do, so I definitely don’t want to add more. But it clearly happens; and it seems to be particularly common with book reading. So, let me tell you why I think it’s an especially bad idea to read books as a means to something else.
For starters, it can be as ugly as going to school and doing your homework, except it’s even worse because you’re dealing with content that was not even created with pedagogy in mind.
But let’s practice some candor: it seems many people want to read books because they want to appear educated. Even though books are potentially the best way to become deeply educated, if you only want to appear educated, it’s probably a horrible strategy. Why? Let’s begin with an observation: if you pay attention around you, appearing educated makes use of what I have dubbed reductive bites:
Interestingly (and depressingly), reductive bites are employed even by actually educated people because reductive bites are the only thing that can be used in a normal interaction, especially the way these take place today (e.g., the pace, duration, and ideologically charged texture of these interactions). In other words, even if someone has read (extremely carefully), say, The Genealogy of Morals, I can guarantee you there’s absolutely no way they can explain to you anything that is not ridiculously reductive (read: simplified) in the 5-10 minutes it will be mentioned and discussed. There’s only one way to avoid that: if both people have read the Genealogy of Morals carefully, and so they can jump to the deep end immediately. Nevertheless, environments that allow such discussions are rare.
In other words, the whole format of discussions—or discussions viewed as a medium—today is such that it’s very hard to tell if someone is educated or just appears educated. So, if appearance is what you care about, there’s no reason to suffer through books to extract reductive bites as a side-effect. There are much easier ways to get direct access to reductive bites: follow a bunch of “philosophy” pages on Instagram, 2-3 “intellectuals” on Youtube, use any of these apps that summarize books in a Duolingo fashion, read an article here and there, and consume “critical reviews”.
I know this all sounds passive-aggressive, but I think that if you consider it carefully, you’ll see this is solid advice. Obviously I don’t recommend any of that, but we have to be realistic here: there’s basically no reason to read books unless you like doing it.
Finally, books are not the only way to get educated. You can read any decent long-form content, e.g., a magazine like the Atlantic or a newspaper every once in a while. You can listen to (long-form) podcasts. You can attend talks. You can watch documentaries. You can take lessons. I would say that almost none of my friends that I consider educated reads books regularly.
In my experience, whenever you ask “where should I start from?”, almost always the answer is: it doesn’t matter. Where should I begin with reading books at all? Where should I begin with reading Plato? Or hard books? You guessed it: it doesn’t matter. There are a bunch of reasons for this.
First, with the inflation of information today, you will probably find yourself wasting too much time trying to find the perfect starting point. A couple of decades ago, you’d basically ask a friend or two where to start, and then you’d start. Now, you can easily spend hours first on Quora, then on Reddit, then on Goodreads reviews, and then reading articles. All the while, you are not reading any actual book! The worst, but not that uncommon, outcome of this process is to become overwhelmed and not read a book at all. Or, to be exposed to so many spoilers throughout all these that it’s not fun to read the book anymore.
For similar reasons I recommend avoiding long introductions; you can end up getting bored, or taking too much in and then leaving the book aside. Here’s a specific example: there’s an edition of Penguin Classics of The Communist Manifesto with an introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones. Do you know how long the introduction is? About 180 pages. Do you know how long the Communist Manifesto is? About 50 pages. In my opinion, your time will be much better spent reading the Manifesto directly and two other works of Marx and Engels, amounting to about 180 pages, than reading that 180-page introduction.
There are still more problems with introductions. For example, that introduction is, in my humble opinion, pretty boring; definitely way more boring than the text itself. Such cases lead to a potential fallacy: we may think that the actual text will be equally boring, even if that happens subconsciously. That’s really a shame and unfair to the book! So, my suggestion is to always get to the main text.
Another problem is that it may lead to bad spoilers, and I don’t mean just the “plot” (in quotes as I mean it in a broad sense). Let’s take the Communist Manifesto again as an example.3 By the way, spoiler alert in the next couple of sentences! So, as you probably know, the Communist Manifesto starts with this dramatic sentence: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism”. It’s just incredible, right? It takes you by surprise and it draws you in immediately. Well that effect will be diminished severely if you have first read... uhm, what I just wrote, or a preface that tells you “the now popular introductory sentence of the Manifesto has left its legacy...” blah, blah, blah. You’re robbing Marx and Engels of their trick!
Generally speaking, good authors write (and rewrite) something in a specific way because that’s how they want the text to hit you. So, we should be careful with choosing e.g., to get introduced to Communism by some whatever professor and not Marx and Engels.
Yet another problem is that, especially for monumental books, an introduction can intimidate you. Say you find this sentence in an introduction to Aristotle’s Politics: “Politics is the most important text in Political Philosophy ever written”. Sure, that can make some people super excited. But it can definitely also make people afraid of touching the text. They may think “am I really ready to read the most important piece of Political Philosophy ever written?” And in particular, they may assume it’s super difficult, even though many incredible books are regarded as incredible irrelevant of how difficult they are (e.g., The Stranger by Camus won a Nobel Prize but it’s not difficult).
Of course I’m not categorically against introductions. For example, introductions are many times important exactly because the author did not know she was writing a historic text that would be read 2000 years later. Or, they expected that it would be read by a few professors, but somehow it became almost a pop hit. As such, they may assume quite a bit of context. For example, I’m sure Aristotle thought that many of his readers would be his contemporaries, and as such he assumed a certain understanding of democracy because they were also experiencing it. In such cases, an introduction can help give you that context; and in my opinion, this is the main thing an introduction can offer.
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Let me return to wasting time on “where to begin?” Another reason to avoid thinking too much about it is that you usually are led by others’ opinions; and that mostly means the Internet. But guess what: most people on the Internet are not experts on the topic in any sense of the word (like the author of this article on reading books). I’m literally talking about people who talk (at lengths) about a book without having read it. So, another reason not to spend too much time and just start reading is that most of the information you’ll find will be rubbish anyway.
Furthermore, I think it doesn’t matter where you begin because what matters is the impact—the impression a book leaves on you—not whether you understand it the first time. Let me give you another example: say you start reading Plato from Timaeus (highly unlikely...). Timaeus is one of the most difficult dialogues of Plato; even expert analysts are not quite sure about many of its parts. But that doesn’t matter because probably the most important thing this book will provide you is to want to read more Plato. And as you read more, the more you’ll understand! In my opinion, this effect is much more important than understanding Timaeus, and that’s the way I approach it. In other words, when I don’t understand something on the first try, I don’t bother. What is important is whether it left me with the desire to read more.
A personal example is Panajotis Kondylis, who I consider to be one of the most important philosophers of Modern Greece. I started reading him randomly through the book “The decline of the bourgeois culture”.4 I first started reading the preface (written by him) and I did not understand sh#t. Then, I moved to the first chapter, and I also did not understand a thing. I finally put it aside. But, this reading left me thinking “this guy is saying something very important; I don’t know what, but there’s something incredibly deep there”. After some time, I picked it up again, and this time I started from the third chapter. The third chapter turned out, unexpectedly, to be way more understandable than the preface and the first chapter. Slowly, I started working my way backwards.
What does that tell us? First, as I said, it’s this hard-to-describe impact that it left me that mattered, not whether I understood everything. Second, you rarely read a book once, which brings me to the next topic.
That’s another misunderstanding that is created maybe to some extent due to the platforms we have today, like Goodreads, where you declare the book as “Read” and that’s it. For whatever reason many people seem to think that you start reading a book, you hopefully “get it” from the beginning, and you proceed until you understand and/or read 90% of the content; and then that’s it, you’re done with that book. In other words, it’s an one-time, smooth pass. But in my experience that is rarely the case, especially for the great books.
For me, it usually goes something like this: First, I come across a reductive bite (see above) that makes me interested in the book/author. Then, I start reading the book (the actual book, not an introduction, commentary, analysis, etc.). Usually, I’ll read a bunch of chapters, and I’ll understand around 60% of them, let’s say. Note that this means I keep reading chapters, even though I don’t understand everything. When it stops being enjoyable, I start reading something else. Then, at some point I return to the book again. This happens either because of a sudden urge, or—and that’s more common—I read something else (usually seemingly unrelated) that gives me an insight into the book (which then creates an urge). So, now the 60% became suddenly let’s say 70%, which was enough to bring back my excitement towards reading this book.
This happens many many times, until at some point I don’t think this book has much more to offer to me, at which point I consider it “read”. But this anyway is a mostly useless label. What matters is whether you have an urge to return back. If you don’t want to return, that’s just a side-effect of the fact that you don’t think it has to offer more. So, what I call “read” is really more like “I don’t feel like returning back to it”.
This is also why if you follow me on Goodreads, you’ll see books popping up as “Read” without having gone through “Currently Reading” first, because the way Goodreads is set up does not align with my process. I just add a review whenever I think the book is in the “read” state I mentioned above.
And then there are books that you’ll simply never stop coming back to, again and again. Like, for example, I don’t think anyone will ever stop reading Aristotle’s Politics. Of course, that can be intimidating, especially when you’re about to pick it up: there’s this feeling of entering an eternal relationship. But I think that’s the wrong way to approach it: instead of thinking about it a priori, I think you should let it happen, if it happens. In other words, you start reading Politics and then, if at some point you want to read parts of it again, that’s ok. And if not, that’s also ok.
Another unrealistic expectation is to expect to read a book in a linear fashion, and especially from start to finish. I feel like that’s something you do if you need to read something. But otherwise, I just start where it seems the most interesting. Of course many times I start reading, and I realize there are things that I’m missing, which the author has explained in previous parts. So great, now I go to these parts; or I don’t, depending on how important they are.
In either case, the experience is educational because you learn to recognize what you know/understand and what you don’t; and being fine with it. On the other hand, reading linearly may make you uncomfortable with any lack of understanding, because you may assume that since you’re going linearly, then you must know everything required to understand the current piece; a bad assumption in my experience.
So, if you pick up Pussypedia and you see “Sex Toys” in the Table of Contents, and that seems especially interesting, well then, jump there! By the way, you’d think that it’s only normal to conclude that knowing about the uterus (a previous chapter) is not that important in reading about sex toys, but the problem is that the Table of Contents is itself a medium. In other words, it influences the content it presents. In particular, it’s sorted and presented in a linear fashion, even though the book’s content (and the way the author intended it) may be more like an unordered set.
Let’s start simple: if your native language is not popular, then my guess is that most translations are bad anyway and so it doesn’t matter which one you pick. Case in point: Modern Greek, my native language. Many translations are horrible. I don’t mean like “somewhat inaccurate”, I mean they’re disconnected from reality. For example, about two years ago I started reading Molière’s “Le Malade imaginaire” (usually translated as “The Imaginary Invalid” in English). Note here that Molière’s French, although obviously archaic, is not hard. Like other fathers of comedy, e.g., Aristophanes, his language is vernacular.
Now, in Greek, the word “fourth” and the word “Wednesday” are almost the same.5 But, in Modern Greek you can tell them apart because the day is written with the first letter uppercase. The book writes at some point “in the twentieth Xth6 of the month”, where X is the word but with an uppercase. So, as a Greek person you’d read “in the twentieth Wednesday of the month”, which of course makes no sense because no month has 20 Wednesdays. In other words, translations are usually so bad that you know they’re inaccurate without even looking at the original, because it’s obvious that no literate person would write anything like what you just read.
Of course, there are exceptions. I have devoted a whole article to a Greek translation of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time which is better than the English translation. But such cases are rare.
Let’s now talk about translations in popular languages like English, Spanish, and French. In such languages it’s rare to find a terrible translation, but there are other issues. People usually group all these issues under the description that “every translation involves an interpretation”, which is true, but it’s not very detailed. So, let’s break it down.
First of all, some texts can interpreted in wildly different ways. Take, for example, a part of Book 2, Chapter 40, Section 2, from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Note that this part belongs to what may very well be the most popular part of the whole of Thucydides’ History (that or the Melian dialogue), since it’s part of Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Let’s first consider the translation by Richard Crawley, used in the popular Landmark edition:
[A]nd we are able to judge the proposals even if we cannot originate them; instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.
Here’s the translation of the same excerpt by Rex Warner (used in the Penguin edition):
We Athenians, in our own persons, take our decisions on policy or submit them to proper discussions; for we do not think that there is an incompatibility between words and deeds; the worst thing is to rush into action before the consequences have been properly debated[.]
As you can see, these two diverge significantly here. To see how this can happen, let’s first see the original (which you can find here):
καὶ οἱ αὐτοὶ ἤτοι κρίνομέν γε ἢ ἐνθυμούμεθα ὀρθῶς τὰ πράγματα, οὐ τοὺς λόγους τοῖς ἔργοις βλάβην ἡγούμενοι, ἀλλὰ μὴ προδιδαχθῆναι μᾶλλον λόγῳ πρότερον ἢ ἐπὶ ἃ δεῖ ἔργῳ ἐλθεῖν.
Now, here’s my (transliteral) translation:
καὶ [and] οἱ αὐτοὶ [ourselves] ἤτοι [certainly] κρίνομέν [decide, judge] γε [at least] ἢ [or] ἐνθυμούμεθα [deliberate] ὀρθῶς [correctly] τὰ πράγματα [the affairs], οὐ [without] τοὺς λόγους [words] τοῖς ἔργοις [the actions] βλάβην [hurt] ἡγούμενοι [regarding, believing], ἀλλὰ [but] μὴ [not] προδιδαχθῆναι [studying before] μᾶλλον [more, better] λόγῳ [by reason, by discussiong] πρότερον [beforehand] ἢ [than] ἐπὶ ἃ [to what] δεῖ [must, has to] ἔργῳ [be done] ἐλθεῖν [to come].
But, one could make different decisions for some words. In particular:
You can see that my first translation is closer to Rex Warner’s translation, although there are still differences (e.g., Warner created a “We Athenians” out of thin air). The alternative choices lead to a translation closer to Crawley’s. I think Crawley’s translation is less accurate, but this is just my opinion. More importantly, however, it’s not that unreasonable. Especially with complex languages like Greek, and when you have to do with difficult and terse writing like that of Thucydides, you can end up with significantly different interpretations.
A translator can’t help you if there are many wildly different interpretations; she has to choose one. One option is to be reading multiple translations at once, but still that’s not the best way (and in the long term it requires more effort than teaching yourself how to read basic Ancient Greek). For example, my interpretation of this part doesn’t completely agree with Crawley’s, Warner’s, or Hammond’s translations (Hammond’s translations is featured in the Oxford edition).
Another case of interpretation is the obvious case when someone interprets feelings or other states when they’re not explicitly conveyed. For example, someone may write “sorry” at some point during Pericles’ Funeral Oration, because he thought Pericles was sorry, even though the original may not include an apology at this point.
Moreover, sometimes an interpretation is simply necessary. An easy example is “Ich heiße X” in German. This is usually translated as “My name is X”, but, to the best of my knowledge, it’s impossible to translate it perfectly. If we try to force it, it would be similar to “I am called X” or “λέγομαι” in Greek. However, “heiße” is not in the passive voice.
A subtler example is the phrase “I don’t give a f#ck”. If you try to translate that to e.g., Greek, it will read something like “I don’t give a coitus”, which of course makes no sense. Necessarily, you have to change it a bit, probably ending up with something like “this doesn’t concern me” or e.g., in French, “Je m’en fous”. But, neither conveys and evokes what the original phrase does. For example, there are situations where it’s fine to say “Je m’en fous” but in the same situation “I don’t give a fuck” would be too vulgar. As a translator, there’s nothing much you can do if you want to write something that will be understandable.
Nevertheless, the worst case of interpretation is when someone tries to interpret a situation of the past through today’s (and particularly, modernity’s) lens. Easy example: Crawley (mentioned above) uses the words “industry” (to translate “ἔργα”), “capital” (to translate “περιουσία”), and “highway” (used in “be the highway of” to translate “ἐσβατόν”)—and many others—even though obviously none of these concepts existed back then. This is why I think it’s more accurate to think of modern translations not as recent but as “through the eyes of modernity”.
Because of these problems, I don’t think you can ever read an old text without reading history—because that’s the only thing that will help you understand the historical/social/political/... context. In other words, it’s hard to understand what Aristotle meant if you don’t know what Aristotle lived. There’s no quick fix for that; we need to read history and soak ourselves into the then state of affairs.
In a similar manner there’s no easy fix for the problem of not “getting” phrases from other languages like “I don’t give a f#ck” (for a non-English speaker): we need to get extended exposure to that language. Only then we can start “getting” it. In practice, this means that we should be comfortable with not “getting” it the first time; and accepting that we won’t get it soon. A Google search, a lookup in a dictionary, or asking a native speaker will not make a non-English speaker immediately “get” what “I don’t give a f#ck” means, just as it won’t help a non-French speaker “get” what “Je m’en fous” means. And that’s fine, it will come with time.7
Which brings me to my original point: quite unintuitively, a translation doesn’t really matter if you really want to understand the text. Quite the contrary: you need a good translation if you don’t care that much about the original. For example, if you don’t care about what Thucydides exactly wrote and meant in the Peloponnesian War, and you just want to read about it in well-written English, then the Landmark edition is great! Not because it will really give you a very good sense of what Thucydides said—no translation can—but because it will tell you the story roughly as Thucydides wrote it in cool and fancy English. The same goes for novels: if you’re reading a translation, you’re not reading what the author wrote, but how the translator rewrote the original. So, similar to how you need a good author for a non-translated novel, in a translated work you need the author of the original to be good, and the translator—as some kind of secondary author—to be a good author herself.8 These should give you a good novel to read.
Here you may protest: I do want to understand the original, but I don’t speak e.g., French yet! Do I just not read the work? What if I’m learning languages through reading? Don’t I need a translation to start? Well, yeah! And that’s fine! It’s fine to accept that you won’t fully get the first couple of books you’ll read in a new language—especially if reading is the way you’re learning the language. You’ll struggle through translations. However (!), it needs to be a struggle! In other words, you need to constantly be trying to read the original. Of course you’ll be failing, but eventually (and I mean months or years later!) you will be able to read the original. Thus, in my opinion, translations are fine as long as: (a) we understand we’re not getting the real thing, and (b) they’re a temporary tool to get us through the learning period.
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I’ll end this section with the one and only Alan Turing, who said something that reaches the root of the problems of translation much better than I could ever do (although he wasn’t thinking about translations). He said:
I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
And here’s how William J. Rapaport commented on that in a paper:
[Turing] did not say that machines will think, nor did he say that machines will behave as if they think, nor did he say (as many take him to have said) that “intelligent” behavior is all that matters.
and in another paper:
[Turing] predicted that successful imitation would be taken as Intelligence (our use of words would alter), and also that our notion of Intelligence would change to include such imitation (our educated opinion would alter).
Intelligence is in the eye of the beholding judge; it is not necessarily something internal to the system being tested. Thinking that an LLM is Intelligent tells us more about us than it does about either the LLM or Intelligence. [...] If we judges cannot distinguish an AI system’s output from that of a human, we will inevitably treat the two kinds of Intelligent systems alike[.] [...] Whether the judges are wrong depends on what they take Intelligence to be [.]
Now think to which extent “our use of words” and “our general educated opinion” has changed with regards to the term democracy, why it happened, and why it matters.
Some people argue: “Aristotle lived in a slave-owning society in which women were not citizens. Why should I read him?”
Because Aristotle lived in a democracy while we don’t. No, I’m not saying that because Aristotle lived in a “direct” democracy, while we live in a “representative” democracy. It’s because the adjectives “direct democracy” and “representative democracy” don’t make sense (and Aristotle never used them). To say that we live in a “representative” democracy is either an oxymoron, or an admission that we don’t live in a democracy. Why? Because either people (the demos) deliberate themselves (democracy), or they do it through representatives (representation). Where you have representation, you can’t have democracy. In other words, the two are incompatible. That doesn’t mean they can’t co-exist within a political system; for example, in Athens people elected representatives for e.g., military generals, while the courts were democratic because everyone served. But it does mean that wherever you have representation, you don’t have a democracy and vice-versa.
I know this sounds shocking, which is why it took Contogeorgis and me 3 hours to unravel the misinterpretations of modernity. The episode will be published shortly here and in my Youtube channel. My point, however, is that we don’t know or understand every aspect of the past, which is to say that important ideas got lost over time, and I'm not particularly original in saying that. See, for example, the discussion I had with Federica here (1:06:55). Worse yet, several ideas have been misinterpreted...
Think about your college years, or even school years: chances are your favorite classes were not those in which the subject was something you liked, but those which had a good professor teaching it. For example for me, even though I liked informatics a lot, I didn’t like the relevant class in high school because the professor was bad. On the other hand, I became interested in history due to a professor.
My point here is that often we focus on the subject when picking a book. But in my experience, it’s the author that counts much more. For example, I could read Michael Sandel writing about Kitchen’s Nightmares and fashion. It’s Michael Sandel, you know it will be amazing. In particular, if he decides to write about something, you know he loves it enough and has studied it enough that you’ll get something good. Same with Naomi Klein and many other authors.
Of course you don’t want to confine yourself to few authors, because then you’ll get into some kind of echo chamber. But my point here is that if you read a good book by someone on some subject you care about, try reading other books from the same author, even if the subject doesn’t sound interesting. It’s likely that you’ll get introduced to something you didn’t know by one of the authors you already like.
Audiobooks have many benefits over physical or electronic books. For example, they’re usually much cheaper, or even free.9 Also, for most people they’re much easier to get through because it’s harder to read (even physically) than to listen. For instance, you can listen to a book while cooking, eating, or driving, but reading anything in similar situations is impossible or even illegal.
However, audiobooks have one major disadvantage, and it’s one we also find in movies, documentaries, podcasts, etc.: these media don’t encourage pausing and pondering/reflecting. Say you’re listening to an audiobook. If you hear something that you want to reflect over, you need to consciously/intentionally and physically pause the audiobook. It doesn’t matter whether this involves hitting the pause button on your Tesla or doing a double-tap on your Airpods; in all cases it’s an abrupt action. Same with a movie: you need to take the mouse and click pause, or hit the spacebar, or grab the remote. In short, in these media pausing and pondering is a disruptive, conscious, and physical act, that abruptly breaks the flow or state of the experience.
Books, on the other hand, make pausing and pondering so natural and smooth, that it usually happens without you even noticing. In a book the moment you divert your gaze.. whoop! the content emission just pauses automatically! You don’t really need to do anything conscious, or physical (it’s as if someone hits pause on the content when you hit pause in your brain). Many times I find myself having paused to ponder looking exactly where I was looking at 5 seconds ago, except now I’m not reading anymore. As such, the nature of the medium encourages reflection, and deep thought. It encourages making sure you get something before you move forward, because it makes it so easy to pause and think about it.
That’s not the case for a video or an audiobook. In fact, not only do these media make it difficult to pause—as we explained above—but in fact if you do it without physically hitting a pause button, the medium will cut your thought in the middle of it and slap you right back on track. For example, if you hear something that’s interesting and you start thinking about it, let’s say unconsciously, well guess what: the audiobook keeps playing! So, what was your source of information a second ago, now becomes an intense distraction, which usually “wins” in the sense that it will cut your thought and make you return to the book’s content. If you do persevere, and stay lost in your thoughts, that will make you lose track of the content, so you’ll have to rewind it—which is even more annoying.
As with most things, whether that’s a bug or a feature is up to you. For example, some people may get distracted a lot, and so this slapping back may be good for them to keep them focused. For me it’s definitely a huge problem!
Another problem with audiobooks (and again videos/movies/documentaries) is they do not encourage keeping notes. This is terrible for me because keeping notes aids my understanding. In particular, in my notes I usually try to create a “book within a book” similar to what Ray Dalio did in the book “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail”. Or, I try to explain (to an imaginary dumb friend) something I just read that challenged me. Or, I connect it with a previous part of the book, or another book. Or I try to construct a counter-argument. All these acts, I find, help me understand the content. These other media make this note-taking pretty hard.
Finally, for similar reasons I prefer a physical book to an electronic book because the physical book, as a medium, encourages you to stay within the book and avoid distractions. If I’m reading a physical book, I have my phone playing music somewhere far, I sit comfortably in a couch, and I just read the book. If I want to e.g., open Instagram (or more commonly for me, a dictionary; usually when I’m reading French), I need to: (a) use a bookmark so that I don’t miss where I was at,10 (b) close the book and put it somewhere, (c) extend my arm to reach my phone (and you know, if you grab it weirdly it will stop the music, especially if it’s Youtube), (d) open Instagram. Then, I need to reverse all these to get back to the book. That’s a nightmare! Basically, reading physical books, and in that way, makes it very annoying distracting yourself, which is great!
By the way, I said that I may reference “another book” earlier. Many times when I read a book, I refer to another book and I need to keep it open for a while. Sometimes it’s multiple books. Physical books, and even electronic books, make that pretty easy. An audiobook, however, makes that a pain. In my experience (i.e., the platforms I have used), you are supposed to be listening one book and one book only.
Before finishing off this section, I should say that all that doesn’t mean I don’t listen to audiobooks every once in a while. They can be useful as as a preview, especially because, as I said, they’re cheap or free. So, I start listening to a book and if it’s interesting, I buy it.11 Otherwise, I take it off my reading list.
Here I definitely don’t know much. I’ve been learning French for quite a while, to a big extent through reading, just because: (a) reading is my hobby anyway, and (b) because I’m mainly learning French to read French. I’m not even sure if it’s one of the efficient ways, but it definitely comes naturally to me, so following a way is definitely better than not following the best way.
In any case, what eventually became obvious to me—pretty late for some reason—is that stopping and looking up every word you don’t know is a big no-no. It’s clearly highly inefficient on so many fronts. My suggestion is to start reading the book and highlight any words you don’t know. Every 2-3 pages (or when the plot gets hazy because you have missed much) stop, and only look up the words that seem to be the most useful/common. I’d say more than 10 words a page is not worth it. Similar to the general theme of this article, it’s much more important to keep your interest up than looking up every single word.
Of course, if there are too many unknown words, that may be an indication that this is not your level yet. But then again, you can’t put a number on that, simply because if you absolutely love the book, and it keeps your interest despite looking up words all the time, I think it’s fine to continue.
As a last note, I suggest you start with non-fiction; it’s usually much more approachable. I think this is important to be said because many suggestions for beginners you’ll find online suggest fiction.
Some people consider this too strict, but this one is partly a numbers game. You see, if books are your main hobby, then the books you want to read are way too many; and at some point, they will probably unavoidably surpass what you can read in your life. Also, it’s not just the number of books, but also how long it takes to read them carefully.
So, my rule of thumb is that if I’m not convinced a book is worth it after reading 30% of it (not necessarily in order; see above), then I just put it away and pick up another one. Again, life is too short for bad books, and that’s not a banal proverb; literally, our lives—yours and mine—are too short to read all the books we want. So, we can’t be wasting time. And anyway, why read it if you don’t enjoy it? The only reason is because you can’t think of yourself admitting you haven’t read e.g., Dostoevsky.12 But again, that goes back to the need to appear educated, which we discussed earlier.
For the most part, classics are classics for a reason. That doesn’t mean that all classics will agree with you (e.g., I have no idea what people like in The Catcher in the Rye), or that only classics are worth reading. But, I feel they’re a much safer bet; they have passed the test of time, and if a concept or plot sticks still and keeps intriguing people, then there’s some value to it.
Today you read all these ambitious and bold reviews like “one of the most important books of the 21st century”, or “a life-changing book”, or “a unique and novel analysis”, etc. However, nowadays our lives are ephemeral, which impacts what we value: most things become ephemeral, including book reading and book writing. As a result, I generally find it hard to believe this is truly “one of the best books of the 21st century”, because the processes that our lives lead us to follow do not usually lead to such results. Of course there are exceptions; for example, this book (which is unfortunately in Greek) was being written for seventeen freaking years.13 Well yeah, that one may be one of the best books of the 21st century. But a book that was written in 2 months to analyze the first 3 months of a presidency... eh... I’m not so sure.
And generally speaking, it’s hard to believe that a book is one of the best of the 21st century (or any century), when we’re still not done with it! Besides, as people we have a tendency to think of the present as more important than it actually is (see the discussion on “Presentism” in Stumbling on Happiness). In that sense, I don’t think you should focus only on classics, but generally older books. I know that’s not “hip”, but apart from the fact that an older book has been there for a while—which lets us view it with a sober eye, an older book can help you avoid what you naturally get exposed to every day, which is current trends. To give you an example, you will probably get to learn a lot about the criticism on meritocracy today (e.g., by the one and only Michael Sandel) just by living in this world today, as part of “the talk of the town”. On the other hand, reading the Federalist papers will give you insights that you don’t hear today; for example, that James Madison was openly and unapologetically against (what he called) democracy.