I thought for sure this essay would reference Pierre Bayard's really fun How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Oh well!
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’s worth having some form of takeaway from a book, even if it’s just one profound paragraph that resonated with you, and the rest can be filtered out. I mostly read self help, and have managed to boil some books down to a little kernel of truth that I use daily to help me navigate life. Holding a whole book in your head can be done.
Alternatively, books can be entertainment, and that's fine. This I think is a difference in the types of books read. I generally don't read self help books, my experiences in the past with many of them leaving me uninterested in the genre, and instead tend to mostly read novels, especially sci-fi/fantasy.
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.
This is why I find, especially for self help books, reading a distilled summary may suffice. Often the Wikipedia page for the book has enough depth for me.
> 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.
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.
Language in Thought and Action has deeply affected how I think about thinking. I've read it three times now, and there's one or two dozen other books from the same school of thought that I've read since reading it the first time.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 triggered in me an abiding fascination with the operation of the political process.
For me, I was thinking of Gene Wolfe when I wrote that. I've reread the entire "solar cycle" at least once every couple years for the last 20 years, and of course I own all the secondary material I can find on it. And I subscribe to three different podcasts where people just discuss it. And Youtube channels, and mailing lists... I don't think I'll ever really get to the bottom.
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.
Notes from Underground was the book that really pulled me into Dostoevsky (after initially reading C&P and disliking it - I doubtless missed quite a lot the first time through).
Definitely in that category for me.
"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man." A good hook, but I had a tough time finishing Notes. The narrator really shows that yes, he is in fact a sick and spiteful man. Not one I'd want to pick up again.
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
For me it's Nietzsche's "Thus spoke Zarathustra". I'm a different person each time I get through certain sections of that book. That said, I'm sure one of the hundreds of unread books I own is equally life changing.
I see your Seveneves! For me it's Anathem. Though the fact that it's the only Stephenson book I have a hard copy of probably helps with serendipitous rereads of the kind you describe.
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!
I've read eight of the Culture novels now, and "The Player of Games" was in the bottom two for me. I'm mystified that most others seem to rank this book so high. "Use of Weapons" and "Surface Detail" are my favorites so far, but they're rarely mentioned here.
> The latter is much more rewarding, but my point is not that one is better than the other [...]
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.
Funnily enough, pretending to read a book will almost always make you better at these conversations than actually reading the book.
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.
The best grade on a book essay I got in High School was for a book that didn't even exist. We were supposed to read a book of our choosing and write about it. I couldn't be bothered (ok, ok, I wasn't the best student), so I just made one up and the teacher commented that it was the best essay in the class.
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.
>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).
Moby Dick is what it looks like: the whalers are whalers, the ship is a ship, the whale is a whale. "Deeper meanings" are not as characteristic of literary fiction as your high school English teacher might like you to believe. But whereas stories on the pulpier end of the spectrum create characters to meet the demands of the plot, Moby Dick's plot is a delivery mechanism for its characters.
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.
I just felt bad for Melville when I got to chapters where he introduced his classification system for whales. He seemed so excited by it, and it's unfortunately obvious with the passage of time that it was very wrong.
The main problem is teachers not adjusting the books to the personality of the student. I often wonder if many US high-school English teachers don't actually read anything outside of their curriculum literature.
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.
I think Neil Postman hit this point in his arguments regarding the death of the written culture when showbiz was born in the late 1800s. The culture shifted with technology to become either a prison or a burlesque.
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.
>The sad truth is that we are becoming an illiterate society.
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.
I don't mean to offend, but you almost proven the article correct.
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 reread books and if some smartass had challenged me about the contents of some of them I would have probably looked a bit suspicious.
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.
My mother used to read a lot of books when I was young so I picked it up as a hobby. I have to say that after the internet came into my life, reading books has become much harder. The effort is much bigger because my brain was wired to faster reward cycles.
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 think, for me, there is a parallel with video games. The common denominator is time and emotional investment.
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.
For me, what helps, is the fact that I have a vivid imagination. Thus games and movies always feels shallows unless they have an interesting plot. Or the mechanism are so hard you have to focus too master them. But I’ll always take a book over a movie.
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.
I’d never heard of this publication before but the way this article so casually and confidently touted the importance their own literary reviews made me feel like I ought to have! I looked up their launch editorial[1] (from 2019) and it seems they’re angling to be a(n ostensibly) “middle of the road”/both sides are bad New Yorker with funding from Jeremy Hosking[2].
I don't read the launch editorial as 'both sides are bad', but as a challenge to what they perceive as a sloppy and pervasive left-wing 'default' opinion. The 'new orthodoxy' language is straight out of the ongoing culture war, in particular.
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.]
I mean the “both sides bad” angle is flatly stated in the editorial:
> 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.
I can’t identify with any of this—I guess I simply don’t travel in social circles where reading books confers status—but I will say this article is wonderfully written and entertaining throughout. In particular, I got a good chuckle out of this turn of phrase:
> You don’t have to go fully commando, of course. There are plenty of briefs available.
Oh, wonderful. I was (perhaps fittingly, given the topic) skimming, and didn't notice this for the excellent pun that it is - I'm glad you pointed it out.
Is anyone else thrown by the lack of editing here? There are a couple things that read oddly but might just be regional wordings, but other sentences seem like they can't have passed under an editor's nose. Yikes.
Agreed, syntactically. However, it is passive in that the strategies aren't actually the actors. The word _evolved_ has a general passive use while actually retaining the active voice syntactically. The actual passive voice version you gave is not normal usage. The author is the actor who has developed strategies, but he is dodging the responsibility by making the strategies be the subject of the sentence and leaving himself out.
The "passive voice" is a term with a technical meaning in grammar. "Evolved" used intransitively doesn't qualify. This is the kind of thing an ordinary person mostly shouldn't need to care about, but if you're going to reach for the cutesy editor joke...
Okay, I'm going to give you a shotgun blast of these and a good chunk of them may just be wrong. (It's my birthday, I feel crotchety, so out comes the red ink) If I were close-reading a text for an important purpose, here are the things I'd want to bring to the author's attention:
* "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.
> Now, over ten trillion new titles hit the shelves every month in Young Adult fiction alone.
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.
A 15 year old niece told me this week that she can’t be bothered to read because she gets bored by the time she gets to the end of the first page. “Why do that when I have TikTok and YouTube?”
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.
It was the same in the previous generation. Not reading school assigned books isn't new to gen Z. People were considered way more odd if they did read the books. Even more so if they said they enjoyed it.
Having had the experience of having read on my own time as a younger teen a book that was on the school curriculum in my later teens, I will say there is something about dissecting a book so you can write essays on it that is pretty effective at removing the enjoyment.
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
To be fair, reading a book and engaging in a conversation about a book are two utterly different bags. And engaging in a conversation about a book is often way more fun. And shifting gears between the two modes is difficult. So you really can't blame people for faking it.
I've noticed that Wheel of Time can be very fun to complain about: the plot goes nowhere fast, there's too much gender war dialogue, too many characters are belligerent idiots. But people still read it and talk about it, passionately. So it's still somehow engaging despite or maybe even because of the flaws.
If there weren't black market epubs, would that be one component to market forces doing their thing for high-quality content?
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?)
People ask me why I buy some many books when obviously I haven't read them all - I usually ask them if they wear all their clothes all the time.
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.
> Tellingly the first download was The Complete Works of Shakespeare — the next, one of the original bluffer’s guides, by Charles Lamb. His abridgments were good enough for James Joyce, who based Ulysses on Lamb’s filleting of Homer. Would the masterpiece of modernism have been any better, more highly esteemed — or more readable — if he’d actually read The Odyssey first, instead of just getting the gist? I doubt it.
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.
That approach sounds like a good post digestion by public model. It gets the archetype more and what gets emphasized or de-emphasized. Like how Oedipus is known the most for sex with his own mother.
Eh, if the book is not worth the read to you, why the angst about admitting that? Sure, if your job is to read books and write critiques on them, your position may be different. Thinking of it, it should be admissible to say "I stopped reading for these reasons" even for a critic. But what can they write after that? It's not going to fill the page, is it?
By being able to pretend that you've seen a television show you won't be left out of the conversation when it drifts towards something that people feel passionately about like Breaking Bad. With books there might be even more pressure: demonstrate your knowledge or you might not get invited for brunch next week.
I'm so used to be left out of television show discussions that I couldn't imagine pretending. I'm ok not getting invited for brunch if that means I don't have to meet people that have expectations about the books I read. Creepy to think that people feel pressured into that.
Edit: Not disagreeing with what you say. It explains the situation of the author rather well. I live in blissful ignorance.
Have always considered Atlas Shrugged to be the best example and anti-thesis too. I’ve met a lot of people who say it’s their favorite book but it becomes clear they’ve never really read most of it or finished it under light questioning. But it will get you invited to those parties anyway.
On the left, they’ve never read it and mentioning will cause your brunch invite to get lost.
Haha, I loved reading Rand in my teens. Also Tolkien. Somehow people are comfortable with having read the one fantasy land, not the other. I guess it's because Tolkien didn't write to change current politics. Rand did.
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.
I've read "quite a few books" in my lifetime. I am not interested in having a conversation about any of them. Well... maybe one or two. Love Tolkien but boy did he need an editor. For the most part, many of the books I read are instantly forgettable. Those that aren't, I remember fragments, some bright, salient details surrounded by a fog of dullness.
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.
> 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.
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.
I see the author's point yet there are echos of the old argument of 'this generation doesn't do X'. Typically those arguments almost always end up being false.
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.
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.