We’re Reading Wrong
A multi-trip ticket on the Swiss national railway has room for six stamps. Before each journey you stick the ticket into an orange machine that validates it by stamping the date and time and cutting off a tiny notch along the left edge. Once it has six stamps, the ticket is worthless.
Imagine a book-reading ticket with fifty spaces. The system is otherwise the same: before you read a book, you’ve got to stamp your ticket. Yet unlike the train ticket, this is the only one you’ll ever have. You can’t buy a new one. Once the ticket has been used up, you can’t open any more new books—and there’s no fare-dodging allowed. Fifty books across a whole lifetime? For many people that’s a non-issue, but for you as the reader of this book it’s a horrifying thought. How are you supposed to get through life in a half-civilized manner with so few books?
My personal library consists of three thousand books—about one third read, one third skimmed, and one third unread. I regularly add new ones, and I have an annual clear-out when I chuck the old ones away. Three thousand books. It’s a modest library in comparison to that of, say, the deceased Umberto Eco (thirty thousand books). Yet often I can only faintly recall its contents. As I let my gaze wander over the spines, my mind is filled with wispy shreds of memory mixed with vague emotions and the occasional flashes of a particular scene. Sometimes a sentence will drift by, like an abandoned rowboat in the silent fog. Rarely do I remember a compact précis. There are a couple of books I can’t even say with certainty I’ve actually read—I have to open them and hunt for crinkled pages or notes in the margin. At such moments I don’t know what’s more shameful, my Swiss-cheese memory or the apparently negligible impact of so many of these books, though I do find it reassuring that lots of my friends have had the same experience. For me it happens not just with books but also with essays, articles, analyses and all kinds of texts I have read and enjoyed. Little of them has stuck. Dismally little.
What’s the point of reading a book when the content largely seeps away? The felt experience at the moment of reading matters, of course, no question. But so does the felt experience of crème brûlée, and you don’t expect it to shape the character of the person gobbling it down. Why is it we retain so little of what we read?
We’re reading wrong. We’re reading neither selectively nor thoroughly enough. We let our attention off the leash as though it were a dog we’re happy to let roam, instead of directing it toward its splendid quarry. We fritter our most valuable resource on things that don’t deserve them.
Today I read differently than I did a few years ago. Just as much, but fewer books—only I read them better, and twice. I’ve become radically selective. A book earns ten minutes of my time, maximum, then I give my verdict—to read or not to read. The multi-trip ticket metaphor helps me be more drastic. Is the book I’m holding in my hands a book for which I’d be willing to sacrifice a space on my ticket? Few are. Those that do make the cut I read twice in direct succession. On principle.
Read a book twice? Why not? In music we’re used to listening to a track more than once. And if you play an instrument, you’ll know you can’t master a score on the first attempt. It takes several concentrated iterations before you can hurry on to the next piece. Why shouldn’t the same go for books?
The effect of reading twice isn’t twice the effect of reading once. It’s much greater—judging by my own experience, I’d put it at a factor of ten. If I retain three percent of the content after one reading, after two readings it’s up to thirty percent.
I’m continually astonished by how much you can absorb during slow, focused reading, how many new things you discover on a second pass, and how greatly your understanding deepens through this measured approach. When Dostoyevsky saw Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb in Basel in 1867, he was so captivated by the painting that his wife had to drag him away after half an hour. Two years later he could describe it in near-photographic detail in The Idiot. Would a snapshot on your iPhone have the same degree of effectiveness? Hardly. The great novelist needed to be immersed in the painting in order to make productive use of it. “Immersed” is the key word here. Immersion—the opposite of surfing.
Let’s refine this a little. One: degree of effectiveness—that sounds technical. Can you make that sort of judgment about books? Yes, this type of reading is use-orientated and unromantic. Leave Romanticism for other activities. If a book leaves no trace in your brain—because it was a bad book or you read it badly—I’d count that as a waste of time. A book is something qualitatively different from crème brûlée, a scenic flight over the Alps or sex.
Two: crime novels and thrillers are excluded from the ticketing system, because with few exceptions you can’t read them twice. Who wants to re-identify a killer?
Three: you’ve got to decide how many spaces your personal reading ticket should have. I’ve limited mine to one hundred for the next ten years. That’s an average of ten books per year—criminally few for a writer. Yet, as I said, I read these excellent books twice or even three times, with great enjoyment and ten times the effectiveness.
Four: if you’re still young, say in the first third of your active reading life, you should devour as many books as possible—novels, short stories, poetry, non-fiction of all stripes. Go nuts. Pay no attention to quality. Read your fill. Why? The answer has to do with a kind of mathematical optimization called the secretary problem (see Chapter 48). In the classic formulation, you’re trying to select the best secretary from a pool of applicants. The solution is to establish the basic distribution by interviewing and rejecting the first thirty-seven percent of applicants. Through indiscriminate reading, or—in statistical terms—by taking multiple samples in the first third of your reading life, you’ll get a representative picture of the literary landscape. You’ll sharpen your powers of judgment, too, which will enable you to be drastically selective later. So don’t start stamping your reading ticket until you’re about thirty, but be ruthless thereafter. Once you hit thirty, life’s too short for bad books.