Long Reading

Books train the ability to hold a long thought.

Not because paper is morally superior to a screen. A book simply creates a space where an argument, a story or a world unfolds over longer than a few seconds and requires you to remember the earlier parts.

Reading a lot is useful, but quantity isn’t the goal. A hundred books skimmed quickly may change less than one read carefully and at the right time.

Different modes of reading serve different functions: a quick acquaintance, a search for particular information, sequential study, slow reading of a difficult text, immersion in fiction, and rereading.

Not every book has to be finished. Sunk costs apply in the library too. If a text gives neither pleasure, nor knowledge, nor the professional information you need, permission to stop has already been granted.

Difficulty, though, doesn’t always mean poor quality. Some books require learning the language of the subject. If you drop every text at the moment of resistance, you stay inside what you already know.

Two sensations are worth telling apart:

This is hard because I’m learning.

This is hard because the text is badly written or I don’t need it right now.

The answer isn’t always obvious. Sometimes another twenty pages are needed. Sometimes a different book.

The two kinds of difficulty differ in one sign: either it isn’t clear what exactly is unclear, or it is clear but pointless. In a textbook on an unfamiliar subject, a person can usually name the place where they got lost: they don’t know a term, don’t remember the previous chapter, can’t see where a formula came from. That is fixable — twenty pages back, or with another book on the same topic. In a bad text it is impossible to say where you got lost, because there was nothing to lose: paragraphs follow one another, and after the third chapter you can’t restate a single claim.

The second sign works on books everybody likes too. If after a hundred pages you haven’t found a single proposition you could argue with, the text may not be difficult, just about nothing. Unfortunately, this only becomes clear in the process.