What Reading Is For

Note: I know I told you a few weeks ago I was done publishing every Wednesday. But I’ve accidentally had a lot of decent ideas lately, so I’m taking advantage of them while they’re flowing, so to speak. I promise, eventually I’ll follow through and disappoint you.

---

If you look at the bookshelf in your house, it’s pretty likely that you remember almost nothing from almost every one of the books. Despite having spent hours, days, or weeks with each book, you probably remember almost no details. If you’re lucky (and if the author was particularly good with words), you might remember about two full sentences from the book. Everything else is just a blur of vague scenes and feelings.

And it’s hard not to ask why we read, if that’s the case. If I don’t even remember what I read, is reading a waste of time?

No, of course not. Because reading is not about information. It’s not about remembering things. It’s really not even about what’s written in the book (although it is pretty cool to be able to talk about specific information and specific stories with other people — it gives you a unique sense of cultural participation).

It's about improving your model of how the world works. It’s a place where you spend time updating yourself. Reading is not about reading; it’s about becoming the kind of person who has read.

For example: if you read about ancient Greece or the seventeenth-century Netherlands, you’re probably not going to remember most of the “facts” you read. What you are going to get is some time spent understanding how things worked in those civilizations. You’ll have a better model of things like early cities, how the first corporations were formed, and how money has evolved over time.

Knowledge like that doesn’t necessarily come in the form of facts. It’s more like imagery and cause-effect relationships. You’ll remember those things, but not the facts.

Another example: one of the biggest takeaways from The Grapes of Wrath is that things never change. There is always some new technology and some big business venture invading our lives and bullying out all that is good in the world. And there is always rebellion against it as people try to keep their lives from changing and their families from being torn apart.

It doesn't matter if you don't remember the name of Tom Joad’s sister or his best friend, or even whether they were from Oklahoma — by reading The Grapes of Wrath, you learn lessons about people, relationships, and the nature of civilization. Lessons that not only still apply today, but that shine light on why today is the way it is. Because in most ways, today is the same as yesterday.

The point is, you’ll be a better and wiser person by having read the book. You’ll understand the world better.

No one will ever test you on the details of Steinbeck’s novels, and no one will ever test you on the Dutch East India Company. What life will test you on is whether you understand people, relationships, and civilization. And it will test you on those things over and over and over until you die. In that way, life is basically a test of whether you’ve done your homework. And if you haven’t done it, you’ll never be ready for things that happen. You’ll always be scrambling.

Reading is doing your homework about life.

I generally find that people who don't read don't get what they want out of life. Because they haven't done their homework. I wish that weren’t the case, and I certainly wish I didn’t have to say it, but I think it’s true.¹

The more you read, the less you'll be surprised by the world and its people. Because whatever you encounter, chances are you've encountered it before in a book. Roughly.

There are only so many things that can happen in life. There’s tragedy, there’s civilization, there are relationships, there’s work, there are calls to purpose and meaning, and there is a struggle to be true to yourself. That pretty much covers everything that can happen to you in life. If you spend a lot of time with those few things in books, over and over, you’ll just about know all there is to know.

Anything that happens to you or around you, you'll have models for what the implications are, what natural forces are at work, and what to do about it. You can see not only the lead-up, but also the fallout. Because things that happen in life tend to happen again. And things that happen in fiction tend to happen in reality.

One of my favorite sayings: the point of a parable isn’t that it happened, but that it happens. It’s good to know lots of things that happen.

When you read the news, you don't learn anything that goes beyond the current moment. There's nothing to distill out and generalize. It's just a never-ending onslaught of trivial details in the never-ending now.

It’s hard to build a good model of the world if you spend your entire life in the details of the moment. Reading is an escape from the details of the moment. But it’s not just an escape as in escapism — it’s an escape to something. To what is even more real than reality itself. To principles and understanding.

You read for that general, non-specific understanding. You read to be in touch with what is timeless.

But the way I’m talking about reading, it almost sounds like work: ruthlessly pragmatic and joyless. Like it must have utility above all — like if we’re not learning, we’re decaying.

First of all, that’s true. If you’re not learning, you’re decaying. In fact you’re decaying anyway; you might as well do something to counteract it.

But I also believe in joy and entertainment. For instance, I watch horribly offensive stand-up comedians because it’s fun. It makes me happy. (But even then, they’re saying things that apply to reality. It still isn’t totally empty entertainment.)

And reading isn’t just work anyway, it’s also fun. That’s what good writing is for. The point of good writing is not simply to be good — to tickle something. It's to make digesting important ideas easier, deeper, or more enjoyable. Good prose, therefore, is not just a beautiful thing; it's a vehicle for carrying useful information. Bad prose is a bad vehicle that no one wants to ride in. Bad prose is bad at carrying ideas. Which is why being a good writer is not just an option but a requirement.

John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, for instance, is an almost worthless document. Because it’s just no fun to read (it’s the most hideously, needlessly verbose thing I’ve ever touched), and very few human beings could ever learn anything from reading it. It’s a bad vehicle.

And even if it wasn’t a bad vehicle, there’s no “there” there. There’s no destination — you never arrive anywhere. The problem with abstract philosophy is that it just isn’t useful. It’s pondering for the sake of pondering: masturbation. It’s carefully-crafted, painstakingly-reviewed, beautifully-written essays about nothing.

There is such a thing as reading something beautiful just because it's beautiful. But what that amounts to is poetry, and most people aren't into poetry. What that suggests is that there's something in reading that we find useful, and that when it's missing we don't want to read. Reading, for the most part, is not like music. We don't just use it to tickle senses or validate moods. We don’t read sad books after a breakup or happy books at a party.

We use it to become something we're not. To get smarter. To get in touch with something.

People read to arrive somewhere.

We don’t read The Lord of the Rings because it’s beautiful or entertaining — we read it because it contains reality.² It does happen to be beautiful, which is a nice touch. However if it was beautifully written but didn’t reflect real relationships or how the world actually works, we wouldn’t read it.

You read it because it’s useful. Because it makes you better at handling tragedy, and civilization, and relationships, and work, and calls to purpose and meaning, and being true to yourself. Because it gives you all of the things that reading is supposed to give you — the things that life will test you on.

So reading is:

• a process of gathering imagery, wisdom, and cause-effect relationships, not facts

• which show you how the world works

• over and over

• until you’re wise or dead.

• And it also happens to be fun.

• Sometimes.

• But even when it’s not, you should still do it.

Drink some water and read something you love. Anything. Read what you love until you love to read.

JDR

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” - Oscar Wilde

1. One reason is that reading forces you to spend time and get dirty: you have to get down in the mud and the muck and wrestle extensively with important ideas. People who aren’t willing to do that probably aren’t willing to do much else to get what they want, either.

2. I also just stumbled upon the reason I dislike anime: because it doesn't contain reality. Its characters are so saturated, so exaggerated, so not-real, that you can't learn anything from them. Real people do act like characters from children's books; real people don't act like anime characters unless there's something wrong with them.

Anime, in general, looks to me like pure escapism. I’m not sure what that says about Japanese culture. One guess is that they take their real lives so seriously that when they want entertainment, they want something that has nothing to do with reality. Maybe it’s an overcompensation thing.