Books
My harsh thoughts on the meaning of "reading"
How many books?!
It’s funny how often people brag about how many books they read per year. I’ve had many people tell me that they read 50 or even 100 books per year. When people ask me how many books I read, they are often shocked when I say, “usually 10 to 12.” What?! A self-proclaimed “avid reader” only reads a dozen books per year? What a phony!
Am I the phony?
Let’s start by establishing an important premise. Speed reading is bullsh*t, bullshit, bullshit. As you’ll see in these articles, high-quality studies have demonstrated that one cannot read faster than about 500-600 words per minute with strong comprehension. Yes, you can skim through news articles and pick out the key points, but good luck trying to speed through Human Action or The Peloponnesian War and understand anything. You’d be better off staring at the ceiling fan than trying to speed read.
To be clear, people can read 50-100 books a year. If you read 2 hours every day, that’s 730 hours of reading a year. Most books take between 6-12 hours of reading, so an avid reader who dedicates that much time to reading can definitely finish 50-100 books. Most of us, unfortunately, don’t have that kind of time.
What is “reading” a book?
I have high standards for saying that someone has read a book.
You have read every page.
You can explain the book in detail.
You can discover in three questions whether someone who claims to have read the book has actually read it. In other words, if I were to set up an experiment where I had 10 people read the book (according to my criteria) and 10 people only skim it, you would be able to ask questions to each person and accurately determine who read it and who skimmed it.
You can easily answer the questions of someone who has read the book (according to my criteria), to demonstrate that you have read it.
If I say that I have “read” a book, it means that I believe that I have met these criteria. People will often ask if I have read a certain book, and I know that I know enough about the book to pretend to have read it, but I will always say, “I am familiar with it",” or “I have skimmed it,” but I will never say I’ve read something I haven’t read. And I am super judge-y when someone claims to have read a book and I quickly discover that they don’t meet my criteria.
One time I was having a conversation with someone who told me that she had read Thinking Fast and Slow three times. I asked her what she thought of the Linda Problem and whether she knew of any strong objections. She then asked, “what’s the Linda Problem?” I won’t get into the specifics here, but the Linda Problem is, in my reading, the central problem of the book. It is the example that highlights the book’s main key thesis and contains many of the key themes.
The best-known and most controversial of our experiments involved a fictitious lady called Linda. Amos and I made up the Linda problem to provide conclusive evidence of the role of heuristics in judgement and of their incompatability with logic.1
Not knowing the Linda Problem after reading Thinking Fast and Slow is like claiming to have read a book on Napoleon and not knowing that he was Corsican. So, I said flat out, “you didn’t read it three times. You don’t know the Linda Problem? You didn’t read it.” I was trying to be playful, but she was shocked and offended that I would make such a claim.
There are other people who have much lower standards about what it means to “read” a book. For example, we once had a retired colonel come and talk to our unit about some niche topic in which he was an expert. This colonel was very knowledgeable about his subject, but he also was very adamant about looking smarter than he probably was. He told all of us that we should be “reading” fifty or more books a year. He said,
Here’s how to read a book. You read the front and the back, then you read the first paragraph of every chapter, then you go through and skim the rest.
After the retired colonel left, my buddy turned to me and said humorously, “Fifty books a year!? Sounds like he’s never actually read a book in his life.”
Danger of Skimming
“It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
-Mark Twain
The quote just about sums it up. Worse than not reading a book and really understanding it, is skimming it and thinking that you understand it. The most interesting authors, the ones who are the most valuable, are typically dealing with nuanced topics and use examples that are not immediately easy to understand. Examples abound, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to skim through a book like “Strange Defeat” by Marc Bloch. The most important aspects of that book are hidden in the middle of chapters and are not obvious unless examined closely. The fact that I read it so closely meant that I was able to identify it without it being named in the book “The Blind Strategist.”2
“The Gulag Archipelago” is another example. If you try to skim through it, you will miss the explosive emotional power of Solzhenitsyn’s writing. Why would you want to skim it?!
Skimming is fine, and many books don’t deserve to be read. Skim to identify whether or not you think the book is worth reading, just don’t claim to have read it.
Thanks so much and have a great week!
Thinking Fast and Slow, Pg. 156
In the Blind Strategist, the author references an obscure French Book from WWII that John Boyd would often cite as a reference. The author does not reference “Strange Defeat” directly in “The Blind Strategist”, but I would bet a substantial amount of money that the book Boyd was referencing was “Strange Defeat".”