Tag Archives: Reading

I am a picky reader…

Posted on September 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

This is a repost of an old post of mine from Books Worth Reading. I think about it every time I hear someone say that they can’t or shouldn’t put down a book they’ve started reading, despite not enjoying it.

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you or I read, on average, 50 books a year. This is based on reading approximately one book per week, with a two-week vacation (to make the math easier). I know many people read a lot more than this, but most people read less, and I think it is a reasonable number. At least, it is fairly true of me.

Now, also for the sake of argument, let’s estimate that we will all live to be 95 years old, and we will retain our eyesight and mental faculties until our last days. Omitting the first 5 years of life, when we did not know how to read, that gives us approximately 90 years of reading time in a lifetime.

So, averaging 50 books a year for 90 years means that most of us will read around 4,500 books over the course of our life.

In 2006 (the latest year for which I could find data), 291,920 books were published in the United States alone. It would take almost 65 of us, reading our entire lives, just to read all of those books. And that’s what was published in just one year.

I don’t know about you, but if I am going to be able to read only the tiniest fraction of all the books that are out there, I want them to be good books. Which means I’m not going to feel guilty again about putting a book down after page 100, or page 10, or paragraph 10, or even word 10.

Life’s too short to read bad books.

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How to be a better reader…

Posted on June 27, 2011 | 1 Comment

I spotted this question on Quora: How does one become a better reader and what does it mean to be a better reader? Here is my answer.

Being a better reader, I would say, means that you choose higher quality books that can enlighten as well as entertain you. By high quality, I don’t just mean the established canon of literature, but instead I am referring to well-written, impactful books in whatever genre speaks to your interests. Over time, you’ll find that you more naturally choose these books, that you learn more from your reading and that you retain what you’ve read longer. Your reading will start to inform other aspects of your life, particularly your creative life. In all respects, your reading will be richer.

A good way to become a better reader is to practice close reading. Instead of skimming or reading quickly, try reading word by word. Pay attention to the word choices writers have made and the way they have structured their sentences and paragraphs. Think about the effect they are trying to accomplish with their choices. You will read more slowly and you may read less, but you will get more out of what you read. And you will be unable to tolerate poor writing! For more on this technique, see Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer or her article on Close Reading in The Atlantic.

I believe I became a better reader after I started journaling my reading. There are many methods available: a notebook, a blog, social sites like LibraryThing or GoodReads. Discussing what you’ve read with others is also helpful. Over time, I found myself choosing better books and thinking more deeply about what I read. It helps me to think of reading as a conversation between me (the reader) and the writer. Once the writer has his/her say, then I respond. This definitely helps me internalize what I’ve read and remember it longer.

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Why do we love lists?

Posted on March 1, 2011 | 1 Comment

Lately, I’ve been making a lot of lists. (Well, I’ve always been rather obsessed with lists — just more so, lately.) Lists of books to read, lists of movies to watch, playlists on my iPod. If there were a job that entailed making lists all day, I would be the perfect candidate.

But that only makes me human, doesn’t it? Because we humans love our lists. We love to name things (even going back to the Bible!), then put them into categories, and then make lists of them. Tag, cross-reference, organize. This is pretty much what we do, we humans.

Umberto Eco has said, “We like lists because we don’t want to die.” I get that. Lists bring order to the chaos. They constrain the infinite. They name the unknowable. We live in a vast universe, and we will never be able to enumerate everything. But doesn’t it give some purpose to our lives to at least try? And so we make lists.

Lists also set boundaries. When there is so much out there — so much to read, hear, see, do, eat — lists give us a place to start and, perhaps more importantly, a place to stop. They let us know when we are finished. There is such a satisfaction when the last item is crossed off. Even if we turn around and start another list.

By the way, don’t search for the word “lists” on Google, if you want to know about lists. The Internet is full to the brim with lists. It’s like we invented it just so we have a place to make and share our lists. Here are a few useful list-making sites: Ta-da list; Listography; Lists of Bests.

Here are some lists of lists: 1001 before you die; Wikipedia’s lists; Flashlight Worthy book recommendations; McSweeney’s lists; Lit Lists; Listverse; my lists.

It seems obligatory to finish this post with a list of my own, so here is a list of 10 great list makers:

  1. Benjamin Franklin
  2. Thomas Jefferson
  3. Peter Mark Roget
  4. Oskar Schindler
  5. David Letterman
  6. Santa
  7. Roger Ebert (Great Movies)
  8. David Wallechinsky (Book of Lists)
  9. the guys in High Fidelity
  10. Umberto Eco

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How to have a conversation with a book…

Posted on January 27, 2011 | 1 Comment
Illustration of the final chase of Moby-Dick.

Image via Wikipedia

In school as an English major, I learned how to interpret symbolism in literature. Take Moby Dick, for instance. My professor made a point, which I still remember, of how Ahab’s hat symbolized his manhood, which the whale stole from him. He likened that to the scene in Thelma and Louise when the girls blow up the trucker’s shiny big rig full of oil (like a whale, ha ha) and then steal his hat before driving away.

Finding symbols, making connections, trying to guess what the author wants you to know — this is what English class is all about. In studying literature, we are meant to be doing something “important,” which is why we spend so much time discussing what the writer intended and what the text really means. We are taught there is a right way and a wrong way to read literature, that we either get it or we don’t. No wonder so many people get turned off of reading.

In creative writing classes, however, I learned what I already had guessed –writers mostly wing it. They write from the gut, or the subconscious, if you prefer. They don’t think in symbols any more than I, walking through a mall, would see a pair of red shoes in a store window and think, “Ah, there’s a symbol of my lost youth, if I ever did see one.”

Today I’ve come to think of reading a book as having a conversation with the writer. It’s a conversation where both parties are separated by time and space, and the writer will probably never hear my side of it, but it’s a conversation nonetheless. The writer brings a lot to our conversation, of course — characters, setting, plot, theme — but as the reader, I bring a great deal as well. My life experiences, my beliefs and values, my current preoccupations, even what happened to me that morning or what I read in the news last night — all affect how I respond to and interpret what I read.

The writer has put something on the page, some words. Some time later, I read them. And together we decide what those words mean for us, in that moment when they are read. If I read those same words twenty years later, they may mean something entirely different, and then the writer and I will have a different conversation, even though the words themselves haven’t changed.

All those English classes spent trying to figure out what the author meant by such-and-such an image were probably pretty useless. The point is not to become preoccupied with what the words are supposed to mean, or try to guess the right interpretation. Any writer who’s overly concerned that his readers understand his precise meaning at all times is probably not a lot of fun to read, anyway. I think what’s more important is the meaning that is created between the reader and the writer when the book is read. A novel is not a lecture. It’s a conversation. Or at least that’s what it should be.

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On my other blogs: A Dystopian Reading List

Posted on November 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

Over on my books blog, you might enjoy my latest reading list: How Did We Get Here? A Dystopian Reading List.

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Twitter vs. RSS: How Twitter has freed me from hours of blog reading

Posted on January 16, 2010 | 3 Comments

I used to subscribe to all my favorite blogs and read them in Google Reader. But no matter how much I tried to stay on top of them, I always ended up subscribed to 100 or more blogs, which were collectively posting hundreds of times a day. I was spending hours skimming through blog posts.

There is something about the RSS feed reader that makes a completist like me feel like I have to at least look at every post that shows up. Maybe it’s that bold number at the top. I have to get it down to 0 each time I open up Reader. It’s like my email Inbox — it must always be empty. And it feels like cheating to mark everything as read when I hadn’t actually read it.

Another problem was that I was reading about the same things 5, 6 or 10 times over in different blogs. There aren’t that many blogs that consistently post new content. Usually, they just react to the same bit of news as everyone else.

So one day, not too long ago, I unsubscribed to most of the blogs in my Reader. And I started following the bloggers on Twitter instead.

Almost everyone who blogs is also on Twitter. And they usually tweet about their own blog posts as well as other interesting bits of news and links. So everything in their RSS feeds also shows up on Twitter.

But I don’t have the same need to have to catch up with everything on Twitter that I do in my RSS feed reader. Twitter is like a river of information flowing by (I know that New York Times columnist used the same metaphor in his Twitter article but he stole it from me — he must have overheard me making this observation in a Starbucks or something). Every now and then, when I have a few minutes, I dip my toes in the river. Google Reader, on the other hand, is more like a dam, and all the new information flowing in backs up into a lake that I feel compelled to empty.

But what if I miss something? Well, so what if I do. The Internet is so vast, and there is so much interesting stuff going on all the time, that I’m bound to miss many things. Besides, the truly interesting things get reposted so much that I will see them sooner or later. By doing most of my reading through Twitter, I have found that I am more in control of how long I spend surfing. Whether I want to stop in for a few minutes or hang out for an hour, when I am done and ready to move on to other things, I just close the page and walk away.

Twitter lists are the new feature that have made this really possible for me. I obviously don’t want to follow thousands of people — too much noise. I tend to follow just the people who are consistently interesting. But I can add anyone I want to a list without having to follow them. So when I want to dip into a particular subject of interest, such as the world of book bloggers or minor celebrities, I open up my list on that topic.

I still use Google Reader, but it’s a much more targeted use now. RSS is a very handy way of keeping on top of news that really interests me, such as local events or personal friends’ FriendFeeds or Google alert results. And there are still a very few blogs where I want to see every posting. For instance, I know if it’s interesting, eventually it’s going to show up on MetaFilter, so I still subscribe to that feed. But now when I open Google Reader, the bold number that faces me is usually less than 20, which is a lot easier to zero out.

This is yet another reason why Twitter is so much greater than people generally think it is. And it’s not at all addictive. So if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find out whether Justin Bieber is still trending.

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