image courtesy, Simon & Schuster
A few thoughts on books and how long it takes me to read them, as they relate to what I learned reading this book
- Reading for joy, is just that. Reading for joy! Nothing needs to come in the way of that.
- Books can take as long as they need to be read. Comprehension is key. Not how many I finish.
- I was wondering how so many folks read so many books “better” faster than me. The book assures me that reading books analytically, reading ideas syntopically across a swathe of books is inherently slow. I cannot read everything that way. Nor should I want to obviously. The book needs to be worthy of that kind of time and attention. To quote Adler …
A good book can teach you about the world and about yourself.
You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life.
You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable—books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.
- And I always worried about how I would go about reading all the great books there were, when there were so many? How would I get to them all? Adler assures me that such books are few and far between. And Having read thousands of books by now, I agree. A good book, a good Lindy book is really hard to find. The last great expository / philosophical / non fiction book I read was Antifragile close to twelve years ago. The last great fiction book, luckily was Harrow in 2020. Great books don’t come by often.
Here’s Adler again …
… if the book belongs to the highest class—the very small number of inexhaustible books—you discover on returning that the book seems to have grown with you. You see new things in it—whole sets of new things—that you did not see before. Your previous understanding of the book is not invalidated (assuming that you read it well the first time); it is just as true as it ever was, and in the same ways that it was true before. But now it is true in still other ways, too.
How can a book grow as you grow? […] what you only now begin to realize is that the book was so far above you to begin with that it has remained above you, and probably always will remain so. Since it is a really good book—a great book, as we might say—it is accessible at different levels. Your impression of increased understanding on your previous reading was not false. The book truly lifted you then. But now, even though you have become wiser and more knowledgeable, it can lift you again. And it will go on doing this until you die.
There are obviously not many books that can do this for any of us. Our estimate was that the number is considerably less than a hundred. But the number is even less than that for any given reader. Human beings differ in many ways other than in the power of their minds. They have different tastes; different things appeal more to one person than to another. You may never feel about Newton the way you feel about Shakespeare, either because you may be able to read Newton so well that you do not have to read him again, or because mathematical systems of the world just do not have all that appeal to you. Or, if they do then Newton may be one of the handful of books that are great for you, and not Shakespeare.
You should seek out the few books that can have this value for you. They are the books that will teach you the most, both about reading and about life. They are the books to which you will want to return over and over. They are the books that will help you to grow.
- And suddenly it isn’t so hard any more. The path I have now before me, is to go find my small set of great books. The books I can learn from and grow old with. Oh joy!
To quote Nux, Oh, what a day! What a lovely day!
Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain or continue the discourse here.
P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.