Reading Is Forgetting (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Reading Is Forgetting (2015)

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119 pointsmercer19 comments

I think this is a vast oversimplification. I may not remember the details of every book, but I do remember the main themes and elements. I think the usefulness of rereading ultimately depends on what one’s purpose is in reading a particular book.

If I read a Dan Brown novel, it’s purely for entertainment purposes. I remember what it was about, and to read it a second time would be of little benefit and even less enjoyment. But then I read George Orwell’s 1984, where the enormous insights I gain from it exceed the enjoyment and make it worth revisiting. The second reading is even more gratifying than the first because I’m able to consolidate my understanding and discover nuances I'd missed on my first reading.

I read Snow Crash and only got a surface level read of it, but was recently talking to a friend who enlightened me on the near future social commentary it contains. The one I remember most is the proliferation of mega franchises, as well as "the library" corporation which we see in today's Internet data brokers.

Need to re read it.

You:

> I think this is a vast oversimplification. I may not remember the details of every book, but I do remember the main themes and elements.

The article:

> Only on a third or fourth reading, he claims, do we start behaving toward a book as we would toward a painting, holding it all in the mind at once.

> Nabokov does not mention forgetting, but it’s clear that this is what he is largely talking about. The physical effort of moving the eyes back and forth remains exactly the same on every reading of a book, nor have I ever found it particularly laborious. What is different on a second and subsequent readings is our growing capacity for retention, for putting things in relation to one another. We know the end of the story now and can see how it is foreshadowed at the beginning, how the strands are spun and gathered together. Rereading Mrs. Dalloway, for example, we are struck on the first page to find the comment “What a lark, what a plunge,” of Clarissa’s sallying forth from her house into the street, aware as we now are that later in the book one of the characters will plunge to his death from an upper window. At once we feel we know the novel better, or at least are more aware of its careful construction. It is gratifying.

I find this holds for music as well. From Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to Vivaldi's Summer to Nine Inch Nail's The Downward Spiral, one simply cannot grasp all the concepts, ideas, conflicts, and motifs in a single listening. In fact, even after listening to them for _decades_ I still find nuances and expressions that I've never noticed before.

Another interesting thing about classical music in particular is that different conductors will emphasize different motifs. Listen to Furtwrangler vs Bernstein conducting the fore-mentioned Ninth, for example. It is like seeing two photographs of the same person: obviously the same body but completely different representations. And each teaches us something different about the Beethoven's intentions and inspiration.

Slightly off topic but I think Brave New World is more relevant in today's world than 1984.

Majority of people couldn't care less what our government does as long as they have Netflix, Facebook, and their drug of choice. You should also check out Amusing Ourselves to Death

> I ran across a quotation from Vladimir Nabokov on the Internet: “Curiously enough,” the author of Lolita tells us, “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it."

...

> Nabokov continues his essay, quoting Flaubert: _Comme l’on serait savant si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq ou sìx livres._ (“What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books.”) The ideal here, it seems, is total knowledge of the book, total and simultaneous awareness of all its contents, total recall. Knowledge, wisdom even, lies in depth, not extension. The book, at once complex and endlessly available for revisits, allows the mind to achieve an act of prodigious control. Rather than submitting ourselves to a stream of information, in thrall to each precarious moment of a single reading, we can gradually come to possess, indeed to memorize, the work outside time.

...

> Couldn’t there be a hint of irony in Flaubert’s _Comme l’on serait savant..._ (“What a scholar one might be…”)? Is it really wise to renounce all the impressions that a thousand books could bring, all that living, for the wisdom of five or six?

That question has been on my mind lately. I can't speak to fine literature like the author of this article, but with high quality non-fiction, I've found that becoming well-read suits me better than widely-read. By that I mean I've discovered more benefits from reading fewer books deeply than more books superficially. This notion of slowing down and reading less would have been anathema to my younger self.

I would agree. Well said. I would imagine this would hold true for knowing and using technology frameworks too.

It might be that different approaches to reading are more useful at different points in your life. When you're young, inexperienced, ignorant, inevitably mentally provincial, you might well gain most by reading widely and quickly in order to acquire perspective and a passing familiarity with a lot of things. Once you've built a reasonably rounded, if shallow, model of the world, and started to learn which parts of it you are most passionate about, you'll probably gain most by going deeply into those.

Breadth first search, then depth on the best matches, in other words.

Like someone else said the "one can only reread a book" quote strikes me as lens specific. Would you really get that much different from reading a book twice in a row? Maybe if it is a technical or science book, etc. but it is more likely that any book might have things that will resonate with you differently as you age and your perspective changes.

Time is the great equalizer.

Yet I think you'll find that the more you read (both in depth and breadth) the more you will see that there are tight connections and parallels between things that are often, for social/academic/political reasons, considered disjoint. This was the key insight (and only insight IMHO) of the deconstructionists.

The implication is that either lots of breadth with some depth, or lots of depth and some breadth will give you sufficient insight and ontological complexity to attack any reasonable problem.

Which fundamentally was the original meaning (since lost in the early 20th century) of the Ph.D.

I feel like a good compromise is to read widely, but when a book strikes you as worthy of greater focus, to reread it at least another two times (in the Mortimer Adler sense as described in How to Read a Book).

Perhaps scheduling rereading in a spaced repetition sort of way, like doubling the interval of time before you reread a text every time, might be useful.

> becoming well-read suits me better than widely-read

I believe this is true simply because most books of the same genre rehash the same set of ideas. Author reference each others works and reach the same conclusions as their predecessors.

The benefits of reading outside your regular genre can't be underestimated.

Also, can you recommend some of your favorite non-fiction books? I've read most of the popular ones and while re-reading some of them is on my mind, would still love to have something new in the pipeline.

Obviously this is a situation that has been central to mankind's situation for centuries: people who know only one book -or collection of books- very well, even able to quote directly from it, who think they thus know the truth and answers to all questions. Thus, they feel confident enough to ignore the rest of the published works of mankind, including the discoveris of science.

I do not believe what we read is "forgotten" as in deleted. I believe, it remains as a distinct series of patterns that may or may not be elicited again, depending on circumstances. Proust's "madeleine" is a perceptual example of this and we all have many such. Often, entire passages of books I read come back up to my awareness without me even knowing what the book was. I could possibly investigate but I prefer to rely on this human ability to retrieve percepts or meaning in an apparent random fashion, as I trust my brain entirely. There are amply enough potential connections or patterns of connections in anyone's brain to store, in a way or another, pretty much anything we are exposed to, from the trivial to the essential. As far as I am concerned, a book read is a book stored. Maybe not wilfully remembered, but mine.

One of the primary reasons I read books is to get a wider perspective on how everything works. It's true that the first read is barely enough to recall any details but it's suffice to grasp the essence. And often, essence is all I want. I can barely recall anything from "The Ascent of Money" but the book enabled me to finally understand the financial system—How money works? Where does it come from? Why does US has $18T of federal debt? All questions became crystal clear because of the book's simplicity.

I don't feel good about re-reading because there are tons of similar books which can explain things in intriguing way to leave a lasting impression. Unless I run out of options in that category, reading more seems a better choice.

For me it comes down to diminishing marginal returns. I figure that the first time I read a book I might retain 50% of what is written. Just the big picture stuff. Reading through that book again, I might retain an additional 20% of what the book has to offer. I’ll probably remember a lot more details this time around but I already had a general understanding of the concepts going into the second read. With each additional reading after that I may pick up on some new and interesting nuances that I did not understand the first few times around but I am really only adding a few more percentage points of understanding towards some hypothetical “Complete understanding”. With this in mind, there are really only a select few books that are worth the opportunity cost of beginning another.

I think that if you are reading to better yourself professionally however, there is good reason to revisit old topics since a few more percentage points of understanding might make a big difference when it comes to job performance relative to others in your field. This idea is probably best on display in athletics. Take baseball. The difference in skill between a minor league baseball player and one playing in the MLB relative to the skill level of the broader population is minuscule. However, to make any money playing baseball you have to be in the .000001% of the talent pool and thus it is worth it for minor league ball players to spend a great deal of time for just a few points boost in there batting average.

pg essay "How You Know" http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html

Thanks for linking that. I'd read it before, but it was useful to read it again ;-)

"The purpose of reading is not to pass some final judgement on the text, but to engage with what it has to offer to me now."

Agreed, and I can't help but wonder if an exploration of that topic would have been more worthwhile.

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