> 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."

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> 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.

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> 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.