The Case Against Reading Everything
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
It's easy to speed read technical material, especially with the benefit of 50 years of doing it--I simply look for the new material that is inevitably mixed with lots of introductory or background material; I really can't read fiction any faster than my normal relaxed, rather ordinary reading speed. Fiction can take so many twists and turns that it's not possible to dash through it without reading every paragraph.
Recently, I've been thinking about revisiting the subject of my undergrad degrees, Mathematics. I just don't know if I really have time in my life to go back and relearn Topology for example. I didn't appreciated (nor respect) it enough to learn it well when I took Topology 45 years ago, now I wish I recalled it.
It's sobering to consider how few kilo-days I've got left. :(
You don't need to "read fiction fast" you need to slow down and enjoy it, internalize the universes that are created by it.
Reading fiction allows you to think about non-fiction differently, i.e. you gain new perspectives by also reading non-ficion.
That's at least my experience.
The value of life is not in its quantity alone, but in $\int_{birth}^{death} quality \: dt$. If life is extended without due diligence to improving quality of life for humans and indeed all sentient beings, we are ultimately doing a disservice to our fellow humans.
It is the weakest because there are only a few good arguments for life extension, and all of them are better (but not by much) except for the "because we can" people.
Always when introducing these "benefits" to society we must carefully weigh and consider the way they will shape how human lives are led and experienced. And nothing good can come of extending life if there is no corresponding marked increase in quality of life for everyone who may be affected--and I don't just mean statistics like access to healthcare and food, but real, perceived happiness of individuals.
Quick edit to respond to your last point: "truths" in this context hardly mean much. There are very few things you can call objectively true. There are metrics and statistics you can measure but they only explain themselves and any correlations you may assign are spurious at best, and harmful when acted upon without fore- or afterthought.
Reading widely has exposed me to new ideas, some of which became favorites. It's also exposed me to a lot of bad writing, which is helpful in building that inner sense that says "this sentence is shit" or "this sentence is amazing". And it's given me a good sense of the clichés of how a plot will progress, and how to balance using them because, well, they're clichés because they work, against doing something different to suit the precise needs of the story, or to surprise readers.
And yes, I have also chased obsessions, too. There's time for both. I've got favorite creators who I've devoured everything they made, and will buy a new work from without needing any review.
Hell, the two key insights that helped me approach the very complicated last third of my dense, weird graphic novel came from re-reading an old favorite (Iain M. Banks's "Use of Weapons") and from watching something way out of my comfort zone (J.C. Staff's "Revolutionary Girl Utena"). It would have been a lot less coherent without the lessons in the power of repetition I learnt from Utena.
Ultimately whatever works for you as a creator is good, but I sure do find that a more broadly-cast net has a lot more interesting things to pick and choose from in it.
Meanwhile this author loves advice about semicolons and em-dashes? Okay.
Reading widely isn't about reading everything. Any good reader will learn to discriminate between good and bad writing over time, and will inevitably be drawn to books that are worth reading. No man is an island, and no writer is an island either. The whole endeavor of human knowledge is all about being bolstered by the minds that have came before you and adding a little on top of that.
The argument for breadth, especially the kind of breadth that says "read trash as well as classics," assumes at least a deep enough reading to understand how a piece of writing works or doesn't work. Understanding how Dan Brown novels are bad--and how they're good--can be illuminating. The article seems to be arguing that this idea is overrated, and that giving that kind of attention to bad writing (or just many kinds of writing) is counterproductive.
I "read" constantly. I just read this article and many comments here. But I almost never read in a mode that would supposedly improve my writing. The advice to read more in that mode makes sense. Letting all kinds of garbage wash over me uncritically does not.
http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/726892307/david-bowie-tas...
Reading wide and reading are complementary, I don't see how one can be a good writer without doing both.
Everyday every reader faces a choice between exploration and exploitation, between reading someone new and strange, or something more written by someone he knows. Both are necessary. If you don't explore, you'll never find the writers you truly love. If you don't exploit, you will never truly know them.
And there's a balance to be struck between the two strategies, a balance that varies over time. "Read widely" could be interpreted as anti-obsession, while "read narrowly" is clearly anti-discovery. But readers need to both discover and obsess, and discovery necessarily comes first.
Guriel doesn't talk about how he discovers the next object of his obsession, he glosses over the discovery phase in order to emphasize the obsession. In a perfect world, we would simply move from one great writer to the next without disappointments or slack time. It doesn't always happen that way.
Some people are born into families, institutions and social circles that will lead them straight to the great writers. The lucky ones have access to a cultural lineage that shows them the breadth and possibility of art. Curation aids their discovery.
Others, like me, will waste many years on pap and not know for years what they're missing. Garcia Marquez spent his adolescence reading stilted poetry before Kafka showed him, as a young man, what prose could do with the first sentence of The Metamorphosis [0], or before Mrs. Dalloway taught him how language could handle time.[1]
But I guess the point is that any given moment we face a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We have to choose which is more promising: another volume of our current obsession or taking a risk on an unknown.
In my experience, the obsession always wins, and it also always ends, not because the reader becomes tired of the writer, but because the writer produces a finite body of work, and after we read it all, we're back to blindly groping the shelves.
So long term, we have to find something new, and the real question that's not being addressed here is: What kind of new? Do I move on from one author of mystery novels [action thrillers, Harlequin romances, substitute genre here] to another? Or do I seek out categorically new kinds of pleasure?
Anyone who's read enough knows there is good writing and bad writing in every genre and every national literature, and so your meta-genres become just good or bad writing, no matter what the writing is about. That discovery comes slowly after a lonely slog in the wilderness of mass media, or it comes quickly, when one of your friends presses a book in your hands and says "Read this."
[0] http://petitchou.tumblr.com/post/225168928/various-translati... [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=XJE_CwAAQBAJ&pg=PT11&lpg=P...
"Read widely" isn't some religious dictum. It's more of a religious calling. (Of sorts.) If you love to read, and you love to write, you naturally read all fucking day. Your thirst is unquenchable. Your tastes are varied. So you drink from many different fountains.
You also realize there is no trade off between depth and breadth. It's a false dichotomy. It seems to be manufactured by people who find the act of reading some sort of chore. I do not. I find it the highest pleasure I have ever experienced.
Perhaps there's a difference between being naturally curious and being forced to read broadly. I dunno. I've never had to be forced. I like reading and writing the way many of us like programming. I'm truly sorry if the author does not. Writing's a hell of a shitty way to make a living; I can't imagine what it'd be like if you didn't at least enjoy the sport of it.
It's a tradeoff because of the finite time for reading.
One can reread Shakespeare's 4 tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth) again for the 10th time (about 8 hours of reading) -- or -- read E.L. James "50 Shades of Grey" for the 1st time (also about ~8 hours of reading).
Some writers may suggest that you read E.L. James because that way, you can mark the checkbox of "read some BDSM material" and hence satisfy the "read more widely" advice. (The "widely" as the blog author interprets it). The blog and his quote of Seamus Heaney disagrees with that and advises to read what one enjoys. It's also ok if one is re-reading an old favorite again instead of unfamiliar writing that's often low quality.
And yes, choosing what to read is a zero-sum game. Mathematically, how could it not be?
Then again, I'll continue to caveat all of this by saying that my subjective experience seems increasingly abnormal every time I read someone's advice on how to read (or write). The idea of deliberately practicing a style or a voice is weird to me. I've always written by ear, and I've never thought about it. I've thought about structure, and character, and perspective, and logic, and all of the other elements that go into writing well. But when it comes to voice and style, well, shit, man. You pick it up as you go along, and you learn to trust it. It strengthens, not weakens, with exposure to breadth.
One last time: I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my experience is probably weird.
However, across individuals, there certainly need not be (and I think that is the intuition). Saying someone "reads for breadth" or "reads for depth" doesn't seem as justified if they read 10x as much as anyone else - relative to others, they "read for both."
Emphasis on quotes. Most of that novel is an abusive relationship, from what I hear.
Based on ~155,000 words[1], that would be reading ~2500 words-per-minute.
Most everyone else reads around ~200wpm to ~400wpm. Reading at 300wpm is considered "fast" for a college-educated adult.
[1] https://novelwordcount.com/2015/04/11/fifty-shades-of-grey-w...
In addition I find that when reading “bad writing” I have a natural tendency to (automatically) skip over long, tortured sentences that seem to be going nowhere. From reputation, “50 Shades” may qualify for that category.
It’s also possible to be both categories at once.
My wife wants to try as many pistes as possible I like exploring the same in more depth explore some of the details.
She gets to explore many different pistes I get to explore the details of the same.
The tradeoff is really about perspective but it's not really a tradeoff but just consequence of choices (which is a kind of tradeoff).
Given that we're in a forum where computer science and engineering topics are often discussed, I find it odd that anyone would suggest this.
You have a limited resource (time). Whenever you have a limited resource, there are tradeoffs in how you spend it. Unless exhaustive search is feasible, there is indeed a tradeoff between depth and breadth.
Take the recent solution to the Kadison-Singer problem. A group of relative outsiders with comparatively little mathematics expertise solved a long standing problem using techniques from their own field, computer science. The depth they achieved in math exceeded that of people who focused solely on the math. And similarly they achieved more in their own field by tackling problems from other fields.
Obviously there's a very tight conceptual relationship between those two fields even if that isn't always the case institutionally. But I think you can easily find examples where knowledge from dramatically different domains contributed to some paradigm shift, breakthrough, or other significant achievement.
If we're to speak about very specific increments of time and units of reading material -- say, you get to read N books over 1 week -- then sure, the zero-sum argument holds. But a lifetime is so much time, offering so much opportunity to the experienced reader, that time is almost effectively lifted as a constraint.
The only zero-sum quantities in this case are time and number of books. Depth and breadth of subject matter are better described as characterizing subcategories of #_books.
humans have limited memory, we are not machines. How many books can you remember, and not just in a vague sense, but lines, tone, structure?
Nabokov made a similar statement as the author claimed that the only good reader is a re-reader. Nobody can genuinely remember more than a few books and be familiar with them, if you read hundreds of books at the end of the year you might as well have read nothing. But every time you reread a great work, you learn something new and free your mind up to discover even more things about it.
The very best musicians will often study their favourite pieces compulsively. They have an intimate relationship with them that others have not.
I am very sympathetic to the message of the author because we seem to be living in an age where people attempt to measure literacy on a scoreboard by counting how much books they've read. Obviously this is as doomed of an attempt as being in a hundred relationships at the same time.
A good friend of mine teaches Russian literature, and when he talks about a book like The Brothers Karamazov he can get so much more out of one book than I get out of reading 50. That is something to me that resembles genuine understanding.
Perhaps an analogy to songwriting will make things more clear: how well received are the works of someone who writes rap-funk-metal-folk-electro-bluegrass songs?
It's not that a successful country music songwriter can't listen to and enjoy hip-hop but you'll find they tend mainly to listen to and be influenced by country music.
Austin Kleon puts this especially well in “Steal Like An Artist.” He says that you can cut off some of your passions, and try to focus on one thing, but eventually you will “feel the pain of the phantom limb.”
Now, given the vast population of the world, I'm sure there are a few people out there who are into bluegrass-rap fusion, but your friends, family and neighbors are probably not going to get much out of it.
So who do you want to make art for? Who do you want making art for you? Random strangers peicing together art from fragments of digital audio they stumble across while surfing on an endless stream of information?
The answer is not different, it is the same for EVERYONE! Turn around and swim back to land!
> It's not that a successful country music songwriter can't listen to and enjoy hip-hop but you'll find they tend mainly to listen to and be influenced by country music.
Without any examples for or to the contrary, I'm not convinced this is true.
> The point of the article was in encouraging writers to hone in on an individual voice as opposed to being influenced by thousands of competing tones.
I think both extremes are harmful. But my experience comes from dabbling in Jazz music of all sorts; 'Jazz fusion' is such a broad moniker that it extends from funk to rock to swing to rap.
There are two volumes of Songwriters on Songwriting and I guess I could introduce you to all my songwriting buddies if you're so inclined.
When it comes time to settle down on a voice and hone your craft, sure, I would never recommend you switch up your style for the hell of it. But if you want to read widely, and if doing so refines your style, great. Go for it. It probably will.
Again, the way the author characterizes this 'problem' is jarringly foreign and antithetical to my own experience. Perhaps I lack the objectivity to see it the way the author does.
That sounds awesome!! Country and metal do nothing for me, but that genre sounds potentially amazing.
Anyhow, i agree with following Steven King as someone to look into for inspiration and advice on writing. The only reason i'm making this comment is because i want to mention something i once read about King that has always stuck with me. That being, that when he ends the last page of a novel, he then writes the first page of his next work right away to avoid ever having a time without some work in progress.