Reading, fast and slow

We're culturally inclined to read fast, but reading slow is often better.

This is Bebe Gunn, from the Wayside School, who was really fast at drawing cats in Mrs. Jewls’s class. For some reason I think of her often when trying to optimize for speed. IYKYK.

Our culture compels us to read quickly. Rationale is easy to find: reading is good for us; reading more, faster must therefore be better for us. It’s plausible, and the convenient virtue signals deter introspection.¹ Granted, reading quickly does achieve certain objectives well: reading more exposes you to more concepts, which can yield a wider corpus to draw on while thinking. If you are trying to solve a specific problem, reading more increases the probability that you will encounter something pertinent.

That said, I don’t think we spend enough time reading slowly: reading, then rereading, then thinking. A kind of reading where you play with the words. A kind of reading where the words don’t simply settle thinly over your short-term memory for future use, but take residence in your core. And it’s taken me embarrassingly long to figure out the value of reading slowly, though it should’ve been obvious early on — it’s where my best ideas come from, I retain more of what I read over longer time scales (years), and while it might not be the best way to ingest volume, it’s certainly been the most effective way for me to change myself. While reading fast maximizes exposure, reading slow maximizes internalization. The ideas you consume slowly have room (time) to grow and elaborate, giving them the opportunity to integrate into your deep brain and ramify.

There's a big difference between reading things as description or as instruction. Generally we tend to experience words as descriptions of things. But when we take [them] as instruction — that has a liberating power.

- Joseph Goldstein

Of course, it’s not one or the other. To read everything slowly could mean effectively reading nothing at all. But I think we generally err on the side of speed too often. The prospect of speed just has too much momentum, so a correction is warranted. When deep thought is my objective, I try to read something like this:

• Read fast until I find something. I like to read as fast as I want until I come to an idea that I either (a) find interesting or (b) don’t understand. Too many books are filled with fluff and garbage so to waste your time reading them slowly can be a huge waste of time (don’t read something deliberately if it clearly wasn’t written deliberately).

• Read that thing slowly. Upon finding a compelling idea, though, I read it slowly and savor it, as I’d savor a good meal. To rush is equivalent to scarfing down a Michelin star meal. Let it swim around in your brain. Write it down, write about it. See how it fits into your worldview. Turn it over in your head until you are satisfied with the shape, the taste. Fit it with metaphors and your life circumstances and thought experiments until it carries its brilliance through the long tendrils of your brain.

• Switch books. In the past, I’d often then just toil on, but more recently, I’ve started to embrace taking breaks — once I’m satisfied with my ingestion of an idea, I’ll switch books or do something else entirely. Ideas need time to grow in your brain.² I have this odd compulsion to want to read one book at a time and slog my way through it without distraction. But I’ve come to realize that this is a far worse way to read books — yes, the dopamine feels more predictable, but by reading many books at once, you organically create stop points where your brain can have time to let the ingested ideas evolve internally.

Of course, if you have your own system for reading, please share — I’d love to optimize this further.

… read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.

- Friedrich Nietzsche - Daybreak - Preface - Aphorism #5

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This week

Going to try something new and just share some other notes / things I’ve found interesting but don’t quite fit into the post. Let me know if you find this interesting or superfluous 🙂

• Writing about what you read is a great way to force yourself to read more slowly. Or, when a computer / notebook isn’t available, sometimes I’ll just record myself talking about it, which has been a reasonable replacement.

• I’m re-reading Ray Dalio’s Principles, and it hits way differently now than from when I was in my 20s. It’s an easy book to skim, but really finds its value through deep thought. His first principle — “Embrace Reality and Deal with It” really is everything.

• I’ve been listening to Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather. This song is incredible. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a pop song where the arc of the vocals and the arc of the production so synchronously hold, release, and play with tension.

1. “There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” (Bertrand Russell)

2. There’s something analogous here in practicing an instrument where, when you get stuck on a particularly challenging section, instrumentalists will have this incessant need to repeat the section until they figure it out. Of course, this rarely works — your brain needs a break (my wonderful late violin teacher would always call this “stacking pancakes”).