Like a Bird Podcast by J E Chadwick

April 02, 2024 Twelve Ways to Read Books

Why do so many of us still read? After all, there are now dozens of alternative ways to entertain or improve ourselves. Can a good book still compete with a blockbuster movie or an addictive computer game? Finding the time to sit down to read alone feels harder than ever, and too often we gradually lose our cherished habit.

That would be a mistake. In this essay, I’ll argue for more books and share twelve different ways to read them. Some of these may seem obvious, but a few of them might make you feel hungry to devour your next pile of books. I’ve also written a recommended reading list, with over 200 books across twenty genres, each with a ten-word review.

Read with total freedom.

There are too few areas of our lives that we genuinely get to control. Most of us wake up earlier than we’d like to, then race to hit deadlines and appointments and make hundreds of daily compromises to keep others happy. Sometimes, we don’t even get to choose the movies or music we need to match our shifting mood.

But nobody gets to control what we read.

The books we choose and how we decide to read them are an oasis of pure, indulgent freedom. Books uniquely put us in charge, allowing us to slow down and dwell on new truths or to speed past or skip tired ideas. This rare freedom is what we need more of in our lives.

Nobody can judge us for keeping five or ten different books on the go at the same time. Like tapas on a Mediterranean break, we can endlessly snack on a diet of fiction and non-fiction—Yeats on the park bench, Amis before dinner, Austen in bed. Libraries are free, and all are now online, so everyone has access to an unlimited stream of fresh books. And if you don’t like your local selection, you can even ask a friend in a fancier zip code to lend you their login details.

Life is too short to continue with a dull book. If you find a book opaque or challenging to get through, it’s the author’s fault, not yours, so please move on. If they could think clearly, they would write more clearly, but alarmingly few do. Reading a different chapter of ten books is often more rewarding than reading ten chapters of one book.

Modern life rarely offers us pure freedom, so we must indulge in the serendipity of reading books.

Richard Powers captured this freedom wistfully in this passage from Bewilderment:

“My son loved the library. He loved putting books on hold online and having them waiting, bundled up with his name, when he came for them. He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.”

Read to be alone.

We can only know ourselves once we deliberately carve out space to spend time alone. Books are perhaps the best way to be alone. They provide just enough company to keep the wolf of loneliness from the door yet still demand our active introspection. A good book gently pulls our attention between the characters, the author, and inevitably ourselves at a pace that creates space for self-compassion. Do we sometimes act like this? Are we also, perhaps, too jealous or too forgiving? Possibly. Read on.

With a day of solitude and a pile of books, we can enjoy aloneness, the happy cousin of loneliness. In his 1905 essay “On Reading,” Marcel Proust captured it well:

“With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?’—‘Did they like us?’—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else.”

Read to be intimate.

At the same time, our books can help us find intimacy. They open our hearts and make us available again to connect with people we might wish to love. There is perhaps nothing more erotic than to sit and read in silence with someone we desire. Books allow us to intimately experience shared meaning with other readers and invite friends and family into more profound communion.

If you’ll permit an irresistible pun, our books bind us. Cormac McCarthy wrote in The Passenger, “Having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.” Sartre once said, “I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.” Or even as John Waters rakishly put it, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t f**k ‘em.”

Books can also have a unique physical intimacy that can last for decades. I have copies on my shelves that I swear still hold the scent of the person who gifted them to me. Impossible. Right? When we discover and finish a remarkable book, we should buy copies for friends who need to read it and let them know we want to discuss it as soon as they finish. Sometimes, as I read, I’m already debating who will require their own copy when I’m done.

Read to understand other people.

In Walter Isaacson’s insightful biography of Elon Musk, he quotes the billionaire describing a difficult childhood:

“I took people literally when they said something…and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant.”

I don’t usually identify with Musk, but when I read this, I couldn’t help wondering whether my own teenage fixation with Jane Austen was rooted in the same need to understand others, especially those new objects of desire, girls. I suspect I was desperately grasping to decode Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet (“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.”) or Emma Woodhouse (“I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other.”) If I could understand the secrets of these 18th Century heroines’ hearts, I would surely be more successful with 1980’s girl goths. (Dear Reader, it didn’t work.)

As an interesting and perhaps telling aside, Austen’s novels were prescribed to shell-shocked WW1 soldiers to help them rehabilitate back into society. Following their trauma, I imagine those young men must have struggled to learn again how to make sense of anything.

Most books make us wiser somehow. Paradoxically, non-fiction reveals the most wildly improbable stories, but the most profound human truths are found in the characters of fiction. Johann Hari explored this in “Stolen Focus” his insightful book about distraction, where he shared the outcome of a study of reading habits:

“When they got the results, they were clear. The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated—because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.

I asked Raymond why. Reading, he told me, creates a “unique form of consciousness…. While we’re reading, we’re directing attention outward toward the words on the page and, at the same time, enormous amounts of attention is going inward as we imagine and mentally simulate.”...It’s a way of combining “outwardly directed attention and inwardly directed attention.” When you read fiction in particular, you imagine what it is like to be another person. You find yourself, he says, “trying to understand the different characters, their motivations, their goals, tracking those different things. It’s a form of practice. We’re probably using the same kinds of cognitive processes that we would use to understand our real peers in the real world.” You simulate being another human so well that fiction is a far better virtual reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name.”

Read old, original texts.

Despite our relentless bias towards the new, the latest, the next big thing, we should fight this urge and always return to old, original texts. Books, plays, and poems can survive intact and pure for centuries, communicating ideas over the ages and revealing universal human truths. Open any battered copy of Shakespeare's complete works at a random page, and you will find fresh 400-year-old humor and valuable insights.

The playful and erudite essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb is insistent on the importance of older texts. He often invokes The Lindy Effect, which states that the longer a non-perishable item like a book has been around, the longer it's likely to persist into the future:

“I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.”

He believes this idea should also guide writers. If you want to write a book that will be read in twenty years, he suggests, then write a book that somebody would have read twenty years ago.

Taleb also argues that most new texts, and especially non-fiction, are disposable. No book that can be shortened survives. “To see if a book is real, ask ten people of different backgrounds & professions to summarize it,” he advises. “If the summaries are similar, the book will not survive as it can be shortened to a journal article. The more the summaries diverge, the higher the dimensionality of the book.”

I would add that reading old books beats listening to them. Audiobooks and podcasts might distract us from the silence while driving or walking, but they can’t replace the commitment it requires to read the original text. As Naval Ravikant puts it, "Listening to books instead of reading them is like drinking your vegetables instead of eating them."

Read books to savor the craft.

We should savor many things more often, such as our food, our music, and walks in nature. Stopping to savor is a form of meditation that usually helps to calm and clear the mind. But a book can also be savored when we pause to consider the elements of its craft.

What do I mean by craft? We can consider any or all of the writer's decisions as its craft: the language, pace, characters, narrative devices, dialogues, themes, story, plot, and even the typographical layout.

As we read, whatever calls out to us or makes our heart skip a beat requests our attention for a reason. There's usually something there when we pause to consider a line or a single word choice, even if only for a moment. There was a reason it called out. When we savor a book, we start to pick up on all these atomic parts. We stop simply enjoying the story, and we begin to ask why.

Only books lend themselves to this form of meditation. With a movie, a play, or a piece of music, it’s a moving target unless you deliberately hit pause, so it’s harder to appreciate things deeply in the same way. Books invite us to stop and savor.

But don’t take my word for it. Here are the opening paragraphs from Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung), a novella written by Franz Kafka and first published in 1915. It tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect. It’s perhaps my favorite opening passage in all literature, and I invite you to savor the writing craft and pause to spend time with anything that jumps out at you:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly stay in place and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.

What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small, lay quiet within its four familiar walls. Above the table on which a collection of cloth samples was unpacked and spread out—Samsa was a traveling salesman—hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur hat on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!

Gregor’s eyes turned next to the window, and the overcast sky—one could hear raindrops beating on the window gutter—made him quite melancholy. What about sleeping a little longer and forgetting all this nonsense, he thought, but it could not be done, for he was accustomed to sleep on his right side and in his present condition he could not turn himself over. However violently he forced himself toward his right side he always rolled onto his back again. He tried it at least a hundred times, shutting his eyes to keep from seeing his struggling legs, and only desisted when he began to feel in his side a faint dull ache he had never felt before.

Read to become slightly less dull.

I’ve always felt that the worst insult is to call someone dull, and I’d feel gutted if somebody labeled me unoriginal. But after living alone in a cave for 11 years, that’s precisely how the British Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo has described the human mind:

“The mind rarely thinks up something fresh and new and exciting. Mostly it is just the same stale material, repeated again and again. The same old grievances and memories—both happy and sad—opinions, ideas, plans, fantasies, and fears. If we start to observe our mind, we see how unoriginal it usually is. Our ordinary conceptual mind is not really very bright.”

After 11 years of solitude, arguably, she can see things as they really are, so I’m willing to accept that most of us are rather dull. To be clear, I’m not claiming that reading more books will instantly make us fascinating, and I certainly know people who read all the best books and took out all the worst messages.

But if you become a discerning reader and take the time to reflect and savor the craft, especially if you take notes and review them along the way, you should at least become less dull. Curiously, the books we read will still change us even though we forget most of what we have read.

A good book is also a good conversation, even with a stranger. I used to find it difficult to converse with two types of strangers: the very young and the very old. Now, I simply ask them what they’re reading. It works well with five-year-olds and eighty-five-year-olds. And if they tell you they don’t read books, you likely just saved yourself a dull five minutes either way.

Read to get healthy.

Kafka once compared books to narcotics, but all the evidence suggests they are more like tonics. Across various studies, researchers have linked books to putting our brains into a pleasurable, meditative state. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers.

Book therapy is not a new idea. The Ancient Greeks called their library in Thebes, a ‘healing place for the soul’, and Sigmund Freud experimented with using literature as part of his psychoanalysis sessions in the nineteenth century. It’s even got a name, bibliotherapy, dating back to a 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.”

Bibliotherapists can refer to a light-hearted almanac of literary cures, written in the style of a medical dictionary full of lively recommendations. It’s called “The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You” by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin:

Structured like a reference book, readers simply look up their ailment, be it agoraphobia, boredom, or a midlife crisis, and are given a novel to read as the antidote. Bibliotherapy does not discriminate between pains of the body and pains of the head (or heart). Aware that you’ve been cowardly? Pick up To Kill a Mockingbird for an injection of courage. Experiencing a sudden, acute fear of death? Read One Hundred Years of Solitude for some perspective on the larger cycle of life.

Reread great books.

D. H. Lawrence once wrote, “It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books,” but I always suspected he was exaggerating. Not all books are worth rereading, but a great book deserves at least three revisits over a lifetime. Perhaps as we get older, we become more efficient at forgetting, so I might return to a few of my favorite short novels six times before I die.

In the case of Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust’ and Roth’s “The Plot Against America”, I hope so. I revisited each of them last year, each for the third time, and I was struck by how different the rereading experience is from reading a book for the first time. I think I preferred it.

The first time we read a book, we’re a little nervous. Like a first kiss, it feels exciting but awkward. Are we right for each other? Where will this go? What are we getting into?

Rereading a well-loved book is very different. We already know we are in love, so we can relax. We half-remember the plot, but there are still delightful surprises. We can stop more often to savor the details, and especially now that we understand the whole book, we can appreciate the craft and bread-crumbs the author laid for us but were missed the first time.

Read to develop a profound, original idea of your own.

Getting to a profound and unique idea takes work. There are many intelligent thinkers, and now anyone with a keyboard or a camera and an idea can publish. The world of ideas is flat and daunting.

But if you read books, you have a strong advantage. For a start, most people are too lazy to find and read the right books. Yet the complex ideas you need to build on to get to an original idea of your own are all in those books.

Remember, good books can contain highly sophisticated ideas, as Michael Chabon has observed:

A book is a map; the territory it charts may be “the world,” or other books, or the mind of the cartographer. A great book maps all three territories at once, or rather persuades us that they—world, literature, and a single human imagination—are coextensive.

– Foreword to Trickster Makes the World, by Lewis Hyde

Books are the most effective medium for communicating complex ideas. Books require their authors to work hard to distill their ideas clearly, even if only a few people ever read them. All it takes is to find and absorb a handful of the right books around a common theme and then to synthesize and extend them into something different and better, and you can get to a fresh idea. Find several books that tackle the same important theme from very different angles, then write down your own new beliefs.

You will need a robust system for note-taking to build deep and original ideas. Unless you combine reading with a simple habit of rereading your highlights and notes, almost everything will be lost, like sand flowing through open fingers. There are plenty of apps out there to help; I recommend Readwise to capture and then revisit your books and articles daily, to harness the power of spaced repetition and active recall.

Read to travel (light).

Books and travel often satisfy similar emotional needs; they release and temporarily transport us to more inspiring places. Our romantic minds often link a favorite book to the warm beach or rattling train where we first sat down and opened its cover. When we revisit its pages, the sounds, smells, and stirring emotions all instantly return.

Sadly, when we get busy with work or parenting, we can’t read as often as we would like to, and our favorite pastime gets postponed to holiday reading. We store our books in a pile for the next trip. Ironically, this almost becomes the main reason to travel: to sit on the beach and read books. Yet often, by the time we’ve navigated flights, car rentals, and hotels, we’re too tired to get through half of them.

If we’re honest, we might have enjoyed our break more sitting with a bottle in our favorite chair with someone we love, all our devices switched off, and rereading our favorite books.

In fact, with the right books, we often don’t need to go far to experience many of the benefits of travel. When we travel physically, we only see tiny fragments of the world. So we can choose to either experience these fragments of the world for ourselves, or we can enjoy even more of them through the eyes and words of the best travel writers.

I’ve traveled both ways extensively, and there are fewer differences than you might imagine. Many decades later, the memories I still hold from reading Bruce Chatwin’s ‘Songlines’ and ‘In Patagonia,’ or devouring Pico Iyer’s ‘Falling off the Map’ or ‘Video Nights in Kathmandu’ are as strong as my own travel memories from the same period.

Read to stay humble.

In Alan Bennett’s bittersweet play (and hilarious movie) The History Boys, Hector the teacher tries his best to express part of the magic of reading to the teenage boys:

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

I feel for Hector. As a father of four boys who were once avid readers and have lost the habit for now, I wish I knew how to convince them not to turn their backs on a habit that will always provide solace. I still hope they’ll return to become readers again as adults.

This humbling reading experience - as if a hand has come out and taken yours - is essential to becoming an adult. It’s the moment when we understand that we are not so special and that our pain or sadness is not so unique either, and certainly not worth losing sleep over.

A good book reflects our mortality. It gently teases us about our pretensions and reminds us how little time we might have. All these feelings and ideas existed before us and will continue long after us, so perhaps the best we can ever make of it all is to sink into a very comfortable chair and get lost in a fresh pile of colorful hardbacks.

J. E. Chadwick

Looking for recommendations? I’ve also written a recommended reading list, with over 200 books across twenty genres, each with a ten-word review.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit likeabird.substack.com

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