The villain of the week on the literary side of the Internet is Richard Hanania, political scientist and author of the blog post “The Case Against (Most) Books.” The title alone was probably enough to make it the target of bookish pearl-clutching. But like a lot of claims that shock and disturb the online literati, there’s plenty of truth to it.
This is what Hanania wants, after all. That’s why he builds his argument on disgraced crypto-fraud Sam Bankman-Fried’s comments about reading:
I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that…If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.
This quote, which circulated a lot when Bankman-Fried was a visionary thought leader and even more after he lost billions of dollars through fraud and incompetence, has already been picked apart to death in a dozen other places. But all of these are variations on the same theme: if it could fit in a blog post, it isn’t worth writing a book about. Like most people who don’t like books, Bankman-Fried just doesn’t read very much, so he doesn’t know what a good book is.
Hanania, however, is a very well-read professor, author, and Online Person. When he makes the same argument, it’s at least worth hearing.
The point of “The Case Against (Most) Books” is simple: most non-fiction books are too long, mostly due to weird status and career incentives in academia, media, and publishing. Writers feel pressure to expand articles or essays that work perfectly well on their own, filling them with bloat, waste, and digression to turn 30 pages of greatness into 300 pages of mediocrity. Readers feel pressure to read books from cover to cover, even though they might only need 20% of the book to get 80% of the point, freeing up time to read more and absorb more.
Old books are even worse, with antiquated, difficult styles that impede understanding. Their information is usually out of date, and has probably been summarized elsewhere. Hanania singles out Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations could have been summarized, he thinks, by any half-competent blogger.
Ultimately, Hanania comes up with three classes of books that are generally worth reading:
History books, because “The returns to reading history are somewhat linear — five hundred pages on World War II give you more insight than a 5-page summary, which gives you more than 5 paragraphs”;
Historically relevant books like the Bible, because they are important for understanding how other people think; and
Works of genius, in which a talented storyteller is addressing an important topic.
For everything else, we are better off simply skipping, skimming, Tweeting, and visiting Wikipedia. By Hanania’s own math, the time spent reading a bad 300-page book could be more favorably divided up into two 20-page chapters, plus 15 Wikipedia articles of about 15 pages each.
Again, I don’t think Hanania is completely wrong. I’m a prolific quitter and skimmer of books because many (most?) books aren’t worth reading, and you have to pan through a lot of soil to get gold. Like Hanania, I do this in order to read more, and to read better. On this much, we agree.
But for somebody who prides himself on being a clear-sighted rationalist unafraid of questioning his assumptions, Hanania’s whole argument rests on a single, giant, unquestioned assumption: reading is all about absorbing information. And this is demonstrably wrong.
In 2012, a pair of UC Santa Barbara psychologists evaluated two groups of middle school science students studying the same content. One group was given conventional, information-heavy textbook chapters about elements and radiation. The other group read a story about Marie & Pierre Curie, and how they discovered radioactivity by smashing a curious case of glowing rocks. The textbook group and the story group then took identical tests. Looking over the results, the researchers found that the story group scored markedly better on tests than the textbook group, and retained the information for significantly longer.
That stories are better than textbooks for learning is not exactly shocking. Educational researchers like Daniel Willingham have been going on about the privileged status of story, and I’ve written before about how narratives are psychologically irresistible. Narratives can stimulate our brains, and some research even suggests that when we hear a story, our brains imitate feelings and actions as we hear about them. More broadly, we can find cultures everywhere that transmit and teach through stories, myths, legends, tales, and jokes, but very few that rely on long lists of ordered, abstract information—and even then, those texts tend to be the domain of tiny, literate, scribal elites.
The upshot here is that information transmission and retention might be an effect of reading, but there is no shortcut around the brain’s desire for narrative entertainment. Hanania’s assumption that we can treat the brain like a computer and books like data ready for transfer are a prime example of what Annie Murphy Paul calls brainbound thinking—the idea that minds work in a straightforward, mechanistic, computer-like fashion. It doesn’t. We are storytelling creatures, which is why supreme storytellers like Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis sell millions of books to people who otherwise slept through classes on economics or psychology.
In this light, Hanania’s original complaint—David Sinclair’s Lifespan has too many tacked-on chapters at the end about the sociopolitical implications of longer lifespans—don’t make sense. If the book was only ever supposed to be a collection of articles describing the latest research on lifespan extension—that is, a collection of information—very few people would want to read it. The whole point of a popular science book is to, well, popularize the science by telling good stories about it.
This extends to the aura of old literature, too. Marcus Aurelius isn’t read for his original contributions to philosophy. He didn’t have any, because Meditations is quite literally his commonplace book, a ragbag of other people’s quotes. Those maxims have survived, though, because they are expressed well, and because they offered solace to one of the most powerful, capable, and wise leaders in Roman history. Even better, reading these connects us to a larger humanistic heritage from Machiavelli to Isaiah Berlin to Du Bois, who wrote:
I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.
Serious readers are supposed to be above this kind of corniness, but we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t think this is one of the chief pleasures of reading the canon, and a major reason why we have a canon in the first place. Classic books come with a history—with a story—that we immerse ourselves in.
Again, I don’t think Hanania is wrong about most books being bad. Most books are bad, and not worth reading. And in those cases, he’s perfectly right to encourage you to just read the Wikipedia article instead. But a better option, and one validated by the science of reading, would be to find a better book that tells a better story.
With this in mind, we can rephrase Hanania’s three rules for picking books. The first rule, about reading history because of its efficiencies, we can discard entirely. The second rule, about reading books that other people think are important, are really important because of the stories around the book. And the third rule is just a convoluted way of saying: read books that tell good stories. But either way, both rules come down to the same thing.
To paraphrase Ellington, there are really only two types of books: ones with good stories, and the other kind. And when it comes to the benefits of a good story, you can’t get there with Wikipedia.
From the Archives
This week, I cleaned up a lot of my old archive from when I briefly experimented with a much faster pace. I didn’t like it, but Substack didn’t make it easy to get rid of old posts. But I’ve done it, and now the archives are much cleaner. Here are more of my thoughts on reading strategies :
And that’s all for this week. Happy reading!