Ezra Pound once said that it’s a complete education when you can’t remember where the quote comes from. At least, I’m pretty sure he said that. I’m feeling pretty educated right now, because I swear that I once read, in Alan Jacobs’s excellent The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, that W.H. Auden claimed he had an angel, or perhaps a demon, at the back of his mind that was always telling him what to read next. I looked all over my Kindle copy for the quote, searching for any sentence with “Auden,” “Next,” “Mind, “Angel, “Demon,” and another dozen possible keywords, and came up with nothing at all. It looks like Auden never said anything of the sort, but I must have read it somewhere: the image of a little daemon camping out in your head just to fling more volumes onto the summit of Mount To-Be-Read is an apt image for what avid readers live with. Or at least that we live with: that is, my book demon and I.
I’ll confess here that, for all the time I’ve spent in bookish circles both online and off, I’ve always been a bit perplexed at the sheer amount of reading recommendation going on all the time: What should I read next? What should I read this summer? What books should I give for the holidays this year? (The short answer: don’t buy books as gifts.) Recommendations are the small talk of book talk, and like most small talk, I’m terrible at it. Partly, I’ve never been active in these conversations because I’ve already got an overwhelming to-read pile sitting in that corner of my mind where stoichiometry and family birthdays are supposed to go. I’m also just bad at recommending books because the ones I love most are weird old texts that most people, quite justifiably, have no interest in. I’ll stand up for my favorites, sure, but most people don’t want to read Cyrano’s Voyages to the Moon & Sun and I wouldn’t tell them to. Honor my reading demon and I will respect yours.
My reading demon is sly, going for the time-honored trick of all devils, marketers, and businessmen: bundling. Why read one book about the Roman Republic when you can read three of them from three different centuries? Shouldn’t a Nabokov fan read all of Nabokov? When are you going to get serious about studying animal intelligence, man? More often than not, what I want to read, or at least what my demon wants me to read, are whole flocks of books, of similar type and moving in the same direction. While I am firmly in the reading & teaching camp that says people should read what they want with pleasure and curiosity as the highest principle, for a certain kind of reader, these reading projects are the most satisfying method to reading. I’m going to write then, about my reading demon and his infernal book projects, where so much of my writing comes from.
Let’s keep a broad definition when we say reading project: any combination of books, chapters, articles, web pages, and other media united around a common subject or theme. Reading all six of Jane Austen’s novels is a good read project; reading a few of them in combination with all their movie adaptations is another good one; and so is reading all the novels and one critical study of Jane Austen from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. You could have a specific goal in mind with this reading, like understanding how critical perceptions of Jane Austen have evolved over time, or who’s the hottest Mr. Darcy. You could forgo goals entirely and just see what comes up, although countless goal-setting studies suggest it’s worth at least trying to define a learning goal, which holds you accountable and might encourage you to tackle unexpected sources you wouldn’t normally pick up. And it goes without saying that you’re always free to set a project down to read different books or do other things. Reading should be fun; this is just a particular kind of fun, with its own rewards.
I came into reading projects sideways, without really knowing that I was doing it. Maybe you already do some version of this, too: picking up tons of books to educate yourself on a subject is something most self-directed learners do in one form or another. What I’ve learned is that the more deliberate I am about my reading projects, the more goals I set, the deeper I dive into the subject, the more I get out of it and the more fun I have. Building up this knowledge doesn’t have the passive pleasure of playing a game or, more to the point, getting lost in a great novel, but the active joy of mastery, like playing a sonata or building a chair.1
I’m in good company here. One of the most scarily prolific readers of our time, the economist Tyler Cowen, is generous and open about his eccentric reading habits and how they keep his odd, beautiful mind spinning. The first thing to note is that he has an unorthodox definition of “reading,” at least with non-fiction: he “reads” multiple books a day, but nearly all of it is skimming, skipping past things he already knows or isn’t interested in. Sometimes he throws them out for having bad fonts. This is all deeply weird, and maybe even vaguely upsetting if you’ve ever written a book or work in publishing, but there is a method here, one of scale: for every book Cowen reads in full, he throws out many others. He seems to believe literally in Sturgeon’s Law: ninety percent of everything (sci-fi, romance, New Yorker articles turned into books, Man Booker winners) is crap. His skimming is really a selection process, weeding out almost everything in order to identify and elevate the books that are worth savoring. If you get a few of those books together one one topic, then you’re really learning something:
Again, you want to read books together in groups. . . take the case of ancient Egypt. As you mentioned, I don’t know what’s the best book on ancient Egypt, but I know there’s enough uncertainty about what went on in ancient Egypt that there’s probably not a clearly well-defined, here’s-the-best-book-on-ancient-Egypt. So you want to read 10 or 20 of them and do a kind of cross-sectional mental econometrics and see which pieces start fitting together and take it from that. So, in so many areas it’s a mistake. “Oh, what’s the best book on X?” Rather you’re looking for some kind of portfolio of books on X.
As an economist who’s big on maximizing efficiency and output, Cowen takes this farther than most people ever need to, but the principle is the same: find a topic you’re interested in, define your learning goals, read a bunch of stuff, and see what happens. This can be a kind of actual concrete accumulation of facts like reading about ancient Egypt, but it can just as easily be applied to fiction, poetry, and drama (e.g. historical periods, literary movements, subgenres, tracking influences, etc.). Again: what kind of content or goal that I think makes a good project is irrelevant. You could do a deep dive on the literature around My Little Pony if that’s what gets you going. The point is to balance breadth and depth to build up a real, personal treasury of knowledge on a topic--the kind that makes you a more interesting, well-rounded thinker. Project reading can be a form of mental hygiene.
If that last part sounds like a stretch, consider the opposite of the project reader: the single-book know-it-all who’s just read some pop-sci guru like Jared Diamond or Malcolm Gladwell or Yuval Noah Harari and now has the answer to everything. I often was that reader--they’re fun authors, in moderation!--until I happened to take a college course with a professor who had a public spat with Diamond about overgeneralizations and inaccuracies he’d made as an ecologist skimming in a completely different field for one of his books.2 I’d read that book long before I took the class, and it had blown my mind. I’m sure I’d gone on breathlessly to friends about the exact chapter my professor was able to tear apart in a single lecture. Of course, if I’d read more than one book (or the whole book dedicated to debunking Jared Diamond’s books) I would have known better.
We can’t stop bad-faith popularizers from doing their thing. We also can’t always read four books on any subject we have a passing interest in. But we can, at least, make ourselves more immune to their tricks through reading with breadth and depth. The neat thing about reading projects is that, even if you can’t become knowledgeable about everything everywhere, the more you do it, the stronger your universal bullshit detector gets. When you’ve seen how back-breakingly hard it can be to build up any kind of reliable, replicable educational research, to take one example, you learn to be not just suspicious of think-tank honchos and their simple fixes for schools, but for the use and abuse of social science research more broadly. If it’s not easy for educational statisticians, there’s probably no magic bullet for criminology or research psychology, either to pick a few other much-abused fields. Again, this isn’t just about facts-and-figures non-fiction: reading lots of literature in general--poetry, drama, fiction--reminds you that our distant ancestors had the same intractable problems and made the same mistakes that we do, and that the world has always been vast, beautiful, and baffling.
But I’m getting far from my point. A good book by itself is always a good book, but there are real, compounding benefits to reading through a constellation of good books. If you and your reading demon have the inclination for it, reading projects have real advantages for learning and building up effective habits. More importantly, they keep your reading demon busy and make sure you never have an unforced idle moment again. And who needs boredom these days?
Postscript: going forward, I’ve decided to do a little postscript after each post highlighting one or two things that I think are worth sharing, since blogging is a gift economy.
One of the best things in life is discovering the work of an artist who has been unapologetically and enthusiastically their best, weirdest self without a single concern for fame or money. I was giddy, then when I read the other day in Ted Gioia’s very excellent newsletter about the wizard of Brazil, Hermeto Pascoal. I can’t do O Bruxo justice like Gioia does: suffice it to say that he’s a musician, now in his mid-80s, who got his big break playing acrobatic jazz-fusion with Miles Davis but in recent decades has become a kind of rambling, mystical samba Bombadil who makes music with water, his beard, whistles, clicks, household furniture, and, uh, dental equipment. He is living his best life, as they say, and I hope he lives forever.
He’s also just a gobsmackingly good pianist, as this improvisation (!!!) shows, wheeling from a Bill Evans-type waltz to some Thelonious shenanigans to, uh, birdcalls and a bit of Stravinsky. Or this delightfully odd, impressionist “Girl From Ipanema” with the always-wonderful Elis Regina, who stops midway through to clown Astrud Gilberto’s original English version. I love it all so very much.
Anyway, have a little Pascoal in your life. Happy listening and happy reading.
Yes, I can do these. No, I can’t do them well.
Very briefly, in Collapse Diamond relates an old theory that the settlers of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) destroyed their environment through a reckless, fanatical devotion to building moai statues. When the archaeological consensus shifted to fit new evidence that it was the introduction of rats and sheep, not humans, that caused mass deforestation, Diamond remained with the holdouts for the traditional theory. Using his massive popularity and platform, Diamond continued to boost the old theory and make money peddling the contested theory that Rapa Nui’s most distinctive contribution to humanity was really a rapacious death cult. Dr. Hunt’s book is very, very good if you’re interested.