I used to read a lot. I saw it as a sort of educational salvation, a path to enlightenment or greatness. It was also very much an addiction, and probably the greatest distraction in my life. My journals have been absolutely littered with references of wanting to escape books. One time at church we went around a table and answered a question about wasting time. I said, “Reading”, to which several others said, “Oh, that’s a good thing!” My reply was “No, you don’t understand”.
[I’ve probably never said this, but now that I’m no longer in school, I punctuate how I want. As a programmer, I’m used to encapsulating things with opening and closing symbols, so it drives me a little insane writing a comma inside a quotation mark when the comma isn’t relevant to the quote. Who the hell came up with those old rules, anyway? /random]
Only in the past few years have I started breaking away from this, but I have a few things to add.
Books suck. I mean, I love them. I love how they feel in my hands, I love how they smell. Some are “juicy”, and you just want to read them to feel yourself flow through the pages over time. Some are pungent, some are lacquery, some have crimpled edges like soft butter. I’m kind of joking, but you get the idea. But books suck! Why? Because their content is so often useless. There’ll be a title and a subtitle, and they promise you knowledge and almost always let you down. The clever ones are quotable, so you keep them on the shelf for another day, but you never reread them, and we all know why. You never reread them…because they suck.
When I was in college, I was sitting in the library on the Auraria campus, and I had an epiphany: if I read every single book in the entire library…my life would not necessarily be any better for it. For one, I wouldn’t remember half of everything. For two, most of what I did remember wouldn’t actually mean anything. For three, it would take my whole life to read all of that, and by that point, there’s definitely no value anyway.
This isn’t to say I haven’t read some very influential books. Jacob Fisker’s “Early Retirement Extreme”, for example, is the most dense, philosophical book I have ever read. All in 240 pages, and my reflections on Life Engineering are all additions to and extrapolations from his thoughts on money, behavior, and earning philosophy. In terms of practical value, it blows almost every other book away. And I have probably learned more about the bigger picture of science through “An Introduction to General System Thinking” than really any particular scientific category (not that I’m a big science guy, though).
However, I have also probably given away 80% of my books over time, and have yet to miss any of them (except maybe that book on Akkadian…).
It’s all too easy to find books that tell you what you want to hear, too. That’s why I don’t read books on politics, aside from the fact that politics is superseded only by theology among subjects I really don’t care to read.
Why is this? Follow the money! There’s a reason “An Introduction to General Systems Thinking” isn’t on the Best Seller lists: hardly anybody has or ever will read it, at least compared to the general population. Books that sell are entertaining, light, and accessible enough that the average person won’t immediately get bored. As with Marvel superhero movies, depth must be sacrificed for entertainment value (burn! I’m joking, I do like a few of those movies). So you get a lot of eye-catching titles that promise knowledge, and then you get a very predictable structure of chapters with a few wild plot-twists attention-getters to keep you entertained. In the end you may have learned something, but more likely, you just enjoyed the ride. So you sit it on the shelf. “That was a good book!” And you never read it again, nor remember half of what was in it. And if you’re idiot me from my 20s, you may have sacrificed time with friends or time in the mountains to satisfy your need to feel accomplished and smart, or something ridiculous like that.
(Also, as much as I enjoy archaeology, theories, interpretation, and evidence change incredibly fast. Books from 20 years ago are probably not the best sources)
The greatest danger is reading a lot, thinking you’re smart, and then getting your ass handed to you. I’ve had several friends say something very meaningful, practical, and intelligent, that not all the books I ever read could put together. And then you ask yourself, “So what exactly am I reading for?” And that is probably when I realized just how much of a terrible distraction it often is.
For the record, I recently ordered a book on Quality Assurance, hoping this would help me build a better open-source product, but the book absolutely sucks. It’s completely meaningless for my purposes.
If you read enough, I guess you can come across the gems. And not everything is non-fiction, either, that’s just the type of book I’ve been talking about. My Chilton’s manual is pretty helpful, but I don’t feel pressured to read it, ha! And the act of reading can be enjoyed for it’s own sake, too.
But even in programming, most books suck. For one, every author feels compelled to include a short primer on programming basics, which is usually not helpful at all. Plus, the books that are out there rarely build upon one another, so they really don’t take you from a shallow knowledge to a deep knowledge. More like, two books on one subject will say 75% of the exact same thing, but the challenge for you is finding the author with the style that works best with how you process the information. Finding the right author can be very difficult. Finding the right author for a unique subject can be nearly impossible.
What’s more, I often find myself reading when I’m too lazy to go out and do. Write unit tests for my controllers? Nah, forget about that. Just find another book on unit testing. You want to do it right, don’t you?
Sigh. I’m thinking I’m really going to try to take a huge break from buying more books. If I get bored, I have a decent little collection of valuable books I can read back through, and I almost always remember more on the second read-through.
I just…don’t believe that reading is everything it’s cracked up to be. It’s drilled into your head as being a good thing in school, but you can’t expect an academic environment not to be biased. Naturally, it will be.
Books…kinda suck. If you’re lucky, they may improve your life. Most of the time, they’re just going to lie to you about their relevance.