On Reading

Rob Henderson writes about how reading is a serious business, much more difficult and yet more informative than audiobooks or podcasts.  He speaks slightingly of the latter, and he is not the only one. He quotes Tyler Cowen saying that even his own podcast is only "a high class form of entertainment."

I take his point, and he is not entirely wrong. The type of intense studying he describes is not easily done by passive listening, as one cannot underline or write in the margins. Skimming books creates a superficial knowledge, though that is often (quite often) all that one needs from a particular author.  Not all authors are worth intense study, after all. Even Cowen talks about dropping books where he stands, even in airports, once he has reached the point where he thinks he has gotten the gist and can do better in his own head than the author is going to do on further pages. I certainly think that a lot, and also discontinue podcasts after a few minutes for the same reason.  I like the radio that plays in my own head.

And then there is Pierre Bayard's marvelous How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.

A good deal of reading is just recreational, a kind of mind-candy. I have wondered this year if much of my reading over my lifetime has been a type of autistic self-stim. Bright children are taught that reading itself is almost a holy act, and praise descended on me no matter what crap I was reading, because it was a book. As I have written lately, there is a type of thinking that seems to be best done walking, and it is hard to underline and write in the margins doing that.  The book is still out on dictating a sentence or two into my phone as I walk.  It should be a godsend, but I don't know that it is working out that way. Some people seem to make it work, but I don't know that I am going to be one of them.