We've Got Reading All Wrong: Relearning How to Read

One essay that changed how I think about reading is the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann's essay Learning How to Read.

It made me realize the now-obvious fact that you don't have to (and shouldn't) read a book linearly, page by page from the beginning to end.

It also taught me that I wasn't supposed to read a whole book at the same speed—say, 350 words per minute—for the whole thing. Linear, steady-wpm reading of this type is only done by amateur readers.

Luhmann on the beginner's struggle:

"Beginners, especially beginning students, find that they are first confronted with a mass of words, which are ordered in sentence-form, which they read sentence by sentence, and which they can understand as sentences. But what is important? What must be “learned?” What is important, what is mere adornment? After a few pages of reading, one can hardly remember what one has read. Which recommendations can be offered?"

A book is full of information, and there's no way we can (or would want to) absorb or understand it all. Sure, you can use certain techniques to improve your understanding (we'll look at these later), but such methods are time-expensive—every minute spent understanding something non-important is time you could be spending on something that is important.

Luhmann points out that most of what you read is baggage—random excess and the other necessary 'fluff' needed to get an argument across, but not a key concept:

"[When writing t]here is a wide variety of word-choices available. Most readers of theoretical texts cannot even imagine the large role of randomness in this process. Indeed, even most writers usually do not make this clear to themselves. The large majority of passages in a text could also have been formulated differently; and they would have been formulated differently if they had been written on another day. ...This problem cannot be avoided. ...[Words of conceptual importance] will only form a very small part of the entire text (Textmasse). "

A chess master learns, through intuition, to only see the "good" moves on a particular chessboard configuration. Likewise, with reading, we can learn to sift through the noise and see the "good" bits of the text where we should be spending the most time.

It's an acquired skill to learn how to do this. At first, you'll probably 'mess up' a lot, skiping over important sections and overinvesting on useless ones.

To get an idea of how this works in practice, I drew some diagrams. This is how a beginner's eyes might move as he/she reads:

Notice that "eye-attention" is spread equally over the whole page. In contrast, an advanced reader might read something in this fashion:

Notice that 80%+ or more of the effort is spent on a small portion of the two pages. You can also chart this as 'time invested per page', which looks something like this:

You'll spend the most of your time on (a) introduction, (b) conclusion, and (c) a few important sections of the book. The rest of the book is skipped or briefly skimmed because you've decided its not interesting, not worth your time, etc.

So how do you decide what's worth reading deeply and what should be skipped?

I'll update this section later, but C. Tieze of the Zettelkasten blog has a nice post on barbell-style reading which shows how you might 'sort' different sections and then figure out the best approach to reading:

Of course, 'useful' and 'not useful' are fuzzy categories that you learn to figure out via intuition as you become more skilled. Likewise, it's not always clear whether or not something is easy or hard to understand until you have spent a lot of time understanding your own cognition.

As a shortcut, I like boredom/interest as a pretty reliable sign of whether something is understandable or not. If something is boring, there's a good chance that it's either (a) too easy [skip it] or (b) too hard [come back later... or never].

In my case, I prioritize these questions to help filter for useful/not-useful: "Will this help me live a better life?", "Is it relevant to my research interests?"and "Will I be able to write about this?".

But I use these questions because of what I've decided is important in my life—tranquility ala Montaigne, writing, and understanding how the world works.