The Art of Manliness - #587： How to Get More Pleasure and Fulfillment Out of Your Reading

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.740 If you have a goal of reading more, but anytime you start working on that goal, it feels like

00:00:13.680 a chore, the equivalent of eating your broccoli.

00:00:15.740 My guest today argues that the problem is likely due to the fact that you're trying

00:00:18.400 to read books you think you should be reading, instead of reading what you actually enjoy.

00:00:21.840 His name is Alan Jacobs.

00:00:22.840 He's a professor of literature and the author of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.

00:00:26.260 At the start of our conversation, Alan offers a critique of a certain approach to reading

00:00:29.680 the so-called great books, and makes an argument for choosing what you read based on whim with

00:00:33.480 a capital W, rather than following any kind of list.

00:00:36.440 He then makes the case for following that whim into reading not only books of your favorite

00:00:39.840 authors, but the books your favorite authors read, which can actually lead you back to the

00:00:43.800 great books, but in a way that allows you to enjoy and appreciate them more.

00:00:47.020 Alan makes the case as well for the value of rereading books.

00:00:49.580 Alan and I then discuss tactics to get more out of your reading in our Age of Distraction,

00:00:52.600 including his opinion on reading e-books versus paper copies.

00:00:55.040 We also get into his take on speed reading, and whether it's okay not to finish a book,

00:00:59.060 you're not digging.

00:01:00.020 We're in a conversation with what parents can do to raise eager readers.

00:01:03.140 Out of the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash pleasures of reading.

00:01:17.100 Alan Jacobs, welcome to the show.

00:01:19.620 Thanks for having me, Brett.

00:01:21.300 So you've written a lot of books.

00:01:22.660 The book I read was about reading, the pleasures of reading in an age of distraction.

00:01:27.080 And I like, you start off the book and you go after a guy who's had a big influence on

00:01:34.420 reading in America.

00:01:35.720 His name is Mortimer Adler.

00:01:37.680 For those who aren't familiar with Mortimer, who was he?

00:01:40.920 And then what's your beef with Morty and his idea about reading?

00:01:45.000 Yeah.

00:01:45.160 Well, first of all, let me say Mortimer Adler was a great man in a lot of ways, but there's

00:01:49.940 some downsides.

00:01:50.780 So he was, a little bit of the background might actually be useful just in the sense

00:01:55.060 that he was a child of Jewish immigrants from Germany, went to Columbia University, sort

00:02:02.040 of discovered this whole world of culture that he didn't know anything about before and

00:02:06.220 became a kind of an evangelist for the great books.

00:02:09.280 Went to the University of Chicago, worked with Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was the president

00:02:13.700 there, transformed that whole university.

00:02:15.800 He was incredibly energetic and dynamic, but his cause was the great books.

00:02:22.900 You know, he wrote a book called Aristotle for Everybody.

00:02:25.680 He wanted everyone to be able to read those books.

00:02:29.100 And in that time in American history, when tiny, tiny percentage of people went to university,

00:02:36.700 it was a great sell.

00:02:38.860 He wrote a book called How to Read a Book.

00:02:41.220 And the subtitle of the first edition was something along the lines of How to Get a Liberal Education.

00:02:47.940 And the idea is that, you know, you don't have to be able to go to university.

00:02:51.520 You don't have to go to the University of Chicago.

00:02:53.500 You can be a great reader of great books.

00:02:56.920 And the problem I have with that, I mean, it's great.

00:02:59.780 As far as it goes, it's great.

00:03:01.460 But the problem I have with that is that Adler didn't really recognize any other way to read

00:03:06.080 a book except to read a great book and to give it your full attention and to underline and

00:03:12.640 annotate.

00:03:13.580 And the whole thing was so strenuous, you know.

00:03:16.960 And I think it really did get a lot of people interested in reading great books, but it also

00:03:23.160 wore a lot of people out.

00:03:24.640 You know, they just got exhausted from the demands that he was placing on them.

00:03:29.940 And I think for some people, that's counterproductive.

00:03:32.640 For many people, that's counterproductive.

00:03:34.660 Well, and you also criticize literary critic Harold Bloom for similar reasons.

00:03:41.040 Yeah.

00:03:41.340 I mean, Bloom had the same, you know, why are you wasting your time on Harry Potter when

00:03:45.120 you could be reading Shakespeare?

00:03:46.840 And, you know, hey, I'm, you know, I've taught literature for most of my life.

00:03:51.420 I probably wouldn't have a job if we didn't read Shakespeare.

00:03:54.200 But you don't read Shakespeare every single day.

00:03:57.580 And you certainly don't read the tragedies every single day.

00:04:01.280 Those are incredibly demanding.

00:04:02.900 You know, for the same reason, you don't every night sit down and watch an Ingmar Bergman movie

00:04:07.120 or 12 Years a Slave or something like that.

00:04:09.940 You have to be able to give yourself a break from the demands of really great works of art.

00:04:17.800 Great works of art ask a lot of us.

00:04:20.500 And we're kidding ourselves if we think we can rise to that occasion every single day.

00:04:26.480 So sometimes you ought to be reading Harry Potter instead of reading Shakespeare because you need a break.

00:04:33.160 And I think both Bloom and Adler were reluctant to acknowledge that.

00:04:38.440 So, I mean, I guess one of the big critiques that you had against these guys was like,

00:04:43.320 hey, read these specific books.

00:04:45.620 And your response, okay, that's fine.

00:04:47.340 Those are great books.

00:04:48.040 We all recognize that the Iliad is an amazing book.

00:04:50.640 It's a great book.

00:04:51.300 Yeah.

00:04:51.560 But you're saying like, well, that could also just sort of hamstring people.

00:04:54.960 People might just be like, ah, I just, I can't do this.

00:04:57.700 I don't want to.

00:04:58.220 Or it sort of limits your reading where you feel like you have to plow through these things.

00:05:02.200 Yeah.

00:05:02.440 And you're not really getting anything out of it.

00:05:05.220 Yeah.

00:05:05.440 All of those things are true, right?

00:05:07.000 I mean, on the one hand, it turns reading into, you know, kind of eating your broccoli.

00:05:12.940 You know, that this is, I've got to make sure that I'm, you know, eating healthfully.

00:05:16.920 And I've got to make sure that I'm reading healthfully.

00:05:19.680 And, okay, but where's the pleasure in that?

00:05:24.140 And my book is called The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.

00:05:27.520 And one of the things I want to emphasize is that it's really okay to read things that

00:05:33.300 are for fun, because if you're only reading, you know, in order to eat your intellectual

00:05:39.180 broccoli, that's going to wear on you.

00:05:41.600 And after a while, you're going to say, ah, who needs that?

00:05:44.120 And I think that's often how people lose the habit of reading.

00:05:47.540 They lose the habit of reading because they make it so strenuous and so demanding, and

00:05:52.460 they don't want to read anything that's not great.

00:05:54.800 And then it just becomes exhausting.

00:05:56.180 And after a while, they're like, yeah, well, you know, maybe I'll just, you know, watch

00:05:59.960 some Netflix or something, you know, because it's, they're just, they're just worn out by

00:06:05.680 the stress of it all.

00:06:07.140 Well, so instead of just going through lists, your advice to readers is to read at whim.

00:06:13.340 Yeah.

00:06:13.800 And then you make a distinction between lowercase whim and uppercase whim.

00:06:17.140 Yeah.

00:06:17.400 So what's going on there?

00:06:19.540 Yeah.

00:06:20.060 So this is, I got this from the poet Randall Jarrell, who ended an essay that way, read at whim.

00:06:25.320 And whim with capital W, W-H-I-M is a kind of a principle or a policy.

00:06:30.960 Let me tell you how I came onto this.

00:06:33.020 What would happen is that year after year after year.

00:06:37.440 So, you know, I've been a college university teacher for 35 years now, and I would have

00:06:42.720 students who would come to my office and they would say, I'm about to graduate, but there's

00:06:47.900 so many great things I haven't read yet.

00:06:50.020 Give me a list of things to read.

00:06:52.340 Give me a list of books that every educated person should have read, you know, and they

00:06:56.500 come in with their notebooks and they got their pens poised over the notebook.

00:07:00.560 Like, give me these things.

00:07:02.160 And, and I would think you're just finishing up four years of school.

00:07:06.000 Give yourself a break.

00:07:07.120 You know, you don't have to do this.

00:07:08.980 Now, you don't have to read according to an assignment or according to a list of approved

00:07:15.240 texts, you know, enjoy your freedom.

00:07:18.160 Go out there and follow your whim.

00:07:21.920 And by that, I mean, follow that which really draws your spirit and your soul and see where

00:07:28.700 that takes you.

00:07:29.980 If it turns out that you spend a year reading Stephen King novels or something like that,

00:07:35.040 that's totally fine.

00:07:36.060 It's not a problem.

00:07:37.300 Read your Stephen King novels, but there are also really good novels, but you know, whatever

00:07:41.220 it happens to be, if you're reading young adult fiction for a year, read young adult fiction

00:07:45.940 for a year.

00:07:46.760 After a while, you probably going to have enough of it, but don't go around making your reading

00:07:54.300 life a kind of means of authenticating yourself, you know, and as a, as a serious person, it's

00:08:01.620 just, it's just no way to live.

00:08:03.160 And that, so I would always tell them, give yourself a break, don't make a list, see where

00:08:09.240 whim takes you.

00:08:11.180 And so this capital whim, I mean, what I think the difference between like whim, when people

00:08:15.560 think whim, they just think sort of randomness.

00:08:17.520 Right.

00:08:17.900 But it sounds like the whim that you're describing is it's random, but also structured at the

00:08:21.820 same time in a way.

00:08:23.100 Well, what happens is that there is a kind of an emergent structure in a way, you know,

00:08:27.900 things emerge.

00:08:28.780 So here's one of the things that I will tell people, I'll say, let's say you really love

00:08:33.960 Tolkien and you've read Lord of the Rings like 10 times, you know, and you're not sure

00:08:38.600 you want to read the Lord of the Rings again.

00:08:40.700 First of all, I will say rereading is always a good idea.

00:08:45.080 It's always a good idea, but there may be times when you think, yeah, maybe I don't need

00:08:49.080 an 11th reading of the Lord of the Rings.

00:08:51.060 And so I'll say, well, then let's move upstream a little bit.

00:08:55.280 Why don't you ask yourself, what did Tolkien read?

00:08:58.860 What did he love?

00:09:00.180 If you love Tolkien's writing, what writing did Tolkien love?

00:09:04.400 And kind of go upstream of him and find out what he read.

00:09:08.900 And in that way, you're actually, you're doing something that is really substantial.

00:09:14.940 I mean, you're learning about some new things, some important things, things that are really

00:09:18.760 valuable, but you're also kind of following whatever it is in your spirit that responded

00:09:26.000 to Lord of the Rings.

00:09:27.560 You're taking it to that, you know, that next level.

00:09:31.060 Yeah, we do this series on the site called The Libraries of Famous Men, where we take

00:09:35.620 some great, you know, person from history could be like, we've done Bruce Lee, we've done

00:09:39.300 Ernest Hemingway, we've done Theodore Roosevelt, and we look at their libraries and like the

00:09:44.720 books that they read, because I think there's a quote I read somewhere.

00:09:47.320 It's like, if you really want to find out about someone you look up to, like, don't

00:09:51.360 read what they wrote, like read what they read, because that's what shaped them.

00:09:55.760 Yeah, exactly.

00:09:56.880 That's the, that's the idea.

00:09:58.440 And it is something in which you're, you're not, it's not a dry scholarly exercise.

00:10:05.040 You're being drawn by something you love.

00:10:06.980 You're being drawn by something that is really spoken to your heart, you know, and, and you're,

00:10:11.220 you're, you're, you're, you're moving through that and on to a much broader terrain.

00:10:16.700 And so it's a way to expand your reading and grow and deepen your mind, but without that

00:10:24.280 sense of duty of just marking things off a list.

00:10:27.760 The problem with that is, I think when you're marking things off a list, that's a, that's

00:10:32.220 not really a sign that you want to read something.

00:10:34.740 That's a sign that you want to have read something, or you want to be able to say you have read

00:10:39.520 something.

00:10:40.640 And if that's all that matters, then, Hey, just go in and read the Wikipedia plot summary,

00:10:45.680 you know, save yourself some time.

00:10:48.160 Well, and the other thing about this upstream tactic of expanding your reading.

00:10:51.760 So say like you do like Tolkien and you start reading what he read, like eventually you're

00:10:57.120 going to probably end up to one of those great books.

00:11:00.060 Absolutely.

00:11:00.460 That's where it's going to take you there.

00:11:02.580 But, but the difference is you're not reading it because this is something on my list.

00:11:09.540 And I don't feel like I'm a really educated person.

00:11:12.000 If I haven't read this book, instead you're reading it because your whim with that capital

00:11:18.360 W has, has taken you there.

00:11:20.580 And so that way it's more integrated with who you really are as a person and what you really

00:11:25.020 love.

00:11:25.480 And it's less about how you want to present yourself to other people.

00:11:29.580 Well, yeah.

00:11:30.500 So I've done this before this going upstream, but in a different way.

00:11:33.020 So my favorite novel of all time, I've said this before on the podcast, lots of times

00:11:36.500 is Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.

00:11:38.600 Yeah.

00:11:39.200 And then I started reading his, like, I've read that thing like five times, but then I

00:11:43.180 was like, I got to read the prequels.

00:11:44.640 So I started reading like, you know, a dead man's walk and a Comanche moon.

00:11:48.380 And then I started learning about the, I was like these Comanche Indians, this is, I didn't 1.00

00:11:51.040 know about this.

00:11:51.720 And so I was like, I went on Amazon and just started books about Comanche Indians.

00:11:55.080 And that's how I discovered Empire of the Summer Moon.

00:11:58.440 Fantastic book.

00:11:59.300 It was one of the best books I've read.

00:12:01.680 Right.

00:12:02.120 But, but you wouldn't have ever, you wouldn't have discovered it if you hadn't been actually

00:12:06.440 reading at whim, right?

00:12:07.760 You were not thinking, oh, let me see.

00:12:10.280 I've read this Larry McMurtry book.

00:12:12.200 Now I need to read all the other books that were well-reviewed that year.

00:12:15.920 You know, instead you were following up something that was really drawing you on.

00:12:19.760 In a way, you're just obeying your own curiosity and that's a much better guide to reading than

00:12:26.340 having a list that somebody else has given you.

00:12:29.460 So we've talked about Harold Bloom, how he's very stringent about his idea of what reading

00:12:32.900 should look like, but you've, in your book, you talk about other literary giants who kind

00:12:37.660 of agreed with your advice about reading at whim.

00:12:39.820 Yeah.

00:12:40.700 You know, my favorite writer and the writer that I've come back to more than any other over

00:12:45.180 the years is the poet W.H. Auden and he has, he actually, I think it was reading an essay

00:12:50.760 of his that kind of set me off down this path because he says in one of his, in one of his

00:12:56.200 essays that masterpieces, great masterpieces are for the high holy days of the spirit.

00:13:03.720 You know, they're not for every day in the, in exactly the same way that you would not eat

00:13:08.320 a seven course French meal every night.

00:13:11.760 You don't read a great masterpiece every day.

00:13:14.940 You, you save it for those times when you are kind of morally and spiritually and emotionally

00:13:22.320 prepared for it.

00:13:23.700 And that, that was really the thing that set me off down this, this little path.

00:13:28.380 And then another person you've written about a lot, written a biography about him, C.S.

00:13:32.600 Lewis had this very idea of kind of whim, following your, following whim where it takes you.

00:13:36.580 Yeah, exactly.

00:13:38.400 And the way that that often expressed itself in Lewis is following the desire to reread

00:13:45.440 something.

00:13:46.420 All of his favorite books he read over and over and over again.

00:13:50.840 And in fact, he felt so strongly the love of rereading that he would say, sometimes I have

00:13:56.400 to ration myself and not allow myself another rereading yet.

00:14:00.380 You know, I got to wait a few more months before I can reread this again.

00:14:03.760 And, and, and Lewis felt that that was, it was, I mean, Lewis was incredibly widely read,

00:14:10.180 but for someone who read as widely as he did, he is surprising how often he emphasized the

00:14:17.780 value of returning over and over again to the same books.

00:14:21.860 If those books are ones that really nourish your, your heart and soul.

00:14:25.620 And when, when, one of those things that sort of inadvertent consequences of like book lists

00:14:29.900 is that it discourages rereadings.

00:14:32.620 People are like, well, I don't have time to reread.

00:14:34.040 I got to get to the next, next one here.

00:14:36.380 Exactly.

00:14:36.900 That's, and again, that's wanting to have read.

00:14:39.740 That's wanting not, not to read, but to have read.

00:14:42.220 And you can say, look, here, here's the list.

00:14:43.880 Here's how many books I read in 2019, you know?

00:14:46.960 And okay, but, you know, maybe, maybe if instead of reading, you know, 123 books in 2019, you

00:14:57.720 know, what if you had read seven books, but you read each of them three times, you know,

00:15:02.460 you might actually be way better off, you know, if you chose those books well, you might actually

00:15:08.060 have had a more intellectually nourishing year than, you know, you're, you're reading your

00:15:14.040 123 books.

00:15:15.300 I think when people get locked into that, I try to gently suggest, when I say locked

00:15:21.200 in, I mean, locked into that idea of getting through a certain number of books.

00:15:25.060 That's a terrible phrase.

00:15:26.140 If you love reading, by the way, getting through, you know, I don't want to get through it.

00:15:29.860 I want to enjoy it.

00:15:31.020 I want to relish it.

00:15:31.940 But if you're thinking in terms of getting through books, I will gently suggest maybe

00:15:36.880 you should reconsider your life choices a bit, you know, like what, what is it, what are

00:15:41.680 you chasing?

00:15:42.340 You know, what is it that's, that's, that's flogging you?

00:15:46.960 Something is, something is, is, is driving you in a way that doesn't seem altogether healthy

00:15:52.120 to me.

00:15:53.040 Yeah.

00:15:53.220 I mean, so I read that many books, but it's because it's my job, right?

00:15:56.160 To prepare for a podcast.

00:15:57.500 So, I mean, I have to crank through like a book, two books a week, but then I also have

00:16:01.340 like my pleasure reading that I do.

00:16:02.940 Right.

00:16:03.080 And it's not that many.

00:16:04.780 And I, I, I don't know.

00:16:06.020 It's like, so yeah, whenever I tell, I always post, I'm like, Hey, I read this many books.

00:16:09.400 Here are my favorites.

00:16:10.360 People are like, Oh, how do you do it?

00:16:11.360 And it's like, well, it's my job.

00:16:12.780 It's like, you wouldn't ask a plumber, like, how do you fix 120 toilets in a year?

00:16:17.380 You know, I can only, so that's my job, man.

00:16:20.000 Yeah.

00:16:20.340 Yeah.

00:16:20.700 Same thing for me, right?

00:16:21.660 As a teacher, I am, I'm, I'm teaching classes right now that I've never taught before.

00:16:26.200 Or some of the stuff I've read before, some of the stuff I haven't, but those kinds of

00:16:30.200 demands are, uh, you know, my job and your job are kind of interesting in this regard

00:16:36.140 because we don't, we can't just read it to get through it.

00:16:40.100 We have to read it well enough that we can talk to other people about it and not make fools

00:16:44.720 of ourselves, you know?

00:16:46.400 Right.

00:16:46.720 So that's, that's a, that's a bit of pressure on us, but that's not bad pressure, right?

00:16:51.760 I mean, it's kind of forces you to be attentive in ways that ultimately make reading that book

00:16:56.760 more rewarding than it would be if you were just trying to get from the first page to the

00:17:00.580 last page as fast as you can.

00:17:03.640 One idea I came across, I don't know where I saw it at, but I really liked the idea about

00:17:07.180 rereading books is someone talked about creating a liturgical calendar for your reading.

00:17:11.700 So there's like certain seasons, like you, you're going to, like during the winter, you're

00:17:15.400 going to read this book or during the fall, you're going to read.

00:17:18.440 And I really liked that idea.

00:17:20.040 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:17:20.840 I think, I'm not sure that's wimmy enough for me, you know?

00:17:24.740 I mean, like, what if I don't feel like doing it then?

00:17:26.840 What if I feel like doing something else?

00:17:28.580 But, but I, I, I'm willing to give in on that just a little bit simply because the, the

00:17:34.280 value of rereading is so rarely acknowledged that anytime people are acknowledging that I'm

00:17:40.680 a hundred percent in favor.

00:17:42.200 Well, what do you think the value of rereading is?

00:17:45.060 Well, there's a lot.

00:17:46.660 I mean, first of all, if, if, if it's a really, if it's a really worthwhile book and, and books

00:17:52.040 can be worthwhile in a thousand different ways, you're, you're never going to get everything

00:17:55.880 important out of it on a first reading.

00:17:58.140 But then in addition to that, you go through different stages of life.

00:18:04.420 And in those different stages of life, books speak to you in dramatically different ways.

00:18:09.780 I remember once I used to teach Tolstoy's Anna Karenina almost every year.

00:18:17.600 And one year I was reading it and I came across a passage which totally knocked me out.

00:18:26.340 And I couldn't even remember having read it before.

00:18:30.420 I'd like taught the book six or seven times.

00:18:33.320 And I had completely passed over this particular passage.

00:18:38.480 And it's a passage where one of the two protagonists, a man named Constantine Levin, his wife, Kitty,

00:18:46.340 has just given birth to their first child.

00:18:49.280 And he picks up his newborn son.

00:18:52.000 And the first thing he thinks is now the world has so many ways to hurt me.

00:18:58.000 And it's just incredibly powerful scene.

00:19:01.520 Why didn't I notice it before?

00:19:03.260 Because I hadn't had children before.

00:19:05.500 It was as soon as my son was born, I saw that passage in a way that, you know, it had been

00:19:13.300 irrelevant to me before because it was so disconnected from my experience.

00:19:16.960 At that point, I thought to myself, what's wrong with you that you didn't notice this?

00:19:20.980 Did you have to have a child in order to understand how emotionally overwhelming it is to have a child?

00:19:26.500 I guess so.

00:19:27.560 So I learned something about myself there.

00:19:29.720 I learned about the things that I was paying attention to and not paying attention to.

00:19:33.800 And you sort of go back when I go back to books, especially books that I teach, because if it's a book that I teach, I write a lot in the margins.

00:19:41.600 And it's really kind of funny to look at my history as a reader. 0.99

00:19:44.220 I'll look back and I'll think, that's stupid. 1.00

00:19:45.700 Why did you say that? 1.00

00:19:46.680 You don't know.

00:19:47.180 You didn't know what you're talking about.

00:19:48.560 I'm arguing with my earlier self, you know.

00:19:50.900 But sometimes my earlier self noticed something that I wasn't noticing, and I'm thankful for that.

00:19:57.120 So rereading a book is kind of an exercise in self-understanding as well as an exercise in better understanding of the book.

00:20:06.240 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:20:10.720 And now back to the show.

00:20:13.200 So another way, as you're talking about reading about WIM, one of the ways that I've found to inject WIM into my reading is actually going into a bookstore, which is becoming less frequent.

00:20:23.660 Because people go on Amazon, and Amazon gives you these recommendations, but they're all algorithm-based.

00:20:29.260 Yep, absolutely.

00:20:30.100 So it seems like WIM, but you know it's like, okay, Amazon, Jeff Bezos has figured out what I want to read.

00:20:37.260 So it doesn't feel serendipitous.

00:20:38.740 But I love going into a bookstore, like a Barnes & Noble, or even better, like a used bookstore.

00:20:43.080 I know, yeah.

00:20:43.940 That's the best feeling in the world.

00:20:45.820 Because you have no idea what you're going to find.

00:20:48.020 Yeah, and that's the really cool thing.

00:20:49.680 I read, just this morning, I read an article in The Guardian of London about a bookstore in London.

00:20:58.040 It's an independent bookstore.

00:20:59.960 And they started offering, a few years ago, this service.

00:21:04.520 You can call them on the phone, or you can come in to the store, or you can even do this online.

00:21:12.620 And you tell them, what are your favorite books?

00:21:15.520 What are the books that are most important to you?

00:21:17.920 What are the books that you've re-read the most often?

00:21:21.020 They just kind of get a little profile of you as a reader.

00:21:25.240 And then what they do is you can sign up, you can subscribe for a package.

00:21:31.960 And according to how much, which package you subscribe to, they send you books in the mail.

00:21:37.620 And they wrap each book individually as a gift.

00:21:41.100 It's their recommendations for you based on what you've told them about yourself as a reader.

00:21:47.220 And you can subscribe so you get six paperbacks, or you can get a dozen hardbacks, or you decide what it's going to be.

00:21:55.600 But they mail them to you, and they're wrapped up as gifts.

00:21:58.180 So you actually don't know until you unwrap the little package what's going to be in there.

00:22:03.320 And I think that's so terrific.

00:22:04.900 It's anti-algorithm.

00:22:06.320 You know, it's all based on people who've read a lot of books, who've listened to you, how you describe yourself, and then make a decision for you.

00:22:15.140 And this bookstore was really struggling until they started offering this particular service, and it's just absolutely taken off.

00:22:22.840 And because part of it is the personal character of it, but another part of it is you're getting wrapped up gifts in the mail.

00:22:30.620 You know, what's cooler than that, you know?

00:22:33.040 People love getting stuff in the mail.

00:22:34.740 Oh, yeah.

00:22:35.420 So, okay, this idea of whim, it's not just like read randomly.

00:22:39.300 Like, read what gives you pleasure.

00:22:40.820 I like the idea of going upstream, maybe digging into a topic.

00:22:44.740 So, I mean, if you read a novel, but you come across a nonfiction idea, like, mind that.

00:22:50.800 Like, just go different directions.

00:22:52.260 And also, I want to make clear, I think you're not saying, like, don't read the, you know, quote-unquote great books, but you don't have to do it all – you don't have to make your diet all that all the time.

00:23:00.660 That's right.

00:23:01.020 It doesn't have to be that all the time.

00:23:02.700 And then if you come to them because you're genuinely interested in what they have to offer rather than because you're trying to cross them off a list – or, you know, if you say, you know what?

00:23:15.760 I know this book is going to be a challenge.

00:23:17.800 I know this book is going to be hard for me, but that's what I want right now.

00:23:21.220 I want a challenge.

00:23:22.820 That's totally great.

00:23:24.140 That's totally great.

00:23:25.500 It's the crossing the books off the list that is the death of pleasure in reading.

00:23:32.580 That's the thing I most want to warn people away from.

00:23:35.700 Gotcha.

00:23:35.980 And it might be the case you start enjoying reading, like, the great books have become your thing.

00:23:39.720 Like, that might be your whim.

00:23:41.640 That's exactly right.

00:23:42.760 That's exactly – that may be where it takes you.

00:23:44.800 And I actually think that eventually that's – you know, if you say, you know what I'm going to do?

00:23:48.820 If I'm going to take a year and I'm not going to read anything except thrillers and, you know, mystery novels or whatever your kind of genre fiction thing is, again, I think for a season in your life, that's totally great.

00:24:01.300 But I bet there's going to be a time where you will say, you know what?

00:24:05.360 I think I've done enough of this.

00:24:07.100 I think I need something that's, you know, a little more meaty, something I can really chew on, you know, not just pure carbs, right?

00:24:14.620 But something that's more substantial.

00:24:18.780 And at that point, you'll be moving towards more challenging and more difficult books, not because you're trying to impress somebody else, but because that's the food you know you need.

00:24:31.060 And when you do follow whim in the right sense of the word, that's what you do.

00:24:36.060 You learn better what it is that you need as a reader.

00:24:40.220 What is it that feeds your heart and your soul and your mind?

00:24:44.360 And if you don't read at whim, but you only read according to a list, you'll never find that out.

00:24:52.420 There'll be really important things about yourself that you will never know.

00:24:55.780 Okay, speaking of great books, this sounds platonic, right?

00:24:58.240 Plato is all about, you know, follow like love.

00:25:00.360 Love will eventually lead you to the good, right?

00:25:03.480 Yeah, yeah, but of course, he also knows that there are people who don't understand that and who will continue to try to pursue the most grossly physical, Plato wasn't big on the physical, the most grossly physical kinds of love.

00:25:21.480 And they won't rise.

00:25:24.000 They won't look for something better.

00:25:26.400 And, you know, if that's the way you are, if you find yourself, you know, over and over and over again, just reading the stuff that isn't substantive, that's just kind of the cheap calories, you know, then maybe it's time to step back a bit and say, why am I like that?

00:25:43.800 Why, you know, what is it that's preventing me from trying something that's more challenging?

00:25:49.300 But again, that's a product of self-reflection, and that's what Plato wants, right?

00:25:53.400 He wants, Socrates is always pushing people towards that self-reflection.

00:25:57.240 So WIM, with the capital W, is actually not, as you said earlier, Brett, it's not random.

00:26:04.340 WIM is something that will lead you to self-reflection and a better understanding of who you are as a reader and who you really want to be.

00:26:11.240 Yeah, you have to know what you like, and a lot of people don't know what they like.

00:26:14.820 Right, that's right.

00:26:15.820 And for a lot of people, you know, they allow their – I mean, this is especially easy when you're in a world of social media and then also algorithmic recommendations of the kind you mentioned earlier, the algorithmic recommendations you get from Amazon especially.

00:26:33.840 They don't know what they like because they're never pausing to think, what do I really want?

00:26:38.860 Instead, they're just responding to whatever the world is putting right in front of them.

00:26:43.960 And when you do that, you can kind of get out of the habit of making your own decisions, and you can get out of the habit of self-knowledge.

00:26:51.860 And in that way, I think you're just always – you're on a treadmill at that point.

00:26:56.060 You're trying to catch up with all the other – all the things that other people are talking about, and you're losing your ability to form your own soul.

00:27:02.960 Yeah, and if you feel like that, someone – you can go to a book to find answers on how to deal with that.

00:27:07.880 Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Emerson, like they wrote about these ideas, knowing what you like, what you love in life.

00:27:15.200 Yeah, yeah.

00:27:16.200 I mean, you may think you know what self-reliance is, but if you read Emerson on self-reliance, it's a completely different thing than most of us think self-reliance is.

00:27:25.620 So we've talked about – so this idea of just make reading pleasurable again.

00:27:30.320 Don't make it something that you beat yourself up with, like a hair shirt you put on.

00:27:34.780 So let's talk about this idea of reading in the age of distraction.

00:27:37.740 That's another complaint that people have is not only – okay, reading just seems like a hard thing.

00:27:41.560 I feel like I'd read these books.

00:27:42.460 The other thing is, well, how do I find the mental space to read when there's so many things distracting me?

00:27:48.160 Right.

00:27:48.480 So people have developed tech tactics or techniques that allow them to read more deeply.

00:27:54.040 And one thing you talk about in your book is e-books.

00:27:57.120 Yeah.

00:27:57.380 What's your take on e-books?

00:27:58.580 Do you think they help or hinder reading, make it more distracting, better?

00:28:01.900 What say you?

00:28:03.440 Yeah.

00:28:04.000 So my history with that is kind of interesting.

00:28:07.620 I was a pretty early adopter of Twitter.

00:28:10.920 I got on Twitter in 2007 and really made some friends there and connected with that.

00:28:16.540 I deleted Facebook the same month that I started Twitter, so I've never been in the Facebook world.

00:28:22.580 But with that, plus just all the things that were always coming across my computer, even though I was a professor of literature, I started noticing how my attention span was shortening.

00:28:37.020 It was getting worse and worse, and I was more and more inclined to turn aside and see what was happening online.

00:28:43.340 All the content farms are just recycling stuff like crazy.

00:28:48.940 And I was really starting to worry about myself.

00:28:52.180 And around that time, because I'm just interested in technology in general, I decided I would buy a Kindle.

00:28:58.300 It was one of the first Kindles.

00:29:00.520 And what I found was that, for me, the Kindle was enormously helpful.

00:29:07.060 I had gotten sort of addicted to screens, and it was a screen.

00:29:10.820 I got sort of addicted to tapping things with my fingers and thumbs, and this had a – I could click my thumb and turn the pages.

00:29:20.880 And the Kindle really helped me to get my concentration back.

00:29:26.500 But the main thing there, it is a screen, and you do use your thumbs to turn the pages, but it really isn't good for anything else.

00:29:35.980 I mean there's a rudimentary web browser on the Kindle, but it's terrible.

00:29:39.140 Anybody who's tried it knows that you can't do anything with it.

00:29:42.360 And so it doesn't distract me.

00:29:45.500 It's not always offering me something else.

00:29:47.860 I can't read that way if I'm on my phone or an iPad or my computer because, you know, in the back of my mind, I always know I'm two taps or two clicks away from looking at somebody's Instagram feed.

00:30:03.760 The Kindle was really good for me in helping me to get back into reading and being able to pay attention for a long period of time.

00:30:11.760 So I don't read on the Kindle as much as I did, but for that season of my life, it was incredibly helpful to me.

00:30:20.180 What kind of books would you read?

00:30:21.300 Did you find yourself like gravitating to certain kind of books that you read on the Kindle?

00:30:25.880 Yeah.

00:30:26.540 You know, mainly I would read things that I didn't feel I needed to mark up, right?

00:30:32.080 So I couldn't – I don't think if my life depended on it, I could teach from a Kindle version of a book, you know?

00:30:40.780 Teaching is all – for me, is all about having that page that's marked up.

00:30:46.000 There's also a really important thing when you're teaching the kind of books that I teach, and I do kind of work in a sort of a great books environment, at least part of the time.

00:30:55.040 You know, when you have a book in your hand, and I'll say, okay, turn to page 69, and then we'll read something on 69.

00:31:02.300 I'll say, okay, now keep your finger there, and let's go over to page 221, and then we look at that, and we compare the two.

00:31:08.960 You really can't do that on a Kindle.

00:31:10.740 It's almost impossible, whereas it's easy as pie in a Codex book.

00:31:16.220 So it's when I don't need to mark something up that I will read the Kindle.

00:31:22.760 So sometimes – often that's pleasure reading, but sometimes I'll actually know that I need to teach a book, and I will actually buy both the Codex version and the Kindle version.

00:31:36.600 And the first time through, I'll just read the Kindle version just to give me a kind of a first read through.

00:31:44.660 And then that helps me when I turn to the Codex, to the paper book, to know how to annotate it better.

00:31:50.260 Yeah, so the Kindle kind of can eliminate whim a bit.

00:31:54.160 I like that idea where, you know, with a paperback book, you can, you know, go to one place, they go back.

00:31:59.440 What else about books is you can just like – I can go – I have, you know, my shelf full of books.

00:32:02.840 I can just grab a random book and just open it to a random place and read something.

00:32:06.900 I can't do that with a Kindle.

00:32:08.400 Now, I mean, there's a lot more clicks involved with that, right?

00:32:12.560 That's also one of the things that I tell my students sometimes when they're not sure they're going to do research for a topic and they're not really sure exactly what they need.

00:32:22.360 I tell them, look, don't go to the library's webpage and search that way.

00:32:28.120 You know, or if you do, only do it for the very first book or the very first article on your list.

00:32:34.580 Once you've got that, go to the library because what you're going to do, you go to pick a book off the shelf and look at the five books to the left of it and look at the five books to the right of it and look at the books just above and just below.

00:32:47.260 So, you're actually getting this really rich context for all the things that people might write about this particular subject, and that's almost impossible to replicate online.

00:33:00.020 So, when students are really trying to generate ideas, I tell them, go to the library.

00:33:04.640 Don't, you know, don't just look it up on your laptop.

00:33:07.300 Go to the library.

00:33:08.320 So, you mentioned one of the downsides of a Kindle is you can't really – it's hard – you can highlight things in Kindle, but that's about it.

00:33:15.340 You have a whole section, which I love.

00:33:16.920 I love when people talk about how they're sort of systems they develop to annotating and marginality and all that stuff.

00:33:22.000 Because what I love about that, it allows you – when you write in a book, it allows you to have a dialogue with the writer.

00:33:27.640 Yep, yep.

00:33:28.460 You have the dialogue with the writer, and then, as I said, if you go back and read that book again later, you can have that dialogue with your earlier self as well.

00:33:37.220 So, yeah, so I like to – I don't – so, if all you can do in a Kindle is highlight.

00:33:43.860 And one thing about highlighting is that there's a lot of research on this that highlighting does not aid retention.

00:33:53.500 It does not help your memory.

00:33:55.220 There's no difference between people who highlight and people who make no highlights at all in terms of what they remember later on.

00:34:02.380 Now, I might highlight sometimes because it makes it faster for me when I'm in class to find the passage that I want to read out loud.

00:34:11.760 But when I'm actually reading and interacting with the book, it's just – I have my little syntax.

00:34:19.560 If I think a passage is really brilliant, I will put a star next to it.

00:34:24.640 If I think the passage is really interesting but I'm not sure what I think about it or it's a surprising idea, I'll put an exclamation point.

00:34:32.140 If I doubt that what the person says is right, I'll put a question mark.

00:34:38.100 And if I'm absolutely convinced the person is wrong, I put BS next to it, right?

00:34:44.340 And just that kind of – and then sometimes I'll go back later on and I'll change my mind.

00:34:49.860 And I'll say, no, that shouldn't have been an exclamation point.

00:34:52.440 That should have been a question mark, something like that.

00:34:54.700 Do you write questions out, like write things in your margins, like sentences?

00:34:59.020 Is that something you do?

00:35:00.320 Yeah.

00:35:00.740 Yeah, I do.

00:35:02.140 But I do that much more often when I know I'm going to have to teach something or I'm going to have to write about it.

00:35:07.940 And, of course, not all books really make room for that.

00:35:11.540 So I keep sticky notes around.

00:35:14.120 And when I have something a little longer to write, I'll write it on the sticky note and then put it on the relevant page.

00:35:19.900 And that's also good because those are easy to find.

00:35:22.880 I wouldn't be doing that if I didn't think this was a passage that I really needed to think about.

00:35:27.440 So it helps me to go back and discover the most important passages.

00:35:30.900 And do you do this, like, if you're reading a Stephen King novel?

00:35:33.900 No, no, no, no, no, no.

00:35:35.340 When I'm reading something, when I'm reading a novel just for fun or just for my own personal satisfaction, I'll do that more often than not on the Kindle.

00:35:48.000 And then, you know, if there's a really interesting passage, I'll highlight it and then I can go back and look at it later on.

00:35:53.700 But that's not the main way that I'm engaging with that story.

00:35:57.220 I really want to be absorbed in the story.

00:35:59.000 And every time you stop to make a note, you're kind of lifting yourself out of the story a little bit.

00:36:05.180 And that's not the best thing for many novels.

00:36:08.380 Well, speaking of the Kindle highlight feature, one thing that bugs me, and you talk about this in the books, I am glad you did, was that they had that feature where it'll show, while you're reading on your Kindle, it'll show you, like, passages that were highlighted the most.

00:36:18.960 Yeah, it drives me crazy.

00:36:19.980 It drives me because I mean, like, you just ruined it.

00:36:21.640 Like, now I think, oh, this is important.

00:36:24.360 And if it wasn't there, I probably wouldn't have think it was that important.

00:36:26.980 Right, right.

00:36:28.040 But here's the one thing.

00:36:29.880 When you do, when you look at that, you know, popular highlights, in any book, all of the popular highlights are in the first 15 pages.

00:36:36.780 Yes, it's hilarious.

00:36:38.220 After that, nobody's commenting on anything.

00:36:40.420 You can see when people gave up.

00:36:42.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:36:43.440 So another tactic people have developed when they had, so they had this idea, okay, I'm super distracted on how much time to read.

00:36:48.500 I got to get through this list of books.

00:36:50.200 People talk about, if I learn how to speed read, this, this will get me through.

00:36:55.480 What do you think about speed reading?

00:36:56.980 Well, first of all, speed reading really doesn't work.

00:37:01.260 Not the way that people think that it does.

00:37:03.300 There are, there's a lot of studies on this.

00:37:05.460 There are just simply limitations on how our eyes work.

00:37:08.760 You know, our ability to scan particular passages of text that, that mean that you really can't speed it up that much.

00:37:19.180 But even if it did work, I'm not sure it's the best way for people to do what they need, what they need to do.

00:37:27.080 Because, look, I've been in that situation many times, too, where I have to get a quick grasp on something.

00:37:35.400 I don't have time to sit down with my pencil in my hand and annotate carefully.

00:37:41.000 I mean, sometimes there just aren't enough hours in the day.

00:37:44.220 So when I'm in that situation, let's say it's an article.

00:37:47.060 It's a long, kind of complicated article on a difficult subject, and I'm not sure what exactly is in it.

00:37:55.780 I'm not sure how important it's going to be.

00:37:58.540 Speed reading actually would be a lousy way to address that problem.

00:38:02.480 What I do in a case like that, and I think a lot of scholarly readers do the same thing, I'll go to, I'll read the first paragraph of the article carefully.

00:38:10.760 Then I'll read the last paragraph of the article carefully.

00:38:13.620 And on the basis of that, I have some idea of what's going on in it.

00:38:18.060 If I realize, sometimes at that point, I say, oh, I don't need to pursue this any further.

00:38:22.360 It's not going to give me what I want.

00:38:24.000 But I found that out a lot quicker than I would by speed reading.

00:38:27.980 But if after reading the first paragraph and the last paragraph, I think I still need to look into this some more, I go through, I go back to the second paragraph, and I read the first sentence of it.

00:38:37.360 Then I read the first sentence of the paragraph after that.

00:38:39.820 And in that way, what I'm doing is I'm starting at 40,000 feet, and then I'm coming down to 20,000 feet.

00:38:48.740 And then ultimately, if I see, oh, this thing is really valuable, then I stop and I go through the whole thing.

00:38:54.600 Or if I don't have time to do that, I make a note, this is something I need to come back to and read carefully.

00:38:59.760 But right now, I'm just getting the main points.

00:39:02.360 And that is actually a much more efficient and useful way to get hold of something in a short period of time than speed reading because I'm getting the structure of the argument rather than just treating every word as being the same value as every other word.

00:39:19.340 Well, this is actually – that's a tactic from Mortimer Adler.

00:39:21.660 I mean, so we kind of dogged on at the beginning.

00:39:23.840 But you say, no, look, his book, How to Read a Book, which I think everyone should read it.

00:39:27.820 I think it's some really useful information there.

00:39:29.840 But he kind of tells you how different ways you can read a book that can allow you to do things like that you do.

00:39:34.560 Yep, yep, absolutely.

00:39:35.480 And that's the thing.

00:39:36.660 It's not that he doesn't give good advice.

00:39:39.760 It's just that he only has one kind of reading in mind.

00:39:42.840 And he tends to leave out the many kinds of reading that are rewarding and, above all, pleasurable that don't really lend themselves to that sort of model.

00:39:54.620 But if you really do have to know something in a short period of time, Adler is actually a much better guide for you than any speed reading program would be.

00:40:04.620 Yeah, I've kind of developed my own tactics for reading different kinds of books because you start recognizing different kinds of books have different types of formats.

00:40:12.640 And certain formats are conducive to certain types of reading.

00:40:15.160 So, like, you know, if I'm reading a fiction book, like, I don't skim that at all.

00:40:19.040 I'm going to read that.

00:40:19.960 I'm going to savor it.

00:40:21.060 Like, a hard work of philosophy, I'm going to go through that, take my time.

00:40:24.940 But if it's like one of those pop psychology, pop business books, like, here's the format on those things.

00:40:30.920 It's a cookie cutter.

00:40:32.060 What you do is you start off with a principle, and then you start off with an antidote where someone, like, you know, a story is highlighting.

00:40:38.100 And then, like, there's bullet points.

00:40:39.380 And that's it.

00:40:40.500 And so, you can just skim those things.

00:40:42.500 I know I can skip the antidote.

00:40:44.420 Yeah.

00:40:44.760 You can just get to the principles.

00:40:46.500 Yep, yep.

00:40:47.200 Rinse and repeat, right?

00:40:48.680 You know?

00:40:49.420 Yeah, that's how they're put together.

00:40:51.220 And, you know, there's a reason for that.

00:40:53.020 The publishing industry knows that that's the sort of thing that works.

00:40:56.580 But you don't have to read it in the way that it's written.

00:40:58.880 You can read it in the way that works for you.

00:41:01.520 Yeah.

00:41:02.060 So, yeah.

00:41:02.460 And another thing, too, once you start reading those books, you realize they all talk about the marshmallow experiment.

00:41:07.080 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:41:07.740 And so, you just-

00:41:09.120 For gratification.

00:41:09.960 Right.

00:41:10.380 Or the gorilla, the invisible gorilla.

00:41:12.360 The gorilla that nobody sees bouncing the basketballs.

00:41:15.120 Yeah.

00:41:15.400 Yeah.

00:41:15.500 Once you know those, like, if you know those, you can just, like, skip through that.

00:41:18.560 Okay.

00:41:18.880 Done.

00:41:19.160 Yeah.

00:41:19.700 There's, like, four.

00:41:20.460 There's the Stanley Milgram Obedience to Authority experiments.

00:41:23.600 There's the Stanford Prison experiment, you know?

00:41:26.180 Yeah.

00:41:26.360 It's about five experiments.

00:41:27.880 Yeah.

00:41:28.500 It's in every one of those books.

00:41:29.800 I thought about writing a book where it's, like, all the experiments you need to know to, like, get through any business pop psychology book as quickly as possible.

00:41:36.880 Yeah.

00:41:37.240 That's great.

00:41:37.840 So, yeah.

00:41:38.340 So, you don't have to read every book the same.

00:41:40.240 And you can skim stuff if you want, if you think it's conducive.

00:41:43.340 What's your take about finishing or not finishing books?

00:41:48.420 Yeah.

00:41:48.960 That's a funny thing because when I was up until I was maybe in my early 20s, I finished every book that I started.

00:42:00.080 And it was – at one point, I was reading a book, a novel by William Gaddis called The Recognitions.

00:42:09.480 And it's over 1,000 pages long.

00:42:12.360 And I was just flogging myself through this book.

00:42:16.720 I just – I mean, I wasn't getting it.

00:42:19.420 I really probably wasn't the right reader for that book, especially at that time in my life.

00:42:25.400 And I was just so miserable.

00:42:27.400 But I was like, but I have to finish.

00:42:28.760 I have to finish.

00:42:29.560 But I couldn't read anything else because this thing was like the albatross around my neck.

00:42:34.060 And I remember getting to page 666, The Mark of the Beast, you know.

00:42:40.380 And I thought, the hell with this thing.

00:42:42.880 I'm not going to finish it.

00:42:44.900 And it was, like, one of the most liberating moments of my life, you know, because I realized, no, I gave it a good shot.

00:42:50.520 I gave it more than a good shot.

00:42:52.260 There was no value added for me in flogging myself all the way to the end of this thing.

00:42:58.560 It's totally fine if I set it aside.

00:43:01.720 And, you know, I have a friend, Austin Kleon, the guy who wrote Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work and Keep Going.

00:43:10.680 And Austin's a big fan of setting aside books that he just – they're just not doing anything for him.

00:43:17.720 And I love the way he talks about it.

00:43:19.840 He says what he tells people when he sets a book aside like that.

00:43:24.660 He said, yeah, that one's not for me.

00:43:27.660 He's not saying it's a bad book.

00:43:29.380 He's not saying it's a useless book.

00:43:31.340 He's just saying, yeah, I'm probably not the right reader for that book.

00:43:35.240 That one's not really for me.

00:43:37.360 And I really like that attitude, you know, because not everything is going to be for me.

00:43:41.760 Not everything is going to be for you.

00:43:43.300 There are some things that we're just not going to be able to get our heads around, even if everybody else likes it.

00:43:47.700 It's just not for me.

00:43:49.200 And that's okay.

00:43:50.720 Yeah, so I've always been like a big finisher of books too because I'm always like maybe there might be some gem.

00:43:56.300 Yeah.

00:43:56.660 One single gem.

00:43:57.520 But then lately I've gotten to a point where I give up on books.

00:44:01.820 I'm a member of a great book club here in my town.

00:44:05.760 But our policy is like, you know, read it.

00:44:08.080 But if it's not doing anything for you, just give up.

00:44:10.460 And then we talk about like why you gave up on it.

00:44:12.460 That's great.

00:44:13.480 What was it?

00:44:14.300 So I had to do that with – we were in Erasmus and Martin Luther's debate about free will.

00:44:19.080 Yeah.

00:44:20.020 And I had to give up on that.

00:44:21.900 And I just – I couldn't finish it.

00:44:23.240 I tried and I'm like, no, I can't do it.

00:44:25.840 Yeah, but that's great, right?

00:44:27.200 If you didn't talk about why, like what is it that I – what was it that I couldn't get into?

00:44:32.080 What was impeding me?

00:44:33.520 What was getting in my way?

00:44:35.600 You learn something about yourself as a reader, but you also learn something about that book.

00:44:39.500 Maybe you learn something in that case about just how differently people did arguments, made arguments in the 16th century than we make arguments today.

00:44:49.200 You know, I mean there's a lot to be learned from understanding why something was not for you.

00:44:55.780 Yeah.

00:44:55.960 And we had to give up – so we read books to our kids.

00:44:58.340 Speaking of like just sort of savoring books, reading books out loud is a whole different reading experience.

00:45:03.040 Oh, it is.

00:45:03.720 So we started reading The Secret Garden last year.

00:45:07.200 And like we tried to get through – but then like we were almost like a quarter left and we just couldn't do it anymore.

00:45:12.380 Because it was just – it was all about, you know, oh, Dickon.

00:45:14.380 Dickon's such a great boy.

00:45:15.660 And like it would be like a chapter about a sprout growing.

00:45:18.200 And we just like, no, we can't do it.

00:45:20.060 So we just gave up.

00:45:22.000 It was funny.

00:45:22.500 My daughter like picked it up and threw it in disgust. 1.00

00:45:25.680 And we switched over.

00:45:27.840 John Belair's.

00:45:28.980 We're really into his series of books.

00:45:31.300 We've been liking that.

00:45:32.520 That's great.

00:45:33.720 I love – you know, when I was a kid, I grew up in a weird house in that nobody in my family had even graduated from high school.

00:45:43.220 But we were – everybody was a reader.

00:45:46.580 They mainly read pulp fiction, you know.

00:45:49.100 So our house was just full of books, thousands of books.

00:45:53.220 But they were all like science fiction, mysteries, westerns, romances.

00:45:57.260 You know, my mom read the romances.

00:45:59.700 My grandmother read mysteries.

00:46:01.500 My father read science fiction and westerns.

00:46:03.980 And the house was just full of those things.

00:46:06.000 And I started picking those up when I was like four or five years old.

00:46:09.540 And I kind of went straight from Dr. Seuss to Louis L'Amour and Robert A. Heinlein, you know.

00:46:17.000 And I didn't read any of the children's classics.

00:46:22.860 And so when our son was born, that was such a great thing for me because all of those books that I never read when I was a kid, I was able to read to him.

00:46:34.200 And it was – I think it was – he liked it, but I think I liked it more than he did.

00:46:38.460 But –

00:46:39.020 Yeah, reading kids' books as an adult, that's an interesting reading experience as well.

00:46:42.940 Yeah, it really is.

00:46:43.920 Yeah, yeah, it really is.

00:46:45.600 This is just kind of a random thing.

00:46:46.960 But I had a friend whose son – he was actually my son's best friend when they were little.

00:46:52.740 And he was a really bright young man or boy.

00:46:55.840 He was a really bright boy.

00:46:56.820 But he couldn't learn to read.

00:46:59.360 And he was getting into second grade.

00:47:01.660 He couldn't read at all.

00:47:02.920 And his parents – well, this doesn't make any sense.

00:47:04.820 He's not dyslexic.

00:47:06.420 He doesn't have any of the usual – the common issues.

00:47:09.860 What's the deal?

00:47:11.400 And at some point, a teacher said, you know, I think he can read.

00:47:16.220 I think you need to talk to him.

00:47:17.860 And so they sat him down and they talked to him.

00:47:19.720 And he tearfully confessed that he did indeed know how to read.

00:47:23.440 Well, then why won't you read?

00:47:25.100 They said, what's the problem?

00:47:26.440 He said, if I read on my own, then you won't read books to me anymore.

00:47:30.960 Oh, man, that's sad.

00:47:33.680 And then they said, no, no, no.

00:47:36.200 We'll read books to you.

00:47:38.120 We'll read them until you're 21 if that's what you want.

00:47:40.860 And then he was okay.

00:47:42.140 But he really thought that once you learn to read for yourself, then you weren't allowed to be read to anymore.

00:47:49.060 And they just had no idea he was thinking that.

00:47:51.600 Well, speaking of – a lot of parents, they want to raise readers.

00:47:55.240 But like this idea of reading at whim, like inculcating that in yourself so your kids see that, and they see that reading is just something fun they do.

00:48:02.640 And like let them read what they want to read.

00:48:04.600 I mean, within reason.

00:48:05.400 I mean, you know what?

00:48:06.260 Within reason.

00:48:06.800 But, you know, if they want to read Captain Underpants, like my kid, my son, he's like nine.

00:48:12.000 He's like he's into those little graphic novel type things.

00:48:14.880 Loves them.

00:48:15.500 But he's reading all the time.

00:48:17.040 I'm like, hey, great.

00:48:17.840 Yeah.

00:48:18.320 Yeah.

00:48:19.100 Absolutely.

00:48:20.060 My son was really big in horrible histories.

00:48:22.620 That was one of his big things when he was little.

00:48:26.220 And that's totally fine, right?

00:48:27.960 What a lot of this is – a really important thing to think about here is that what do you want your kids to associate reading with?

00:48:36.460 Do you want them to associate it with drudgery and pain and just being flogged basically to do this?

00:48:45.340 Or do you want them to associate it with pleasure and delight and humor?

00:48:49.800 If they associate it with pleasure and delight and humor, they're much more likely to be readers as adults.

00:48:55.920 And that – when they get to the point where they're ready to pursue something that is more interesting, a little deeper, a little wiser, a little more challenging, they'll be prepared to do that.

00:49:07.980 They won't be afraid to do that because they have positive associations with reading.

00:49:12.120 I think we do a lot of damage when we overly police our kids' reading to try to make sure that they're only reading really, really worthwhile things because then it does become, for them, the same as eating their broccoli.

00:49:24.700 And that's not a great idea.

00:49:26.660 Well, speaking of kids, do you think readers are born or made or is it both?

00:49:31.400 Yeah, yeah.

00:49:32.580 I mean, I think it's some of both.

00:49:33.820 I mean, I think that there are some people for whom – reading is, as Steven Pinker says in one of his books, language is hardwired, but reading is bolted on.

00:49:46.960 And I think that's true.

00:49:48.600 And sometimes that's kind of an awkward connection.

00:49:52.280 And there are some people who are just not cognitively wired to process reading.

00:49:59.140 It's just difficult for them.

00:50:00.640 And that's totally fine, right?

00:50:02.560 I mean, a lot of these people are fantastic at other things that are equally intellectually challenging.

00:50:08.520 It's totally fine.

00:50:09.980 But if you are capable of processing it, if you've got that kind of – that your mind works that way, then I think the most important thing is what are the examples that you see as you're growing up?

00:50:53.720 When we were away on vacation.

00:50:55.580 But nobody looked at it.

00:50:56.900 It was just kind of background noise.

00:50:58.420 It was like white noise in the background.

00:51:00.040 Everybody was reading.

00:51:01.520 And that seemed normal to me.

00:51:04.140 And because it seemed normal to me, I developed the habit myself.

00:51:07.220 And it's lasted me a lifetime.

00:51:09.300 Well, Alan, this has been a great conversation.

00:51:10.640 Where can people go to learn more about the book and the rest of your work?

00:51:13.760 Well, thanks for asking.

00:51:14.960 Yeah.

00:51:15.480 My website is ajayjay.org.

00:51:20.580 And that contains links to all of the books and places where you may buy them and things like that.

00:51:25.400 And I'm also on Twitter as ajayjay.

00:51:29.180 Fantastic.

00:51:29.600 Well, Alan Jacobs, thanks for your time.

00:51:30.800 It's been a pleasure.

00:51:31.660 It's been great, Brad.

00:51:32.520 Thanks.

00:51:33.680 My guest name is Alan Jacobs.

00:51:34.780 He's the author of the book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.

00:51:38.120 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:51:40.440 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash pleasures of reading.

00:51:43.560 Where you can find links to resources.

00:51:44.960 Where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:51:53.260 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

00:51:55.940 Check out our website at artofmanless.com.

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00:52:27.340 Until next time, this is Brett McKay.

00:52:28.680 You remind you not only to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - February 24, 2020

#587： How to Get More Pleasure and Fulfillment Out of Your Reading

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