The Trap of Reading More

A month back, my daughter asked me a recommendation for a book to read, from my kindle. As most of my books were tailored to my interest and age, I really couldn’t find anything and ended up buying a Nancy Drew's novel. However, in this process I found something interesting . It was an embarrassing one.

I haven’t read the first book that I bought for reading in Kindle.

It not just the first book, when I went through my entire 270 book library of kindle and found two disturbing things.

1. I haven't read at least 50% of those books .
2. I don't remember what I read in many of the books.

If a person whom I care tells me this, my response would be 'ah, that's expected. You can't read everything and you can't remember everything'. That's what Kim Scott calls as Ruinous Empathy. I wanted to see if there is another way to look at it.

May be its over simplistic, but I sort of went back to my school days- it took almost an year to master 10 books with teaching, repetition, exams and yet that doesn't stay in the same way for everyone. It came to the fundamental question then

What's the purpose of reading books, especially reading more books ?

After spending days, I really couldn't get a worthwhile answer that starts from 'Inside Out' - I did not see any point in reading more - am not a book author ( who needs to refer), nor a book reviewer, nor in a position where knowing more translates to better conversations, connects and conversion to a professional benefit. There were other reasons - building a identity around being a 'Avid Book Reader' and broadcasting that in social circles. Right now, it seemed utterly meaningless, next only to browsing the Facebook recommendation for videos and making innumerable LinkedIn connections. (The benefits for children are different, so am not making a claim that this analysis holds good for everyone)

Despondency grew, with me not able to find a good reason to read books.

Thankfully, a little more time on analyzing the type of books I read in 2020 gave me some answers. The two books I really loved reading and was able to recollect very well.

1. Prediction Machines by Ajay Aggarwal, Joshua Gans, AviGoldfarb
2. The 12 rules of Life by Jordan Peterson

The two things that were in common were that I spent lot of time in taking notes, summarizing, practiced something and revisited them one more time after the initial read. Out of the 20/30 books that I would have read this year, there were only 2 books in Fiction section. Normally would have been proud of that, but reality taught me to be real.

Ah, I jumped shouting 'Eureka', out of the water now ! There are three aspects that I need to change to get a purpose.

1. Reading it for Pleasure
2. Choosing the mix of books to cater to my 'Integration'
3. Assimilate Heavily

These may appear a bit contradictory, not if accept the reality of our being. By the first one, I did not mean pleasure in the typical sense - I meant picking books that provide holistic pleasure in content, language, facts that the entire reading experience is rich. Essentially, I need to raise the bar for Pleasure and at the same time not avoid this section as I did in 2020.

The second is about the mix of books that I read - there will be few books which I would pick for what in India call as 'Time Pleasure'. Then there is fiction which offers rich plots, language and sometime myriad of facts. The next section is normally NonFiction which is a big section that includes history, self help, philosophy, economics , and many more. I wanted to introduce a layer where its fictional but rich in life perspectives - like Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels, where you have to connect the characters to a certain paradigm and travel with that.

The last one applies to certain section of Non-Fiction. The aim of reading Non Fiction is to improve our knowledge of the outer and inner world. That's where I want to bring in my High School way of learning and Carl Jung's Integration Phenomenon. Without assimilation of what i read, I don't see anyway that I can become better or even Knowledgeable person. That knowledge which goes sliding into sub conscious has to be integrated into your conscious self by repetition, reflection, connection to existing knowledge. Else, its safe in bits in google. Hopefully I read 'less' in 2021 and assimilate more.

If books don't integrate to your self, its as good as a movie that you saw blind folded, with a white noise in your buds

Finally My recommendation - get your purpose right before you pick up more books. You definitely don't want to become a OCR in the process of reading books - reading, having few Ahas and nothing valuable at the end of the year.