how I read

If we want to normalize a culture of deep reading, of coherence, of wisdom, we have to begin talking more about how to read. The diverse array of personalities and idiosyncrasies across the human spectrum mean that not everyone will engage as complex and old a practice of reading in the same ways.

Some read slowly to methodically chew each passage and phrase, looking up for long pauses to assimilate a new concept or narrative.
Others read in a blur, finishing books in the time it takes to return from a local bookshop with a haul, only to return to key passages on a second read.

Not many people have asked me how I read but since I have a blog I’m allowed to inflict my few readers with a couple descriptive beats from one person’s climbing strategy for their mountain of books…

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At the macro level, I gather the majority of my reading pile for the year during the holidays. It’s both convenient (with gift-giving happening before and book sales happening after the holidays) and effective (cramming your collecting into one set period of planning for the new year’s reading schedule). Throughout the year, my Goodreads accumulates a litany of friendly recommendations, tangential resources, and author releases to cull through in search of the topics, voices, and levels of depth I plan to tackle with my deep learning strategies. Picking the key books I think will impact my year, writing, and work at the right time is a process of intuition and desire paired with background checks and past experience.

Once purchased and gathered from gift-giving and wise budgeting there’s a vital step:
Read 10-15% of all books you take in within 48 hours of receiving them.

When I bring books into my library, I treat them as I would a person invited for dinner into my home.
You have to understand the basics of who they are, who they know, and how to navigate relationship with them.

For books, who they are is their Introduction, Preface, Author(s) Bio, Dedication,
Who they know is their Foreword, References or Resources, Acknowledgements, and Blurbs.
How to navigate them is their Table of Contents, Legends or Keys or Indexes or Dramatis Personae (for fiction), Appendix, and Citation or Translator Notes.

Each of these sections, these “paratexts” (similar to “epitexts”, which exist in the form of interviews, reviews, or marketing for a book) create the conditions you’ll need to understand exactly when to employ a book in your reading line-up or reach for a book when you have a specific question.

Because here’s the secret no one tries to keep— we all haven’t read every page of every book we own.
In some cases, we may ever only read 10-15% of a book before we part with it.

The reality is that much of the gist of a book is crammed into the paratext, the sections above, which include none of the many chapters where the author actually works out her grand tale or take. The truth of every book (fiction and contemplative texts aside) is that its best chapter is always the Footnotes.

If you start here, with a mere 10-15% of a book, your “knowledge-net” expands in width. To become a reader, you have to know how to work with an author. How to understand her references within the zeitgeist of an era. How to connect a constellation of great works to ideologies and hone your radar for propaganda or rhetoric. How to bracket sections of a chapter off as story, statistic, or song and comb through swaths of argumentation to find real gold.

From here, you’re off to the races!
By the 3rd of January, you’ve read 10% of thirty books,
More than four hundred pages!
But, importantly, four hundred shallow, similar pages of paratext…

This step can never be mistaken for the whole. It is your guide to relationship and awareness of another person at dinner, of a book shelved.
It doesn’t open the door, but offers a key.

Your work, my work (turning the lens inward again) from now on is to find the environments and times when you will read each book throughout the year.

I read short books in a frenzy, hoping momentum catapults me forward for longer reads. I put books in different places around the house, in the car, in my bag, on devices to encourage disparate, serendipitous idea-generation and an ever-moving needle of progress in reading. I dog-ear the pulp out of pages that I need for quick access. I keep pens in books that need them (most) and bookmarks in those that don’t (classics, fiction, and memoir). I use an underlining-bracketing-parenthetical-star-dash-quote system of highlighting to draw my eyes to theses, themes, beautiful writing, and paradigm-shifting passages. I spend an hour on one page or might fly past a half dozen leaving streaks down the page to note my dismissal of whole sections. I want to keep ledgers in a book’s back but find my lists and pace to never allow me more than a chapter or two of notes for posterity.

I call myself a reader before almost everything else because that identity shapes every part of my process. And probably my life.

There’s no wrong way to do it unless you’re not doing it.