Reading for Reading's Sake

I found this quote on Alan Jacobs' tumblr and found it prescient for me:

“Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper,” – W.H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (1967)

I know that I often fall prey to this tendency Auden astutely points out. On the top of this page is a list of books that I have read during the current year. Frequently I consider deleting this page. Why is it there? I started it as a way to keep track and for people to have a link to things they might find interesting, but I wonder if it doesn't subtly influence both what I read and they way I read it. There is always a pressure to read a book more quickly than I ought to merely in order to mark it off the list. Now with the page up there that pressure is amplified.

I know most people could not care less how many books I read per year or what books I read, but everything in our culture points us toward a crafting of our identities. For a reader, part of how we craft that identity is by what we read. We keep lists, lists which are constantly updated and amended, of things we want to read. We sometimes feel bad if an unworthy book from off the list is suddenly read.

The solution, I think, is twofold. First, don't worry about any lists. This doesn't mean necessarily to not keep them, but to not be bound by them. As Mr. Jacobs recommended in his excellent book on the art of reading, don't so structure your reading to not be open to serendipity and whim, both excellent guiding principles in their own right. Second, slow down. St Augustine, a quite good reader himself, once wrote "I write as I learn and I learn as a write." Simply put, if you take the time to slow down and write as you read--take notes, ask questions--you gain far more than by simply plowing through tome after tome.

It might mean reading less, fewer notches on the bedpost, but the reading will almost certainly be better and what is learned in the books will last.