There was a time in my life, when (having recently finished undergraduate) – with my time consumed solely by working in a bookstore, self-studying Russian, and consuming literature voraciously - I took something of an obsessive-compulsive relationship to reading. Books have been, and remain, my truest love: across the short spread of my life thus far, reading has been the most consistent activity. As a goal for myself in the year 2008, I set forth a list of ‘commandments’ for reading. More or less, they were:
- Read 65 books
- Read 20 000 pages
…If only the tablets at Mount Sinai could’ve been so concise, maybe things would be a bit easier? (Hell, I’d imagine that even if people lived by my two ‘commandments,’ things would rather be easier than this whole ’10 commandment’ nonsense). Now, of course, this is also the year when I entered graduate school (September 2008). I’d written those two objectives when I didn’t see graduate school as much more than an unrequited fantasy to further engage my bumbling scholastic aptitude in a semi-structured environment.
At any rate. I tracked everything: pages read (daily), pages read (cumulative), a floating average of five-day’s reading, average number of pages read (cumulative). Titles, authors, the number of pages in each book. And through the course of this ‘experiment’ (indeed, I’ve always tracked what books I’ve read, but nothing nearly so thorough), I found my reading habits began to shift.
First and foremost, I struggled to read as much as possible each day. The objective of having both (a) goal number of books, and (b) goal pages read was with the intention of preventing the consumption of many short books in lieu of longer works. I also found that reading the same book for hours each day was something I simply couldn’t do, and so I re-adjusted my focus: rather than reading in series, I began to read in parallel.
Notably, the interim period between finishing with undergraduate, and not yet knowing if I would continue to graduate school, was really the zenith of my intellectual career. I had copious amounts of time, was living with my parents (and thusly, the kibosh was put on my usual belligerence and debauchery), and had a fair amount of disposable income. I studied independently for a couple of hours each day, went to the gym compulsively, kept up correspondence with a number of individuals, and otherwise busied myself with a number of self-motivated goals. I look back on the period with general, gritty fondness, and really felt that I made productive (even if not particularly quantifiable) use of my time.
‘Parallel’ reading, then, is a habit I’ve since kept with. Rather than reading one book after another (‘series reading’), in a never-ending queue of literature, history, philosophy, theology, &c., I instead would immerse myself in a number of complementary works simultaneously. Each day, I would rotate through the batch numerous times, and this ultimately meant that I was (a) reading more, (b) comprehending and absorbing more, and (c) otherwise enjoying my reading to a greater degree.
Some of the clusters?
World War I:
The Great War – G.J. Myer
Storm of Steel – E. Junger
The Decline of the West – O. Spengler
World War I: A Very Short Introduction
Nietzsche:
Introducing Nietzsche
How to Read Nietzsche
Twilight of the Idols & The Anti-Christ – F. Nietzsche
Oh, and for those of you wondering?
I didn’t finish a book from September until December 2008, leaving my grand tally at 40 for the year (Compulsively, I feel I should note that the actual quantity read was probably up around 20 000 pages, simply in light of reading in graduate school. Much to my chagrin, graduate school has been an impasse to my personal intellectual development; I wonder who else has been tempted to leave their doctoral program under the auspices of not learning enough? However, reading a book cover-to-cover (the requirement to count it as ‘read’) was non-existent). And I read only 12 000 pages. C’est la vie.
