Reading and re-reading

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

– Heraclitus

I grew up in a small town in India. This town had a single library, musty and old, and my dad gifted me a lifetime membership when I was 8. I used to devour books, frequently finishing an entire book in a day. The reading habit persisted and, subconsciously, I made reading a part of my identity: “I am a reader of books”.

However, the problem with making it an identity, or at least one of the problems, is that you lose sight of the actual reasons to read. As a kid, I read to learn things, and for fun. Finding out all the things I didn’t know or understand was illuminating and incredibly satisfying. I was enthralled by history and science, by Tom Sawyer and 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. I still read for fun and learning, but also to become a better person.

When people would ask me “have you read that book?”, I always wanted to say yes. Especially if it’s a book I have been meaning to read, or it’s one everyone’s supposed to have read. And sometimes, I wanted to read a book so that I could prove to someone that it was a bad book. Or perhaps so that I could belong to the club of all the intellectuals that have read that book. The bad habits were acquired in my late 20s.

All this led me to read quite a few books for the wrong reasons. Increasing the number of books I’ve read became important. I even had a Goodreads account where I reviewed books and put them on my “shelves”.

I don’t know what caused me to snap out of this mode. Maybe seeing in others a mirror of my own behavior. Or maybe just re-reading Seneca who’d sternly scold you for such superficial behavior. I’d meet people who’d claim to have read a book, but didn’t get anything from it. If you read Nassim Taleb, and don’t spend any time thinking about and absorbing the central ideas of anti-fragility, the risk of ruin, and skin in the game, the time spent reading was mostly wasted. You could have used that time more productively just staring into space, or into your partner’s eyes. But absoribing such ideas and making them a part of your life requires re-reading and contemplation.

It’s common to meet people who make a metric out of the number of books they’ve read and publish it on Goodreads or other platforms. My wife worked with someone that claimed to have read 210 books in one year, by listening to them at 2x or 3x speeds (while having a full time job). The ridiculousness of that statement was staggering. Unless you are able to spend some time thinking about what you’ve read, that kind of “reading” is mostly a waste of time. Sure, you may retain a thing or two from it for a few weeks, until you’ve overwritten everything by listening to another 20 books at 3x speed.

Try to think of the last important thing you’ve read that you consistently apply in your life. Reading Seneca¹ once doesn’t make you a stoic. Many people, perhaps most, forget the important lessons within a small amount of time. Important lessons take time and repetition to master. Seneca says philosophy requires practice.

And the usefulness of a book isn’t just from the lessons you learned from reading it once. When you read, you focus on some things, and not the others. This could be because a certain part of the book is very important to what you’re going through right now in your life. Or it could be because a message from the book hits you so hard that you miss other things, or you forget to read between the lines. Authors spend years writing books. And sometimes a lifetime of experience has been distilled into a few pages, paragraphs or even sentences. And when you haven’t had coffee, or a pretty person is stealing glances at you while you read, it’s easy to skim over some sentences.

“A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.”

– Nassim Taleb

Reading creates a feedback loop. It changes you gradually. You now have a new perspective, new information. And then you experience the world with this new perspective. Given time, your brain consolidates what you’ve read into more dots that can be connected; it connects the new information with your past, and the things you see and hear and experience every day. When you re-read, you’re reading as this new person. The older person read some parts of that book. This new person builds on top of it.

Great books keep giving you more every time you read them.

Re-reading is very enjoyable. Like sitting down to chat with an old friend. You already know some arcs of the conversations, but now you know him better, and you can now ask better questions. You can linger, and be cosy in the conversation.

A pattern I have settled upon is to re-read a book after reading a new book. I think I got this idea from Nassim Taleb (one of my favorite authors) Re-reading doesn’t always mean reading from cover to cover. I sometimes skip sections that I know deeply, or I have read them too many times. I eventually come back to read those sections too, maybe a few re-readings later.

I have discovered insights that I missed on the first reading, made connections that I didn’t make before, and sometimes, read just the right thing that gave me an answer to a problem I was facing ².

Re-reading also serves as a reminder of what I need to practice. This is especially true of practical philosophical works like those of Seneca and Nassim Taleb. But it also applies to technical reading and management advice. It’s easy to forget important stuff even if you keep notes. And the notes from your first reading only reflect the kind of person you were then.

Re-reading necessarily means that I’m reading fewer books than I could have. But as Seneca says

It does not matter how many books you have, but how good the books are which you have.

People want to finish a book as soon as possible; to be more productive; to add to the number of books they’ve read so that they can brag about it; Or because the book is just boring, but they are supposed to read it. But those are all the wrong reasons to read a book.

Sitting down with a book, with perhaps a beverage in my hand, is one of my favorite activities. Reading a sentence or a paragraph and staring into space, sipping chai, and sometimes bourbon, is how I like to spend my free afternoons.

Contemplation is not just you sitting in a meditative pose and thinking hard. It could just be some time off from consuming any other info. It could be a walk, a bike-ride, a swim, sitting by a fire (and optionally) sipping bourbon, a nap, making coffee, mowing lawns, doing dishes and so on and so forth. It could be talking to your spouse while preparing to go to sleep. It could be you writing about what you read. Essentially, you need to free up your brain from work and scrolling and streaming and allow it to ruminate.

Your brain needs quiet, inactive time to form memories, to make connections, to go deeper and ask better questions of the author, and to be creative. Those unexpected connections your brain makes, connecting the dots your active brain didn’t know existed, lead to true wisdom. I’ve come a full circle in my life, and now I find reasons to do household chores. Repetitive work, like folding laundry, that allows my brain to relax and ruminate, have conversations with myself and the authors I’ve read.

A busy mind is a superficial mind.

Footnotes