Learning not to read

The paradox of higher education is that you read less, rather than more. I used to think this conclusion was obvious, but not a year goes past without reading an article in a magazine or newspaper with someone stating as a new year resolution that they will read more.

 I’m not suggesting that everyone with a PhD is a fraud, who spent several years flicking through books rather than reading them in full, but higher education deliberately imposes impossible tasks on learners, in order to teach them better reading skills. I have bachelor degrees in English and in French, and in both subjects – I would guess this is true of most university subjects – one component of higher study is learning not to read books in full. There isn’t time to read all the available books on any subject, so we have to be selective. One of my courses was the English novel, done in ten lectures. We studied one novelist a week, so Dickens was one week, and Eliot the next. That might be an extreme example, but the principle is clear. Whether or not it is good to approach literature in such a selective way, the principle was the same: it was essential to employ some selection. Few people, even academics in English literature, can have read all of Shakespeare’s plays. We take the opportunity to engage with a Shakespeare play when we get the chance, perhaps, but for most of Shakespeare, in fact for most of literature, we read about the plays, we hear about the plays, we hear quotes from the plays, rather than read the thing itself. And often we read just a scene or a speech. There is nothing wrong with that: the selectivity is a good idea. Rather than consuming a book, we should engage with it in a debate. Any author makes assertions and attempts to justify them with some evidence. Rather like the defence lawyer in a court of law, your job is to challenge all the assertions of the prosecution. More often than not, this process leads to you abandoning the book, simply because you have completed your engagement with it. Perhaps, as Pierre Bayard states, in How to talk about books you haven’t read (2007), the mark of the literate person is to be able to place a work in its context, rather than simply reading it, or even, heaven forbid, instead of reading it.

But my point is rather different to Bayard. For me, it is a bit pointless to be able to state that Dante is Italy’s most famous writer, when you haven’t read a word of Dante. I haven’t read all of Dante, by any means, but I read enough to look at with deep suspicion anyone who claims to have read all of Dante in fewer than, say, five years. Similarly, I don’t think there is any problem with walking out of a film after fifteen minutes or giving up a book after chapter three.

In fact, whether for fiction or for non-fiction books, I finish perhaps a tenth of the books I start. Mercifully, I have learned not to care about not finishing a book. Perhaps the true statistic that makes sense is to count not the number of books you finish, but the number of books you start.