Why Reading A Book A Day Is A Very Bad Idea

You might be reading books wrong…

Photo: Getty Images

Reading fast has become the new flex. Take it from the self-help guru Tai Lopez whose TEDx Talk, Why I Read A Book A Day (And Why You Should Too) has gained over 11 million views on YouTube. If that’s not enough, then click on Jay Shetty, the monk turned entrepreneur, whose video How I Read A Book A Day promises to change your life.

The basic idea behind such propositions is that: the more books you read, the better your life will be.

This is not a surprise because a lot of people hold this view. The view that somehow reading more automatically equals more knowledge, or more wisdom, or more learning, or more perspectives.

And that’s why people are always looking for ways to ‘read more books’ by every day, or every week or every year…

Because of it, the Internet is full of advice about how to read more in less time. Some prescribe speed reading like Tim Ferris that will make you read 300% faster. Others prescribe listening to audiobooks while taking morning shit so that you can cram up as many books as possible in the window of time you reserve for shitting every day. Yet others prescribe new apps and companies that create quick short summaries of books that you always wanted to read so that you can read all the books you want without actually reading them.

On Twitter, you have #ReadingChallenges where at the end of the year, people count and post about the books they read that year. “Mine totalled at 87” someone would say. “I crossed a 100, goal complete” another would write in honour of the reading rat race that they had partaken. Heck, even Medium is full of the reading craze gliding over our lives every second of the day, especially the second that we waste not reading.

But all of this. This whole fixation with reading as many books as possible during one’s lifetime, the whole romance with the idea that the more books you read, the better your life will be, this constant need to tickmark your booklist to feel good about yourself — completely and utterly misses the entire fucking point of reading. Like it takes the noble idea of reading, turns it on its head, and pushes it into the graveyard of our fake modern society where numbers matter more than experience.

To be honest, if I wrote the 10 commandments, I would announce it a sin, a grave sin to consume books like you consume wine glasses where you feel the need to not only count but also humble brag.

(As an avid reader myself) I feel absolutely appalled by what reading has become. And even though there are many reasons behind my appal, it mostly trickles down to two main reasons.

Firstly, reading is not really about how much you read, but how much you gain from it. To put it differently, reading has got nothing to do with the number of words, sentences, or pages you cram up, and everything to do with what you absorb out of it. This looks like a no-brainer. But it’s worth mentioning because we often tend to forget it.

Secondly, not all books are created equal, as we will see later there is a neat 80/20 rule when it comes to books: only 20% of the books in this world are worth reading which happen to contain 80% of all the truths and knowledge of this world.

Let’s look at each point in more detail.

Reading is not about how much you read but what you gain from it

According to the famous stoic philosopher Seneca, reading is like eating food.

More so, it is like eating good food. This is important. Because you have to make sure that you don’t cram up the food, that you don’t boggle down on it. You don’t want to eat your food in a quick rush, neither you want to eat just to get done with eating. The Italian chef Angelo Pellegrini in his classic essay, The Unprejudiced Palate, talks about how one should eat.

According to him, eating is like a spiritual experience which requires one’s full focus. One should eat in a state of flow — slow and absorbed, tasting every little flavour, chewing every texture and savouring every spice of the food you are eating to derive the maximum nutrition from it. In the opinion of Seneca, reading should be done in a similar manner.

In his Letters from the Stoic, he writes:

Food that is vomited up as soon as it is eaten is not assimilated into the body and does not do one any good…Nothing is so useful that it can be of any service in the mere passing. A multitude of books only gets in one’s way. So if you are unable to read all the books in your possession, you have enough when you have all the books you are able to read. And if you say, “But I feel like opening different books at different times,” my answer will be this: tasting one dish after another is the sign of a fussy stomach, and where the foods are dissimilar and diverse in range they lead to contamination of the system, not nutrition. So always read well-tried authors, and if at any moment you find yourself wanting a change from a particular author, go back to ones you have read before.

His last sentence, ‘go back to ones you have read before’ deserves an underline with red ink because it can’t be more true. Remember the second part, that reading is about how much you gain from it. There are some books that you don’t ‘get’ by simply reading, at least not in the first go. For me, most classics fall into this category. Those kind of books require you to read and re-read. They require you to pay close attention, require you to constantly discover higher-order truths and meanings down to the last word.

Take my own example. I remember reading Kafka’s, The Metamorphosis a few years ago and not really understanding what the book was about until I attended a Kafka workshop that went for about 6 weeks. Trust me, it was only during that time that I *understood* understood the complex concepts and themes of the book and even then I still can’t claim to fully understand it. Ludwig Mies, the architect from mid-1900 once said that “God is in the details.” That is a hearty little quote right there for anyone who pursues the task of engaging with any artistic or intellectual endeavour, reading being one of them.

It’s not just true for fiction BTW. It applies to all kind of books, the social, psychological, financial, self-helpy kind of books that the motivational gurus so earnestly advise to read.

If you have met me, you would know that I am a huge fan of Daniel Kahneman’s masterpiece Thinking Fast and Slow. I have read it half a dozen times. And no matter how many times I have read it, it’s never enough. And for some odd reason, I keep finding myself coming back to it every once in a while.

And this has led me to craft my own little principle: It’s better to read a few books but read them prim and proper, rather than gobble up a gazillion books with no real value.

Seneca talks about this point in his own senecaesque way.

You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere.

Not only Seneca but the Roman Stoic master, Marcus Aurelius announced his number one rule for reading books in his stoic bible, Meditations:

To read [books] attentively, not to be satisfied with “just getting the gist of it.”

And the father of all Stoics, Epictetus, the slave turned philosopher wrote a whole treatise on reading books the right way. He writes in The Art of Living:

The Right Use of Books Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.

Not All Books Are Created Equal

So earlier I mentioned the 80/20 rule which is just a nickname for Pareto principle. It’s also called the law of vital few which basically states that 80% of things happen because of 20% of things. And in our book example, I took it to make a quick point that 80% of the stuff worth reading is contained in 20% of the books.

Well, to be more precise, it is actually the Sturgeon’s law in philosophy that fits more closely to our example. The Sturgeon’s law basically states that “ninety percent of everything is crap.”

It’s the world-class philosopher Daniel Dennett who championed Sturgeon’s law in his, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking saying that ninety percent of everything is crap, ninety percent of academic research is crap, ninety percent of paintings are crap, ninety percent of music is crap, ninety percent of movies are crap, ninety percent of Internet memes are crap, and ninety percent of all the books in the world are crap.

If you agree with the idea that crap books are not worth anyone’s time, then you agree that 90% of the books in the world are simply not worth reading which means you don’t have to read them.

This is good news because you can instead focus your attention on 10% of the books that are worth reading.

Make no mistake though because the 10% of the books that are good are actually Pandora’s boxes in themselves, to use a Fahrenheit 451 reference, there are some books in this world that contain more truths per square unit of words, you call them good books, even great books.

Perhaps no one understood the importance of reading good books more than Franz Kafka who once wrote a letter to his childhood friend Oskar Pollack that:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief — Franz Kafka 1904

It is given that a book that ‘must be an axe for the frozen sea inside us’ ought to take up a lot of time and energy to read and understand in its full true essence.

And if you are reading just for consumption, you won’t be able to do justice to the kind of books that require work not just from the author but from the reader.

And lastly, it’s worth noting that reading does not end with the last page. It does not end when you close the book and put it down.

You know, I do maintain a checklist for the books I read, but oftentimes it happens that whenever I am about to put a tick on a book that I did fully read from start to end, I deep down wonder, Have I really read that book? Sometimes I don’t tick it until I am sure in my own little heart that I did *get* the book properly.

It was Marcel Proust and John Ruskin that put my sentiments aptly in their 1971 essay, On Reading.