Against attempts to read the Western canon
Note: This is based on a conversation I was having with someone on Discord.
Whenever I have tried to do this sort of thing, I always end up buying a lot more books than I end up reading. Maybe it works for some people. Maybe it’s worth trying just to learn about yourself and how you learn. But for me, that would be just about the worst way to try to learn
For me, I read to:
- Satisfy my immediate curiosity;
- Foster connection with other people; and
- To fulfill a practical need.
So that involves asking questions like:
- What am I wondering about right now?
- What are my friends/family interested in?
- What kinds of stuff would be useful for professional development or side projects?
Even if you limit yourself to those sorts of questions, there are far more books than anyone could ever get to.
If you just try to brute force your way through an extended series of books, you will end up reading a lot of stuff that has no connection to anything that you care about. Then reading will become unfun, and you might just end up watching TV. The tragedy here is that there might be a book that is just sitting there that would awaken so much intellectual passion. Yet, you don’t even open it because it’s not the next book on your list
Another concern with these kinds of lists is that you might view reading as a sort of check-in-the-box. “I read a book about medicine, so now I must know about medicine.” A lot of times that won’t be true at all, because you can read stuff without grasping it at all. All of the time, I catch myself having read a few pages without understanding any of it. My mind might have literally been drifting as I was reading. If I was just focusing on being able to say that I read that book, I might just press on like that to the end. Then, I could say “I finished this book.” That is purely ego-boosting, and has no connection to my learning.