What Not to Read

What Not to Read

So, Richard Hanania has a piece on why most books are a waste of time. I am very much in agreement with his line of thought, but his essay is lengthy. Read this instead.

In my very first graduate seminar, my late advisor Alan Dundes explained how to read to survive in academia. I didn’t last very long in academia, but this advice was the single best thing I learned in college.

A good-sized bibliography contains around three hundred titles, both books and articles. Do learned men and women read it all cover to cover? No, of course not. A few books that others frequently quote and the ones that immediately pertain to one’s research topic should be studied in full. Otherwise, read the acknowledgments and the bibliography to understand what’s going on in the field, and footnotes to get future research ideas — the most ingenious thoughts are often tacked into the footnote section. Then work through the introduction and conclusion and get a few examples in the middle.

The only bibliography no-no is listing a book or an article the researcher didn’t hold in his hands. We have to verify that the item exists in real life because even if it’s cited in multiple other lists of references doesn’t mean that one unscrupulous academic didn’t make it up and others didn’t drag it through their own bibliographies. At least, that’s what Dundes told us. I never ran into a fake title myself.

Don’t feel bad about following this advice. Last year, I put together a book proposal, and now I think I understand not only why books are formulaic — introduction, conclusion, few examples in the middle — but why they kind of suck. A book pitch usually includes a completed introduction with the first chapter, and an outline of the rest. If a publisher picks the pitch, the author receives an advance to complete the work on a schedule. Kind of like finishing the senior year after the college acceptance letter has been delivered. Predictably, everything beyond chapter one is uninspired.

This, of course, applies only to contemporary English language titles. In my experience, old volumes and translations are different. They tend to be structured around the material when we do the opposite, fit knowledge into a pre-existing format.

Writing is a craft. Some exceptional people still pour their hearts into the project, beginning to end, but especially if the author sees it as his task to convey the data, and maybe even be kind of witty while conveying the data, he’ll do a serviceable job to get it over with.

Reading for information requires using time judiciously. Rest assured, the writers don’t take it personal if you don’t contemplate every word that came out of their keyboards. In fact, they will feel guilty if you do — they got their miserly paychecks and comfortable careers, and that was good enough. Knowing how books of this kind are manufactured, only a total sociopath would demand that you read them in full.

The Written word is a great medium for skipping ahead which is why I strongly prefer articles to podcasts. Even the more professional podcasts, the ones where the host doesn’t pontificate endlessly or goes “mmm… mmmm…” between every sentence, are time-consuming. It takes a half an hour to listen to an hour-long recording on double speed. I get restless. In an article, I can navigate to my topic of interest in a matter of minutes and maybe even pick up a few ideas on the way — if they catch my eye. I skip the first “hook” paragraph pretty much always.

However, if you only read for information, you are a fool. Maybe because you are young — I now get why, historical accuracy aside, Ivan Turgenev made the fathers the romantic generation. More on that later. Good writing goes beyond the simple exchange of information. And this is where Hanania goes astray.

Since Hanania prefers contemporary writers, I will say this. In his recent essay on language, foremost contemporary novelist Cormac McCarthy explained that because language is a very recent evolutionary addition to cognition, our unconsciousness frequently communicates with us by other means. McCarthy used the example of the 19^th century German chemist August Kekulé who realized that the benzene molecule is structured like a ring after dreaming of a snake eating its own tail. The scientist’s unconscious sent him a message that he later described in words.

Likewise, an intuitive author will use words as an opportunity to probe something hard-felt and infinitely meaningful. Such writing has staying power.

There exist books that are meant to be devoured. Not academic tracts, but primary sources that keep grabbing the reader’s attention. Some of them said to be the word of God. Immersing oneself into that kind of literature is an experience.

Poetry is not the word of God, but its scope is often hard to grasp on the first try. It’s designed for rereading and — even better — memorization. One of the best parts of old-fashioned education, which I was fortunate to receive in the USSR, was the requirement to learn poems by heart and recite them in front of a class. The verses we were asked to memorize contained examples of some of the best usage of the Russian language, connecting students to thoughts and feelings that are both elusive and enduring.

Poetry is second only to religion in creating common cultural themes. A few years ago, I wrote in American Conservative about how, when looking at the trees changing colors in fall, every Russian speaker immediately thinks of Pushkin’s

A melancholy time! So charming to the eye!

Your beauty in its parting pleases me.

I love the lavish withering of nature,

The gold and scarlet raiment of the woods.

If contemporary Ukraine demolishes monuments to Pushkin, it’s doing so not because the poet is somehow an agent of imperialism, but because he’s good.

Quality literature enlivens the senses and refines souls. I recently reread Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons for the first time since high school. I was holding up OK, but ended up crying for half an hour after finishing the last paragraph. And that’s knowing full well what the likes of Bazarov, whose early death put me into that mood, did to Russia.

I wish I’d reread the novel earlier. It would have saved me a lot of trouble. When I was a decade younger than the sons’ generation, I saw the characters as two sets of adults and their world was exciting and unfamiliar. Now that I’m slightly older than the fathers, I see how Turgenev’s descriptions of social life in the Russian Empire around the time of emancipation are not unlike our own. Turgenev’s humor feels modern and his characters seem recognizable today.

Similarly, Lev Tolstoy’s retelling of Russia of Napoleonic Wars is full of timeless insights. Some critics dismiss Tolstoy as a mere sociologist; the poet Joseph Brodsky even saw him as a precursor to socialist realism. But somebody has to write sociology, and few can do it like Tolstoy. Of course, collecting and analyzing the data is important, but if a reader is interested in a foundational depiction of mating rituals, Natasha Rostova’s debutante ball is the place to start.

Not because Tolstoy was faithful to detail. He, for instance, had Natasha waltzed by her future husband Andrei Bolkonsky, the scene set to the music of Dmitry Shostakovich in Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1965 film. But waltzes were introduced to Russian high society decades later, the fact that the writer’s contemporaries knew very well. Tolstoy was by no means a failed researcher. He intentionally substituted historical accuracy for a vision of courtship.

And this is why War and Peace is the book worthy of lifelong engagement and most of what is written about it — or written about the Napoleonic Wars or the Decembrists — is for skimming. War and Peace is civilizational text. When most books merely make a point, great ones leave a mark in the reader’s imagination, help him live fully, and generate discussion. Books like that are rare, it’s true. More importantly, they don’t merely generate and interpret data.

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