Getting Reading Under Control

A working four-way classification

A while back, I received an alumni newsletter from my alma mater, and the editor was talking about a New Years resolution to read more books. She had recalled a blog post she’d read a couple decades before, to the effect that if you calculated how many books you read per month, how many months you reasonably have left to live, and how many books that would mean you could read over the rest of your life, it wouldn’t be very many. The original blogger had calculated 520.

Or take Oliver Burkeman’s New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks, which calculates how many weeks a human might reasonably live if they survive to 80 years old. The math is simple: 80 x 50 = 4000. You get two weeks of vacation per year. 😎

It doesn’t feel like we live very short lives, but as any person pushing past 60 can tell you, time flies. One may have lived quite a bit, but there’s still a lot of living left to do!

And a lot of reading.

So many books. So little time.

Getting one’s reading under control is easier said than done. It’s a lifelong, ongoing project, involving a surprising number of complexities, so let’s get started.

Divide and Conquer

When facing a large problem, the first task is to break it down into something more manageable. To do that, let’s recognize four basic kinds of reading for lifelong learning.

But first, let’s stipulate that “reading” means any form of quality content consumption. Let’s include listening to audiobooks or podcasts, watching lectures or talks, or panel discussions, or instructive videos or courses. Content consumption today is as likely to be through multi-media sources as through text. As long as it’s high-quality content and as long as one does read regularly from good old-fashioned books — so as to keep the mental skills necessary alive and well — we needn’t quibble about which format is best.¹

Okay, now for the four-part breakdown of reading. Here’s what I propose.

1. Feeds, Findings, and Follows (FFFs)

2. General Reading (Books)

3. Research Reading

4. Systematic Reading (Classics, Great Books)

Feeds, Findings & Follows (FFFs)

The first category, Feeds, Findings & Follows (FFFs) covers article-length reading (or listening or watching) via standard types of channels that keep “feeding” you content. You can subscribe to these feeds through a variety of methods, whether an email newsletter, platform subscribe buttons, or an RSS feed. Content includes periodicals (magazines, journals), newsletters or blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels.

Another possibility is to follow certain people or organizations, accounts or profiles. The only real distinction between a feed and a follow is that a feed is a regular publication, whereas a follow tracks a person or organization, possibly across multiple platforms or publishing channels.

Most feeds and follows today come from online, but physical magazines or newspapers or journals are included, if you prefer paper delivery.²

Findings refers to one-off discoveries that appear on your radar even if you don’t regularly subscribe to the source publication. One-off saves accumulate apart from your regular channels. For academics, findings also include one-off PDF downloads from indexed journals, whether you subscribe or not. Thankfully, many scholarly articles are now available to the general public through open access. (It used to be nigh impossible to get hold of an academic paper unless you had research or borrowing privileges at a university caliber library.)

Note: Technically, social media is included in FFFs. In many cases it’s more of an index or promoter of content published elsewhere, so it can probably be treated separately. For now, let’s say FFF reading refers to any shortform content you subscribe to (or author you follow), from which you regularly receive an email, an app delivery, or an RSS listing — plus one-off discoveries (= findings).

General Reading

The second category, General Reading, includes long form and/or multi-part content, primarily books. Courses, post or podcast series, whole conference proceedings, serialized fiction, and so forth is also included. I consumer most FFFs electronically, but when it comes to general reading and books, I prefer a mix of ebooks and physical copies. You may buy or borrow from the library, including ebook checkouts via Libby. Recommendations for books come through a wide variety of sources: colleagues and friends, FFF reading, quotations and citations from other books, book reviews, bibliographies, reading lists, syllabi, and so on. General reading is not usually “fed” to you serendipitously in the same way as feeds, follows, and findings. You’ll naturally be more selective, too, since it’s long form rather than short form content.

Thus one of the most basic facts about books is that they take longer to read than an article. If a chapter is roughly equivalent to an article, and if you read the whole book, one book may be equivalent to eight or ten articles. Quality should also be higher — although this varies. The time and mental space allowed to any given book is a large consideration. Compare FFFs, for which sheer quantity is a better metric.

Before moving on to the next two kinds of reading, it’s worth reconsidering bandwidth or capacity for FFFs and General Reading. If we have only 4000 weeks or the equivalent of 520 books, what does that indicate about how much of this kind of reading we can realistically do?

Research Reading

The third category, Research Reading, is informational reading chosen through intentional search or looking up a specific topic of interest. It may be a reference source such as Wikipedia or other online or offline encyclopedia (a “tertiary” source). It may be a “secondary” reading giving background about an author, text, person, event, time, place, or phenomenon. Or it may be a primary source, a historical artifact or a report of original research.

With research reading, you are more interested in the information and ideas than in the source itself, as long as it’s authoritative and reliable. Quantity is usually not the issue. The question is how many sources and how much reading do you need to do to gain the understanding you need? If you find an apropos Wikipedia article to satisfy a simple knowledge query, you could use one source and be done in five minutes. If, on the other hand, you’re working to grasp a highly complex topic, you could take months, use tens or hundreds of sources, and follow a long trail of footnotes into ever deeper and more specialized content.

In any case, the point of research reading is to gain understanding through intentional searching and reading, taking just as much — or as little — time as you need for your purpose.

Systematic Reading

The fourth category, Systematic Reading, is for one-of-a-kind and probably classic books — and we’re usually talking about books here. In theory, though, it could also be artworks, natural or physical monuments or great places, or even profound or prolific or influential thinkers (or actors). Whatever the kind or source, these works are read (or studied or visited or contemplate) not only systematically, but repeatedly, multiple times throughout your life, and they become part of your personal canon.

Examples of candidates for systematic reading and inclusion in a personal canon are: sacred books, classics, canonical works, Great Books, and foundational titles in your field. Like research reading, the key to systematic reading is intentionality. These books don’t appear out of nowhere, or serendipitously from a subscribed source. You choose them purposefully — or sometimes they choose you — oftentimes after you’ve heard about them for years.

They are texts you continue to revisit again and again over the course of a lifetime, each time learning something new. You may commit parts of them to memory. You may take elaborate notes. You cite them often. They come to mind and you draw on them when you’re in need of a theoretical or narrative framework to aid reflection.

Quality-wise these are books bear up extraordinarily well under close attention. They are worth the effort put into them.

Priorities?

Research reading and systematic reading are arguably the highest value reading you could put time and effort into, so you will want to save much of your time and mental attention for them. They are also, potentially, easier to manage in terms of sheer quantity or the task of taking notes or citing them.

On the other hand, we cannot retreat altogether out of FFFs and the General Reading “of the day” if we want to interact with our fellow human beings, address present-day issues, and live in everyday real life — if we want to have any conversation or engage in any action at all!

Herein lies the challenge we face as we try to get reading under control: to resist the bombardment of inferior quality content, saving time and mental space for the best reading, but not neglecting the real need to stay informed and engaged in contemporary conversation, understanding backward, but living forward, as Kierkegaard famously said.³

The challenge is real!

image generated by Substack

1. Multi-media learning is arguably much more effective. However, there is so much knowledge and wisdom buried in old-fashioned books that one should never think it’s possible to get all you need from contemporary media sources (audio, visual) only. Not to mention, there are forms to master as well as content. Learning to read big (“great”) books and classics helps you master thought forms and language forms that you will never get from listening to podcasts or watching videos.

2. Do consider the environmental impact, especially for short-form content.

3. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” This quotation is a shortened version of one of Kierkegaard’s journal entries. (Source)