Exploring Modern Reading Habits

I got really fascinated by the way you read, because I thought there was something wrong

with me by doing that.

But you don't really just read a book to completion.

You read and then you pick something else up and you just kind of go based on your whims,

whatever you're interested in.

Well, I was raised by a single mom in New York, and she used the local library as a

daycare center, because it was a very tough neighborhood.

And so, she would basically say, when you get back from school, go straight to the library

and don't come out until I pick you up late at night.

So, I used to basically live in the library and I read everything.

I read every magazine, I read every pictograph, I read every book, I read every map.

I just ran out of stuff to read.

I just read everything.

So, I got over this idea of that reading a large number of books or reading a book to

completion as a vanity metric.

Because really, when people are putting up photos on Twitter and Instagram of look at

my pile of books that I'm reading, it's a show-off thing, it's a signaling thing.

And the reality is, I would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until

I absorb them, rather than read all the books.

Because your brain has finite information in a finite space.

You get enough advice, it all cancels to zero.

There's a lot of nonsense in books out there, too.

So, I don't read anymore to complete books.

I read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity.

And it can be anything.

It could be nonsense.

It could be history.

It could be fiction.

It could be science.

It could be sci-fi.

These days, it's mostly sci-fi, philosophy, science, because that's just what I'm interested

in.

But I will read for understanding.

So, a really good book, I will flip through.

I won't actually read it consecutively in order, and I won't even necessarily finish

it.

I'm looking for ideas, things that I don't understand.

And when I find something really interesting, I'll reflect on it, I'll research it.

And then when I'm bored of it, I'll drop it or I'll flip to another book.

Thanks to electronic books, I've got 50, 70 books open at any time in my Kindle or iBooks,

and I'm just bouncing around between them.

It's also a little bit of a defense mechanism to how, in modern society, we get too much

information too quickly, and so our attention spans are very low.

So you get Twitter, you get Instagram, you get Facebook, you're just used to being bombarded

with information.

So you can take that to, you can view that as a negative and be like, I have no attention

span.

Or you could view that as a positive.

I multitask really well, and I can dig really fast.

If I find a thread that's interesting, I can follow it through five social networks, through

the web, through the libraries, through the books, and I can really get to the bottom

of this thing very quickly.

It's like the Library of Alexandria that I can research at my disposal.

So I no longer track books read or even care about books read.

It's about understanding concepts.