Reading Better
What I read: How to gain more from your reading by Robert DiYanni. Published in Psyche July 7, 2021.
Whenever asked what one habit or activity has improved my life more than any other, without hesitation I say reading books. Books have been my lifelong friends. Books have given me the knowledge upon which many of my careers have been founded. Books have allowed me to poke around in the minds of brilliant thinkers.
A while back I wrote about my love of books in my post, Getting More From Nonfiction Books. There also I extolled the virtue of books and their positive influence on my life. No one comes away from reading a good book unchanged.
So, when I stumbled upon this great article by Robert DiYanni, a professor of humanities at New York University, about how to gain more from reading, I was immediately drawn to it.
The gist of the article’s purpose is stated upfront.
You probably already enjoy the ways that literary works entertain you, instruct you, move you. Recognising and understanding how they accomplish these things will enable you to deepen your appreciation still further and gain even more reward.
DiYanni contends that when we read literature we better understand people, the world, and ourselves. “We become, in some sense, what we read.”
Countless people have advised over the years to read books. I read a preponderance of nonfiction books, but as time passes, I’m realizing the wisdom of reading more fiction and artistic literature. Sometimes it’s through the stories in fiction that we best learn about the human condition or experience an environment or time in history in ways nonfiction can’t adequately convey.
Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz suggested much the same in the New York Times interview, The Nobel-Winning Economist Who Wants You to Read More Fiction. Rather than always turning to nonfiction to become a worldly and informed person, he suggests fiction can offer a certain kind of depth of understanding.
I would encourage anyone interested in understanding the Great Depression or mid-19th century Britain to turn to Steinbeck or Dickens.
Similarly, Christine Seifert suggests reading fiction in her Harvard Business Review article, The Case for Reading Fiction. Her case is directed at corporate manager types looking to improve their organizational and management skills, but her insight can be applied to all of us.
When it comes to reading, we may be assuming that reading for knowledge is the best reason to pick up a book. Research, however, suggests that reading fiction may provide far more important benefits than nonfiction. For example, reading fiction predicts increased social acuity and a sharper ability to comprehend other people’s motivations. Reading nonfiction might certainly be valuable for collecting knowledge, it does little to develop EQ [Emotional Quotient], a far more elusive goal.
In her BBC article, Claudia Hammond asked the question Does reading fiction make us better people? It turns out it does.
So the research shows that perhaps reading fiction does make people behave better. Certainly some institutions consider the effects of reading to be so significant that they now include modules on literature. At the University of California Irvine, for example, Johanna Shapiro from the Department of Family Medicine firmly believes that reading fiction results in better doctors and has led the establishment of a humanities programme to train medical students.
Opening with a lovely poetic form introduction, DiYanni launches us on a better reading journey with this ending to his introductory poem.
It’s a skill for lifelong learning pleasure.
Read for fun as well as learning – for delight.
The art of reading takes some time to master,
in pixels or in print. Go slow. Enjoy. Read well.
That stanza encapsulates how I have always viewed reading. I do it for pleasure. Even when I’m reading to learn some important background knowledge or a skill, I take pleasure in the art of reading.
And it is truly an art. The MacMillan Dictionary defines art in part as “something that people feel has value because it is beautiful or expresses ideas.” All good books do that for me. Even mediocre books do that for me. There is high art and there is pedestrian art. But they are all art in my eyes.
The art of reading does take time to master. The slow, methodical, careful, thoughtful process of reading can only be achieved through time. Time spent reading books. Lots of books. A variety of books. Books that inspire, entertain, and inform.
DiYanni offers some tips on how to get more pleasure from and a fuller appreciation of books. His first suggestion is that we pay close attention to what we’re reading. At first glance that seems self-evident. Of course we pay attention to what we’re reading. Otherwise, how could we be reading it. But this is what he means.
Reading with insight and toward deeper understanding requires paying close attention, noticing as much as you can about the text from the beginning. Attending to a work carefully will prepare you to reflect on it, engage with it and ask questions. That’s the key – bring to bear your attentive, observant, questioning self on your reading.
The casual attention we often give to our reading isn’t going to bring about the types of insights and understanding DiYanni believes are possible when a deeper form of attention is paid.
Questions are important. As I wrote in my previous post, if you want to make something you’re reading stick, you ask questions of yourself as a form of self-testing. Asking yourself questions or explaining what you’ve read to someone else, another approach to self-testing, can bring about a more thorough understanding.
Such deep reading isn’t relegated to only nonfiction works. Indeed, DiYanni uses fiction literature throughout to make his points. Better reading of fiction will provide a more robust enjoyment of the story and the intricacies of its narrative. As with nonfiction, more closely dissecting the work will naturally lead to more questions, which leads to more reflection, all of which engages you more fully with the writer’s work.
Next among DiYanni’s better reading suggestions is to not just read but re-read. This is partly why I re-read books I love often. It’s also why I have long abided by the idea put forth by the esteemed philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, that it’s better to read one quality book well than read many books badly.
Reading with understanding, appreciation and pleasure requires re-reading. Why is this so? Re-reading is critical because there are so many things going on in a work of literature that you can’t grasp them all in a single reading – no one can. You need time to notice and reflect; to revisit and re-see what’s there, to ensure that what you observed in your preliminary excursion through an essay or poem or story is indeed there. And you need an opportunity to see what you might have missed. In your second and subsequent traversals of a work, you’ll notice more, question more, think more, understand more, and in the process deepen your reading pleasure.
I tend to sort my books into different categories of expected depth of reading. If I’m reading a complex work on Aristotelean philosophy, I will likely read such a book slowly, carefully, and more than once. If I’m reading a mainstream serial murder mystery (one of my favorite casual reading pastime genres), I might read it quickly just once because I’m anxious to follow the story and get to the next in the series. If I absorb the storyline and I’m being entertained, I might go no deeper in my examination of that book.
One of the observations that DiYanni mentions is something I find important – rhythm, metrical beats, the ups and downs of pacing. This is important not just in works of fiction where it might play a more prominent role, but in nonfiction too. Good nonfiction writing has a cadence, a metrical style. Perhaps the variations are simply to break up the monotony of the prose. Often though, such mixing up of writing tone and pacing is intended to better convey the information or ideas presented.
In addition to rhyme, you will hear a metrical beat, a rhythm to the words in each line.
Paying attention to what I call the musicality of verbiage can expose clues to what the writer wants to emphasize or a direction of mindset in which they want you to shift.
Reading slowly flies in the face of the prodding I experienced in my youth when I fell prey to the “more is better” way of thinking. But DiYanni suggests we slow down. Even before reading the article, I was convinced increasing the speed of one’s reading didn’t add up to anything more than gobbling up words in a kind of silly race, more a Western consumerist carryover than a meaningful reading tactic.
As a child I was encouraged to learn the speed-reading techniques of Evelyn Wood. I recall spending hours dragging my fingers down each page feigning comprehension of the scanned word groupings, comprehension that was at best high level and incomplete. Years later I would give a new phone app a try that quickly displayed the words of a book in sequential order flashing before me so quickly it resembled disco lighting more than a coherent narrative.
My typical reading speed is brisk, but I never enjoyed the constant nudge to read faster. It destroyed the joy of reading. Rather than serve as encouragement to read, it made it a chore. I’m sure I never absorbed the material as well as when I enjoyed it at whatever pace seemed natural.
There’s no rush to finish; and there should be no rush to interpretation either. Take time to enjoy the way the writer presents his or her thinking, to reflect on what a work is saying to you, to mull over the insights you glean and to enjoy the writer’s craft and art.
For me, reading speed is dictated by the material. Am I reading to simply pick up a skill or find a specific bit of information to do my work better? Then my pace is more scan than slow dissection. Am I reading for deep understanding of complex science or philosophical thought? My pace slows considerably. That said, I’ve concluded that I’d rather read fewer books in ways that bring me joy along with understanding, and that means reading more slowly.
DiYanni also suggests that perhaps reading followed by breaks comprised of reflection and note taking can improve the overall experience. Note taking is usually relegated to accompanying nonfiction reading and I honestly never considered it for fiction and other literature. But it makes sense. Why would I not want to capture and connect thoughts and ideas in at least some of my fiction endeavors? This is something I’m going to try.
When I came to the point in DiYanni’s article where he mentions Henry David Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden, my heart sung for a moment. Walden is my favorite book. I’ve read it 10 or 12 times since first reading it as a child. It resonates with me in profound, formative ways. Thoreau suggested our reading should be deliberate.
In Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), a book that profoundly influenced Mahatma Gandhi, we’re advised to read ‘deliberately’ – weighing and considering what we read. Thoreau suggests that we give to our reading of a work the same kind and degree of care that the author took in writing it, which in the case of Walden was seven drafts over nine years. ‘Books,’ he writes, ‘must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.’
For those not familiar with Thoreau’s Walden, perhaps you are familiar with this oft-quoted sentence DiYanni highlights from the book.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Wise words – advice promoting individualism I’ve tried with varying success to stick to all my life.
Next DiYanni suggests readers do something I have rarely done, read aloud. During my younger years as an actor, of course I read scripts aloud. Occasionally I’ve read poems aloud because for some reason they cry out to be interpretively performed. But a novel or essay? Never has that crossed my mind. Upon reflection it does make sense.
The ear (and voice) prompt the eye to see, absorb more of the writer’s craft and art. The art of reading and the craft of writing owe as much to the ear as to the eye.
After finishing DiYanni’s article I somehow already felt like a more skilled reader. I’ve since tried to consciously pay closer attention to what I’m reading, at least for material I deem important. Reading slower is already a policy I’ve adopted, and the article simply cemented that decision. Re-reading is also something I do naturally. My re-reading of Walden every few years is but one example. As for reading aloud, I’ve yet to do it, but I’m going to give it a try.
Reading for both comprehension and joy is so important that it’s likely to be a craft I hone throughout my life until my eyes can no longer waft across a page.
This article impressed me enough that I plan to purchase DiYanni’s two books, Critical Reading Across the Curriculum: Social and Natural Sciences, co-written with Anton Borst, and You Are What You Read: A Practical Guide to Reading Well.
Happy reading.