In Defense of Reading Whole Books

Another entry in a slow debate

There's been a slow debate about whether it's useful to read whole books.

Last November, the Washington Post published an editorial about how fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried doesn't read books:  how he values "the instrumental knowledge" he can take away (in the Post's words), over everything else in the experience of reading.  The Post's editorialist opposed this position, saying it "might tell us everything we need to know" about him.

Then in May, pundit Richard Hanania defended Bankman-Fried's position on his blog in "The Case Against (Most) Books", saying cynically that nonfiction writers "generally have an idea that can be expressed in terms much shorter than [a book], but extending your idea into a book looks impressive on a CV".  He does give some exceptions, including - very relevant to my own blog - history books.  History books, he says "can always go into more detail," while most other nonfiction books "are padded with filler" to fill out a book length.

Then, in early August, blogger Arjun Panickssery replied on his own blog with "Read More Books but Pretend to Read Even More", saying that some books should be read in detail when you have a particular goal in mind (such as investigating a particular claim.  But, he argues, many other books should be skimmed or avoided entirely.  He admits that "whole categories of books merit suspicion," like the popular nonfiction Hanania draws his examples from.

I think there's a valid point here, but I also think this whole discussion's missing some important aspects.

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On one level, a book can be distilled down to a summary, and a blog post can be distilled down to a single thesis statement.  It's certainly faster to read that summary or even thesis.  But that loses something significant, even something significant to the argument:  the details and reasoning behind it.

A well-developed blog post will have a thesis, and spend the rest of the post both explaining and defending it, and probably also in turn explain and defend some of the points supporting that thesis.  Maybe it'll then go on to explore some implications.  Some of this can be kept in a summary.  If you make the summary a little longer, you'll get some of the reasoning, and hopefully get the core of it.  But you won't get all of it.

Similarly, a well-planned nonfiction book will carry on this same process at greater length.  It'll go on explaining and defending and illustrating and exploring implications of its thesis, the points supporting the thesis, the points supporting those, and the implications derived from them.  Sometimes this goes off on wild tangents, like Hanania describes about David Sinclair’s Lifespan.  (I haven't picked up that book, so I can't comment on it myself.  According to Hanania, Sinclair diverts from his main subject of anti-aging research to talk about social issues that might be affected by longer lifespans.)  But sometimes this does work well.  Even if you disagree with the book's thesis, some anecdotes or arguments offered in support of it might stick with you.  Hanania's written two books himself; he says in his blog post that he "likes to think" the "journey" he takes the reader on there is worthwhile.  Some theses need this greater length to be fully defended; some journeys need this length to be traveled.

I know this personally - there're times I've wanted to go on and make larger claims in my blog posts, but I held back because I knew that defending those larger claims properly would take more space than I was willing to fill.  I don't think those particular ideas would've taken book-length writing to explain, but they would've taken more length than a blog post.  I can easily imagine some things that would take a book to explain.  Maybe someday I'll write one.

If, like Hanania or Bankman-Fried, you refuse to read books - then you're limiting the sort of theses and arguments you can understand and be convinced of.

I'm sure Hanania appreciates this point in the abstract.  (I'm less convinced about Bankman-Fried.)  After all, he all but admits it about his own books.  Why, then, is he making this argument?

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“I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” - Blaise Pascal.

Perhaps, when Hanania was last reading, he was reading the wrong sort of books.  Panickssery gestures toward this, and even Hanania himself admits it to some extent when excepting history from his condemnation.  But I think the divisions are finer than that.  Hanania is a political pundit.  If he's reading for information, I suspect he's often reading books about politics and society.  Aside from Lifespan, he also mentions and criticizes unnamed works in political science.

There are books that deserve this critique, that could have been better replaced by reading blog posts. In fact, the other month I was reading one of them:  The Battle for Your Brain by Nita Farahany.  It talks about a very interesting topic - neurotechnology, which promises and threatens to be able to both read people's minds and influence their thoughts.  The book points out this technology has great promise but also great dangers.  Unfortunately, Farahany oscillates between speculation, describing experimental devices, and lengthily quoting international lawyers.   This was a book where I could've gotten the same thing from several well-written blog posts.  Perhaps it wouldn't quite have been the same.  A few blog posts wouldn't have listed quite all the experiments and international law declarations, but that probably would've been an improvement.

I saw something of the same thing with regard to politics in Richard Land's The Divided States of America (written 2007) when I finally read it a couple years ago.  Having listened to various political pundits back around 2007, there was pretty much nothing new to me in Land's book.  Some of the details he gave might've been new, but even there, it'd been long enough that perhaps I had heard those details before and forgotten.

Of course, if you do value the details, you would value the specifics in these books... but if you value those details, you probably would've read the specifics long before Farahany or Land (or Sinclair) wrote these books.  Blog posts do come out more quickly.

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Of course, there're other sorts of books.  To take two examples I've focused on this blog, there're history books (which Panickssery and Hanania correctly exempt) and novels.  These can't be distilled down to a blog post.  A novel is a different sort of art than a short story.  A lengthy work of history is a vastly different thing than a short historical article.  Novels and books of history dig deeper, draw richer connections, and leave you with a keener appreciation of the story they tell.

If Bankman-Fried doesn't read any books, he's missing out on vast realms of human experience.

In some ways, Panickssery is right when he says that analyzing things through multiple sources and multiple perspectives is deeper than reading a single book.  I've gained a far greater appreciation of history from reading many books and comparing, contrasting, and collating them in detail.  I appreciate novels much more deeply by knowing other works in the same genre and having more background to compare them with, like I mused at the end of my recent post about 1632 and City at World's End.  And when I read enough, sometimes I try plotting my own fiction, or imagining how I'd tell the story of history - which's one of the things that led to this blog.  But this sort of understanding still requires you to begin by reading whole books.

A while back, I wanted to find out more about Alexander the Great, so I went to my local library and checked out a couple of books, including this. It was much more enlightening than reading blog posts or dipping into individual chapters.

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There's a reason most classes use textbooks.  When I was in high school and college, most of my classes did have textbooks, whether commercially-published books or loosely-bound course material written by the professors themselves.  (In one case, the course material was online, but the professor very well could've published his website as a textbook.)  Even when we didn't have a textbook, the mainstay of the course was the professor's lectures.  That content was at the same length and depth as a book.

After these lectures, of course, we dove in at greater depth.  In physical science courses, we might do experiments or read writeups of experiments; in social science courses, we might read primary sources.  When you're studying outside college, you'd probably take something along this same route.  All of these build together for the sort of analysis Panickssery is talking about.

But we couldn't start there.  If we had, we wouldn't have had the proper background to understand our experiments or articles.  Panickssery implies that you can start the analysis by dipping into books to read individual pages or chapters, or comparing blog posts.  Sometimes you can, but you first need to be familiar enough with the field to know where to dip and understand what you're reading when you're dipping in.  Perhaps Panickssery is implicitly assuming someone who does have that level of familiarity, but most people don't have it in most fields.  In college, that familiarity came from the textbook or lectures or other textbook-equivalent.  Outside college, unless you're lucky enough to have a very patient friend who'll explain the field to you, you're probably getting it from reading whole books.

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And aside from all these practical advantages - reading is fun.  The Washington Post is right that when Bankman-Fried doesn't read books, he's missing something over and above any practical advantages.  Sometimes, you can get those practical advantages from blog posts - as Bankman-Fried seems to have been doing.  Or, you can sometimes get them from the skimming Panickserry recommends.  I've argued there are a lot of times you can't, but sometimes you can.

Yet, as the Washington Post correctly says, "You read to read; you don't read to have read."  I read so much because I like actually reading.  When I find a new fun book, it's one of the highlights of my week.  I often mull over it in the back of my mind when I'm cooking or driving or falling asleep.  I like books.

The old library building in the town where I grew up. I still remember it fondly.

I think books are something a lot more people can learn to enjoy.  When I got back into reading after a few years of spending more time online and less reading, I realized I needed to stretch out my attention span again.  So, for a couple months, I'd take a paper book outside and read away from my smartphone.  On top of that, as I went into recently, some nonfiction books can take some background to know enough to really enjoy.

But often, the problem is finding the right books to read.  I do sometimes read the popular nonfiction genre Hanania and Panickssery emphasize.  But even aside from totally-replaceable books like The Battle for Your Brain, I usually find that genre less fun than most other books I read.  History, and good creative speculative fiction, are - at least for me - much better to read.

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"Of making many books there is no end;" it "is a weariness of the flesh," as the ancient writer said in Ecclesiastes.  Hanania and Panickssery are considering a very real question:  you can't read them all, so what should you do?

However, they've got far too negative an answer.  Even if you grant all the large exceptions Panickssery skims over far too quickly, they're still neglecting other reasons and ways books can be good.  They can teach you a lot; and they're fun.