General life lesson: If everyone else is doing Thing A, there’s probably an advantage to be gained doing something other than Thing A.
I’ve seen at least one study [PDF] that shows that we’re reading significantly more thanks to the internet, and we’re spending a lot more time doing it. That’s not to say we’re consuming better information; we’re just consuming more of it.
In this case, Thing A represents reading current web-based words. It’s never been more important for you to think about what you’re reading.
For the last couple of years or so, I’ve tried to follow a very rough rule of thumb: for every minute I spend reading current, web-based content, I’d like to spend at least a minute reading book-bound content (incidentally, mostly stuff written before the 1960s). It’s not something I’m completely successful at. I don’t even track it. I just think it’s a useful awareness-oriented goal.
Great writers who lived before the internet could afford to take longer to get to the point. They weren’t restricted by arbitrary character count limitations—implicit or explicit.
And they were forced to paint pictures in words alone. As such, they reached descriptive depths rarely seen online. And from those depths emerge characters that teach us more about ourselves than we could learn in any other medium.
Understanding people—the fundamental ingredient in any personal or professional pursuit—is probably the most practical knowledge you can have. And there’s probably no better place to read detailed descriptions of people than fictional stores.
Anne Kreamer writes about several studies that build a business case for reading novels.
For instance, in fMRI studies of people reading fiction, neuroscientists detect activity in the pre-frontal cortex — a part of the brain involved with setting goals — when the participants read about characters setting a new goal. It turns out that when Henry James, more than a century ago, defended the value of fiction by saying that “a novel is a direct impression of life,” he was more right than he knew.
She also recommends several books. If I had to recommend one, it would be The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky lived more than 100 years ago, but he knew the same people we know.
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I found “How to read a book” by Mortimer Adler from the 1940s a readjustment to my ideas about of reading; the Cranky Philosopher Schaupenhaur and his essay “on literature” -characterizing reading as a substitute for doing your own thinking- was also a good slap. I can now see, much of the reading I thought I was doing, particularly online, was simply skimming words without much real thought on my part.
Adlers book.
http://cyberspacei.com/greatbooks/h2/how2read/h2r_contents.htm
Schaupenhaur essay.
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/schopenhauer/Schopenhauer-6.pdf
Brothers Karamazov is one of my favorite books along with Crime and Punishment, also from Dostoyevski!
It is interesting how recently I came to same conclusion that I want to read more offline. Currently I am going through and finishing Napoleon Hills book: Think and Grow rich.
And it’s there where I noticed the effect of descriptive writing, that you mentioned. Unfortunately my English is not native so prolonged sessions of reading can be tiring and slow compared to my reading on Serbian.
But it got way better since last year when I started my blog.
What is your opinion on speed reading?