5 ms·

> I ran across a quotation from Vladimir Nabokov on the Internet: “Curiously enough,” the author of Lolita tells us, “one cannot read a book: one can only rerea

> I ran across a quotation from Vladimir Nabokov on the Internet: “Curiously enough,” the author of Lolita tells us, “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it." ... > Nabokov continues his essay, quoting Flaubert: _Comme l’on serait savant si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq ou sìx livres._ (“What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books.”) The ideal here, it seems, is total knowledge of the book, total and simultaneous awareness of all its contents, total recall. Knowledge, wisdom even, lies in depth, not extension. The book, at once complex and endlessly available for revisits, allows the mind to achieve an act of prodigious control. Rather than submitting ourselves to a stream of information, in thrall to each precarious moment of a single reading, we can gradually come to possess, indeed to memorize, the work outside time. ... > Couldn’t there be a hint of irony in Flaubert’s _Comme l’on serait savant..._ (“What a scholar one might be…”)? Is it really wise to renounce all the impressions that a thousand books could bring, all that living, for the wisdom of five or six? That question has been on my mind lately. I can't speak to fine literature like the author of this article, but with high quality non-fiction, I've found that becoming well-read suits me better than widely-read. By that I mean I've discovered more benefits from reading fewer books deeply than more books superficially. This notion of slowing down and reading less would have been anathema to my younger self.

ak39 9y ago
I would agree. Well said. I would imagine this would hold true for knowing and using technology frameworks too.
jnicholasp 9y ago
It might be that different approaches to reading are more useful at different points in your life. When you're young, inexperienced, ignorant, inevitably mentally provincial, you might well gain most by reading widely and quickly in order to acquire perspective and a passing familiarity with a lot of things. Once you've built a reasonably rounded, if shallow, model of the world, and started to learn which parts of it you are most passionate about, you'll probably gain most by going deeply into those. Breadth first search, then depth on the best matches, in other words.
snarf21 9y ago
Like someone else said the "one can only reread a book" quote strikes me as lens specific. Would you really get that much different from reading a book twice in a row? Maybe if it is a technical or science book, etc. but it is more likely that any book might have things that will resonate with you differently as you age and your perspective changes. Time is the great equalizer.
gumby 9y ago
Yet I think you'll find that the more you read (both in depth and breadth) the more you will see that there are tight connections and parallels between things that are often, for social/academic/political reasons, considered disjoint. This was the key insight (and only insight IMHO) of the deconstructionists. The implication is that either lots of breadth with some depth, or lots of depth and some breadth will give you sufficient insight and ontological complexity to attack any reasonable problem. Which fundamentally was the original meaning (since lost in the early 20th century) of the Ph.D.
sn9 9y ago
I feel like a good compromise is to read widely, but when a book strikes you as worthy of greater focus, to reread it at least another two times (in the Mortimer Adler sense as described in How to Read a Book). Perhaps scheduling rereading in a spaced repetition sort of way, like doubling the interval of time before you reread a text every time, might be useful.
sudshekhar 9y ago
> becoming well-read suits me better than widely-read I believe this is true simply because most books of the same genre rehash the same set of ideas. Author reference each others works and reach the same conclusions as their predecessors. The benefits of reading outside your regular genre can't be underestimated. Also, can you recommend some of your favorite non-fiction books? I've read most of the popular ones and while re-reading some of them is on my mind, would still love to have something new in the pipeline.
ceuyoyi 9y ago
Obviously this is a situation that has been central to mankind's situation for centuries: people who know only one book -or collection of books- very well, even able to quote directly from it, who think they thus know the truth and answers to all questions. Thus, they feel confident enough to ignore the rest of the published works of mankind, including the discoveris of science.

ak39 9y ago

I would agree. Well said. I would imagine this would hold true for knowing and using technology frameworks too.

jnicholasp 9y ago

It might be that different approaches to reading are more useful at different points in your life. When you're young, inexperienced, ignorant, inevitably mentally provincial, you might well gain most by reading widely and quickly in order to acquire perspective and a passing familiarity with a lot of things. Once you've built a reasonably rounded, if shallow, model of the world, and started to learn which parts of it you are most passionate about, you'll probably gain most by going deeply into those. Breadth first search, then depth on the best matches, in other words.

snarf21 9y ago

Like someone else said the "one can only reread a book" quote strikes me as lens specific. Would you really get that much different from reading a book twice in a row? Maybe if it is a technical or science book, etc. but it is more likely that any book might have things that will resonate with you differently as you age and your perspective changes. Time is the great equalizer.

gumby 9y ago

Yet I think you'll find that the more you read (both in depth and breadth) the more you will see that there are tight connections and parallels between things that are often, for social/academic/political reasons, considered disjoint. This was the key insight (and only insight IMHO) of the deconstructionists. The implication is that either lots of breadth with some depth, or lots of depth and some breadth will give you sufficient insight and ontological complexity to attack any reasonable problem. Which fundamentally was the original meaning (since lost in the early 20th century) of the Ph.D.

sn9 9y ago

I feel like a good compromise is to read widely, but when a book strikes you as worthy of greater focus, to reread it at least another two times (in the Mortimer Adler sense as described in How to Read a Book). Perhaps scheduling rereading in a spaced repetition sort of way, like doubling the interval of time before you reread a text every time, might be useful.

sudshekhar 9y ago

> becoming well-read suits me better than widely-read I believe this is true simply because most books of the same genre rehash the same set of ideas. Author reference each others works and reach the same conclusions as their predecessors. The benefits of reading outside your regular genre can't be underestimated. Also, can you recommend some of your favorite non-fiction books? I've read most of the popular ones and while re-reading some of them is on my mind, would still love to have something new in the pipeline.

ceuyoyi 9y ago

Obviously this is a situation that has been central to mankind's situation for centuries: people who know only one book -or collection of books- very well, even able to quote directly from it, who think they thus know the truth and answers to all questions. Thus, they feel confident enough to ignore the rest of the published works of mankind, including the discoveris of science.