I like to assume, in all of my bookish hubris, that the reading of books is an excellent use of our free time. But in the interest of open-mindedness, let’s consider: what if we don’t read books?* What then?

The question reminded me of a New Yorker piece from a couple of years ago (“The Year in Not Reading“), with some Schopenhauer musings thrown in for good measure –

“Perhaps there’s consolation to be had in Schopenhauer’s remark that “buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents … 

I like browsing for books; I like the sense of endless possibility, the promise of freedom, of new life that seems so close at hand. There’s also something sad about browsing, though—a tugging awareness that what you’re doing is a waste of time, that your work is still all ahead of you.”

I also find the act of browsing books very pleasurable. The endless possibility of choosing to read a book (or not) is stimulating and makes me want to take up permanent residence at Powell’s Books — if anything, I feel the sadness of browsing tends to center on the Books We Could Have Read But Didn’t.

But so much for cognitive dissonance. Perhaps the simplest solution is to choose no books at all? I rather liked this post over at The Bygone Bureau (“In the Land of the Non-Reader”). It’s a healthy exercise to revisit our assumptions about reading, and why we do it. Far better to question than mindlessly assume we know what’s good for us –

“I must have some free time. Perhaps the “I don’t have time to read” line is just a cover. A way that people excuse themselves from the uncomfortable truth that they do, in fact, have time but that they would rather do something other than read with that time (such as pretending to be a wood-elf). We exalt reading as “good” like exercise and vegetables and so we are always making excuses as to why we avoid it.

 I knew that I had taken up residence in the swamp of the non-reader. Here is what life is like in that swamp:

1. The world is flat. Not in the sense of a level economic playing field (an idea I once read about, when I read). No, the world is flat because I see no depth. I make no associations. Life unfolds as a rather dull soap opera with bathroom breaks.
2. I can no longer reason and cannot be trusted to make a decision. My brain is distracted by second-hand sensations. When the slightest complexity arises in my life, I crave the screen world – the simple goal of building a house in Minecraft or the easily dis-entangled one-hour conundrums that beset the Voyager crew.
3. I can no longer relax. My Skyrim character now has a longer to-do list than my red-flagged Outlook task-list at work. My days at work and home consist of quests and side-quests leading to more quests and side-quests. I have lost the main narrative.
4. I am empty, but not in a monkish way. I am just kind of dumb. Also, without the pleasing empathy that comes from engaging with new ideas, places, and characters, I am afraid of foreigners and easily manipulated by politicians and advertisements.
5. I have the attention span of cocaine-addled four-year old. My mind is an ’80s Scorsese montage on fast-forward. It’s all sound and fury signifying – are you kidding me? Star Wars in 3D? WTF?”

I don’t really know about Skyrim is, but the “I am empty” was an apt way of putting it. For some reason, it made me think of John Milton’s “On His Blindness“.

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* I thought it was important to make the distinction of “reading books.” After all, even we choose not to read and engage in all sorts of non-bookish activities like video games or internet browsing, we are all still reading in some shape or form.

What a neat post, from Brain Pickings: “How to Read Faster: Bill Cosby’s Three Proven Strategies” –

“Bill Cosby may be best-known as the beloved personality behind his eponymous TV show, but he earned his doctorate in education and has been involved in several projects teaching the essential techniques of effective reading, including a PBS series on reading skills. In an essay unambiguously titled “How to Read Faster,” published in the same wonderful 1985 anthology How to Use the Power of the Printed Word (UK; public library) that gave us Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 timeless rules of writing, Cosby offers his three proven strategies for reading faster. Apart from their evergreen application to the printed word, it’s particularly interesting to consider how these rules might translate to the digital screen, where structural factors like scrolling, pagination, hyperlinks, and adjustable font sizes make the text and the reading experience at once more fluid and more rigid.”

The three tips boil down to –

1. Previewing: Read the first two paragraphs, the last two paragraphs, and the first sentence of any paragraphs in between.

2. Skimming: Read very quickly, to pick up a few key words at a time and get the general idea, like so:

3. Clustering. The most important of the three — “word-by-word reading is a rotten way to read faster. It actually cuts down on your speed.

Clustering trains you to look at groups of words instead of one at a time, and it increases your speed enormously. For most of us, clustering is a totally different way of seeing what we read.

Here’s how to cluster: Train your eyes to see all the words in clusters of up to three or four words at a glance.”

Reading on the screen doubtless brings its own unique challenges. I’m starting to think about hyperlinks differently — Nicholas Carr makes a compelling argument about the hyperlink as a distraction technology. From Wired: “The Web Shatters Focus, Wires Brains“

Nowadays it feels like avoiding distractions are our biggest hurdle when it comes to how fast we read. How well do we avoid distractions while reading?

(I love this picture by the way).

Recently, Random House shared some of its insights into ebook reading habits: (“Who Reads eBooks?“). Younger, well-educated, higher-income women seemed to represent a healthy slice of the ebook reading population. I was surprised at how strong a source word-of-mouth (81%) remains for ebook discovery –

“Over a fifth of American adults have read an eBook. EBook consumers are likely to be book enthusiasts who read across digital and print formats. Most eBook consumers are women, are younger than forty-five, have college degrees or have had some college education, and have upscale incomes. EBook consumers are over 20 percent more likely to have household incomes over $100,000 per year than non-eBook consumers. Preferred genres include mystery/suspense/detective fiction, general fiction, and romance.

When compared to all Americans ages sixteen and up, they tend to rely more heavily on word-of-mouth (81 percent versus 64 percent for all Americans ages 16+) and bookstore staff (31 percent versus 23 percent for Americans ages 16+) for book recommendations.” 

Here is the infographic breakdown below, and you can click on the image for more information from Random House.

Here’s some food for thought, courtesy of Salon: “Study: People can remember more about Facebook than real books” –

“Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of California, San Diego,tested how well people could remember text taken from Facebook updates and compared it to sentences picked at random from books. What they found is that participants’ memory for Facebook posts was about one and a half times greater than their memory for sentences from books.”

I don’t know if I would necessarily arrive at the same conclusions mentioned in the article, though: “Responses to news stories, thoughts about the world. Usually casual, often gossipy, these posts, researchers say, are easier to remember than more formal, edited content.”

Is that really true? I would be very hard-pressed to remember what I read on The Facebook last year, or last week — but I tend to fare better when trying to remember what I read from books. If anything, I would have guessed our very different states of distraction and attentiveness when browsing social networks as opposed to reading a book would make Facebook much less easier to recall. Or, maybe I’m just starting to get old and forgetful.*

I can’t help but wonder if randomly chosen book passages are less emotionally salient than a Facebook status and therefore less memorable. I’d also speculate that the social component of what we read on Facebook probably helps with remembering; maybe it’s that we can put a face to a status update that makes it more memorable. Maybe, or maybe not.

So … what about a Facebook Book, then?**

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Random things that I find myself googling: “Cognitive Decline Sets in Around Age 45”

** Speaking of the first image in this blog post, did you know that you can make a Facebook-book out of status updates? I’m actually very curious: why would someone want to do that?

Here’s some inspired bookstore marketing for all of those readers looking for last-minute Mayan Apocalypse reading material: end of the world book lists.

I rather like Abe Books’ End of the World Literature – Post-Apocalyptic Fiction list (surprised I’d read more of these books than I thought) –

“Noah’s ark and the flood that wiped earth clean of wicked mankind is an early example of post-apocalyptic writing but the modern genre of end of the world literature can be traced back two centuries to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man published in 1826.

Even though Shelley, famous for Frankenstein, and a few other writers were able to imagine doomsday scenarios in Victorian times, the genre blossomed – if that’s the right word and it probably isn’t – after World War II. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed humanity had the tools for global self-destruction. The 1950s was a decade where the end of world could be found on the end of our bookshelves.

The method of worldwide destruction varies. Readers could encounter a plague, global nuclear war, biological weaponry, a comet collision, or a blinding meteor shower followed by flesh-eating plants. Many authors don’t explain in detail the nature of their book’s catastrophe but, in many ways, it’s unimportant – the thoughts and actions of the survivors are what counts. How do they survive? Do they attempt to hold civilization together? Do they adopt new values? What do they reject and what do they retain?”

Also worth a look: Powell’s Books “Apocalypse Alley.”

Has anyone read The Day of the Triffids?

Following up on our thoughts from yesterday (The Joys of Rereading) …

The Millions (“The Books We Come Back To“) discusses a very specific type of rereading: people who reread the same book, every year (“Faulkner read Don Quixote once a year, ‘the way some people read the Bible’”). Kind of a neat ideal for an annual ritual.

The New York Times (“Read It Again, Sam“) looks at  rereading from the writer’s perspective: “Some authors reread as a kind of calisthenics”.  And I actually like James Wood a little more now, knowing that he rereads To The Lighthouse every single year. And for some reason, I loved this detail from Sherman Alexie on Emilie Dickinson:

“Another writer who rereads to prepare for the day’s work is the poet and novelist Sherman Alexie, who admires Emily Dickinson so much he doesn’t just reread her — he physically retypes her poems.”

And The Telegraph (“Rereading old books ‘enhances the experience‘”) shares some recent-although-not-quite-profound research on the possible cognitive benefits of the repeated, but different experience of rereading the same books –

I could see an argument being made that there are different sorts of pleasures for the multiple reading experience. Knowing when a favorite part of a book is coming creates a sense of expectation that isn’t present the first time through.

The Guardian (“The pleasures of rereading“) refers to rereading as a sort of ‘time travel.’ And knowing what to expect from a story does provide a certain amount of security –

“Rereading is therapy, despite the accompanying dash of guilt, and I find it strange that not everybody does it. Why wouldn’t you go back to something good? I return to these novels for the same reason I return to beer, or blankets or best friends.”

Here’s a good question, from The Guardian: Who Stole Our Reading Time? Of course, the answer itself is no great mystery:

“Now, the reader is under assault from hundreds of television channels, 3D cinema, a computer-gaming business so large it dwarfs Hollywood, iPhones, Wii, YouTube, free commuter newspapers, an engorged celebrity culture, instant access to all the music ever recorded, 24-hour sports news, and DVD box-sets of shows …  A leisure time that was already precious has been chewed into by text-messaging, Facebook and emails. Almost everyone I speak to claims that they “love books but just can’t find the time to read”. Well, they probably could – they’re just choosing to spend it differently.”

Sure, many more things are competing for our attention now. But it’s too convenient for us to blame the things; it’s still up to us to make a decision to read or not read, after all. And choosing to read means choosing not to do something else. But that also doesn’t mean it is always easy to resist those tempting distractions. When I need to carve out reading time, I prefer to remove myself from even the possibility of temptation: no email, no Internet, no iPhone. Being offline for an hour or two isn’t the end of the world (at least, that’s what I try to tell myself).

The Wall Street Journal (“Finding Time to Read“) chimes in with some additional helpful thoughts: “Reading simply fills all the interstitial moments in my day. I read with my coffee in the morning. I read on the subway, while waiting at the doctor’s office, while on hold with the cable company, in the checkout line at the supermarket and before falling asleep at night.”

And, Nicholas Carr talks about this topic in greater detail in his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

For more perspective, here’s a 2009 survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which you can download right here). The survey  queried some 13,000 people, covering all sorts of age groups and other demographic breakdowns. The usual caveats aside — graduate students probably read more than busy parents, people working 10-12 hour days may not have much reading time, etc. — the average is somewhere around 15-20 minute of reading a day. Kind of makes you want to pick up a book, doesn’t it? I do wonder what a 2012 survey would look like.

Want to read more? Here’s a few useful tips from Lifehacker: “How to Fit Reading Into Your Schedule and Actually Finish the Books You Want to Read.” I’m a proponent of Tip #1: Schedule a Daily Reading Time, because for the most part, we are creatures of habit. And keeping schedules can mean keeping up good habits.

Do we remember what we read better from paper books, or ebooks? Other than our own personal inclinations, the early — and fairly preliminary — research at University of Leicester gives paper books the edge. From Time (“Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?“) –

“What we found was that people on paper started to ‘know’ the material more quickly over the passage of time,” says Garland. “It took longer and [required] more repeated testing to get into that knowing state [with the computer reading, but] eventually the people who did it on the computer caught up with the people who [were reading] on paper.”

I’d say that I read about half of my books in print and ink form, and half in ebook form; personally, I haven’t noticed much of a difference between my ability to recall between paper or screen. Although, for ease of use, I would still prefer paper books for studying, etc.

Also, I don’t know if I fully grasped the distinction being made here between ‘knowing’ and ‘remembering’:

“Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully. Garland explains that when you recall something, you either “know” it and it just “comes to you” — without necessarily consciously recalling the context in which you learned it — or you “remember” it by cuing yourself about that context and then arriving at the answer. “Knowing” is better because you can recall the important facts faster and seemingly effortlessly.”

Neuroscience on the topic does indicate that spatial context is an important cue for our memories. Therefore, if we’re talking about textbooks which tend to have more visual landmarks (diagrams, tables, etc.) there is an argument to be made:

“Context and landmarks may actually be important to going from “remembering” to “knowing.” The more associations a particular memory can trigger, the more easily it tends to be recalled. Consequently, seemingly irrelevant factors like remembering whether you read something at the top or the bottom of page — or whether it was on the right or left hand side of a two-page spread or near a graphic — can help cement material in mind. 

…   E-books, however, provide fewer spatial landmarks than print, especially pared-down versions like the early Kindles, which simply scroll through text and don’t even show page numbers, just the percentage already read. In a sense, the page is infinite and limitless, which can be dizzying. Printed books on the other hand, give us a physical reference point, and part of our recall includes how far along in the book we are, something that’s more challenging to assess on an e-book.

Even for non-textbooks, I tend to believe that page numbers, and chapter breaks are good markers of memory for us. Granted, reading on screens is a fairly new development — and there’s an interesting quote from Jakob Nielson on something I had not thought about: screen size. “The bigger the screen, the more people can remember and the smaller, the less they can remember.”

I wonder about what will come of our ability to learn new reading strategies on digital compared to paper reading. When, and how that happens, remains to be seen.

Were I a scientist, I would want to be doing work like this. Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention by Stanislas Dehaene is one of the more noteworthy books about the neuroscience of reading to come out in the last few years.

Alison Gopnik’s review of Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention goes into some detail about competing theories of brain structures, and the process of how we decode shapes to letters and in turn groups of letters into words, into meaning –

“Dehaene also makes an argument that goes beyond reading, an argument about human nature itself. In “Reading in the Brain,” he adopts the rhetoric of innateness, a complex of ideas developed by Noam Chomsky 50 years ago and popularized by evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker. He argues that reading is highly constrained by fixed, innate brain structures with only a little flexibility, just enough to allow this unprecedented skill to emerge at all.

But there are two very different kinds of innateness. Chomsky proposed that we are born with specific, genetically determined neural and cognitive structures, structures that go far beyond a few general learning mechanisms. This kind of innateness has become the established wisdom in cognitive science. The brain is not a blank slate. 

 … In the past few years, computer scientists have developed new machine learning techniques that allow computers to make genuinely new discoveries, and cognitive scientists have begun to discover that even young children’s minds learn in much the same way. At the same time, neuroscientists have discovered that the brain is much more plastic — more influenced by experience — than we used to think. The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It’s not a blank slate, but it isn’t written in stone either.”

For a better sense of what all of this means, you can visit this website which helpfully has all of the images and diagrams that appear in the book.

The Wall Street Journal: “Book Review: ‘Reading in the Brain‘” also shares some of Dehaene’s insights on the process of reading in our brains. From an anthropological perspective, the shared qualities of alphabet structures is quite a topic to consider in how our brains may have evolved the reading process:

“Mr. Dehaene notes that, despite our sense that we are seeing all the text on a page as we read it, we are only really taking in about 12 letters at a time: the word we are focused on and a few of the letters next to it. Clever experiments revealed that, while the eyes are jumping from word to word, every other part of the text can be changed to nonsense and the reader won’t even notice. Mr. Dehaene also describes research on the similarities among the world’s alphabets and shows how writing systems themselves evolved to become easier to read—by converging on a small set of marks that are combined and recombined to make syllables and words. Across languages, the simpler the mark, the more often it is used. (T and L are more common than K and Y.) The marks are invariably presented with high contrast and pack a large amount of information into a small space.”

Scientific American has an excellent interview with Stanislas Dehaene (“Your Brain on Books“) which is worth a quick read (example: “Essentially, the brain did not evolve for culture, but culture evolved to be learnable by the brain”).