Reflections on a Month for Reading

I’m wrapping up this month’s focus, reading, in my year-long Foundations project. Normally, I split my final posts into one covering the books I read during the month and one discussing my personal experience and habit changes in the month’s focus area. However, since this month was *about* reading, I decided to merge the two.

Those interested in my previous months’ efforts can see them here:

1.     Fitness: Start, End, Books
2.     Productivity: Start, End, Books
3.     Money: Start, End, Books
4.     Food: Start, End, Books

Today, I’ll start with personal reflections, then move onto my reading for the month.

Reflections on Reading

As evidenced by my previous months’ book lists, I already read a lot of books. This is largely an occupational side-effect, but my reading volume isn’t something that concerns me.

Instead, my goals for the month were twofold:

1. To read, however briefly, right before bed. I felt like this habit would facilitate sleeping well, in addition to injecting another regular reading slot into my life.
2. To expand the breadth of books I read. I wanted to spend more time reading literature, history and topics not directly related to my writing. (Though I admit such breadth will probably not be sustained outside of this initial month.)

For both goals, I was successful:

I managed to read every night before falling asleep, although on nights spent with company, my wife and I went to bed later, and I kept this reading brief. I will strive to continue this habit, especially when I approach the month when my project focuses on sleep itself. Books beat screens for improving sleep quality.

In terms of breadth, I was also successful. In particular, I focused on two books I have wanted to read that kept getting pushed out of my queue by more “important” books:

1. The Count of Monte Cristo. This is my all-time favorite novel. I’ve read it at least three times, and last summer I started listening to it as an audiobook in French. Given this month’s focus, I restarted where I left off and have nearly reach the end.
2. Journey to the West. This Chinese classic has been sitting on my shelf since my first trip to China, but the Chinese text was too difficult for me. I’ve surrendered a couple times when attempting to read it in the original Chinese, only making it through a few pages at a time. Now, I’ve decided to read it in English first, following Anthony Yu’s unabridged translation.

Both books are excellent, but they’re hardly quick reads. The unabridged audiobook for Monte Cristo is nearly 50 hours long, and Yu’s translation runs nearly 2000 pages. Thus, in an ironic twist, the month focused on reading is probably the one in which I finished the fewest total books!

Reading about Reading: Notes on Five Books

In addition to my literary excursions, I read five books about reading for this month’s research, two of which were re-reads. This is a lot less than I normally read for Foundations each month. Part of this was owing to the amount of time I took to read longer books that were off-topic, as mentioned earlier. But a bigger part was simply that I have already read a ton of books on this topic as part of researching my latest book, so I didn’t feel compelled to research the topic as aggressively as I do the subjects that are new to me.

1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

First, some quick takeaways from this month’s research:

1. Reading relies on brain mechanisms that evolved to do different jobs, that are recycled to be applied to the evolutionarily-recent task of reading.
2. Despite differences in scripts, reading in Chinese, English and Italian all use basically the same brain circuitry.
3. Reading speed is mechanically and psychologically limited. Speed reading doesn’t work, and the upper limit on reading (without skimming or skipping stuff) is probably around 500 words per minute for most people.
4. Knowledge is the biggest driver of comprehension and memory. The more you know the more you’ll remember from what you read. Ultimately this, not speed, is probably the biggest factor separating people who easily read dozens of books in a month and those who find one or two to be arduous.
5. Reading is a virtuous cycle. In keeping with my fourth point, if you read more, you know more, which makes further reading easier and more enjoyable. Reading well comes from reading lots.

Notes on Five Books

1. The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham

I first read this when it came out. Now, having done a lot more background research on reading, I can appreciate just how good a job Willingham does in covering the basic cognitive science of reading.

Willingham carefully articulates the current standard model for how reading works, from moving your eyes, to decoding letters on the page, to the dual routes of sounding out words while accessing irregular ones through a mental lexicon, assembling words into propositions, determining what a book says and, finally, what it actually means. Along the way, he dispels many myths and misconceptions about this process held by educators and readers alike.

My favorite part of this book was Willingham’s discussion of how limited our field of vision is—and how unaware we are of this. Researchers using eye-tracking software transformed a page of text to replace every character outside a narrow range of vision with the letter “X”, quickly updating the display every time a person’s eye moved. Not only did this change have no effect on reading speed—subjects didn’t even realize there was anything strange about the text!

Truly, the things most familiar to us contain some of the greatest surprises.

2. How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren

This classic has long been recommended to me, but it never made its way out of my book queue. I figured this month was as good a time as any to actually finish it.

The book is well-argued. It articulates a demanding form of “analytical” reading to be applied to the close reading of particular books. The authors argue from the point of view of a reader determining, solely from his or her own efforts and without relying on external commentary, what a book means.

On the one hand, it’s hard to fault much of the advice given in the book, which I found beneficial. And it certainly helped me reflect on my own research process which mirrors the “syntopical” reading they discuss near the end.

And yet, through my research over the past few years, I’ve become more inclined to believe in the “knowledge-centric” view of reading competency rather than the “skills-based” view, especially in light of educational evidence that excessive reliance on skills training has pretty sharp diminishing returns and that what students generally need most is more knowledge.


Still, I think Adler and Van Doren’s book is a classic for a reason, and it outlines a useful strategy for tackling books that might otherwise seem too daunting even to consider.

3. How to Read a Paper by Trisha Greenhalgh

I first read this when embarking on my research project for my first book, Ultralearning. While aimed at medical practitioners, the advice in this book is useful to anyone who wants to make sense of, or apply recommendations from, quantitative research.

There’s a danger in becoming halfway educated on a topic and, as someone who is halfway educated about many things, I’m well aware of the risks. It’s all too easy to see a study cited or read a single book and feel like that’s the end of the story on a contentious topic. It rarely is.

Still, I think we live in a media ecosystem which increasingly requires us to understand scientific work in order to evaluate claims in health, education, politics and beyond. In short, we’re all unavoidably doing the kind of amateur research that often backfires into overconfidence in shoddy opinions.

From this perspective, I think Greenhalgh’s book should be mandatory reading for everyone. She outlines the right way to think about published research. As Richard Feynman once remarked, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Knowing how to read a paper cannot substitute for years of study, but perhaps it can help you avoid fooling yourself.

4. Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

A good complement to Willingham’s The Reading Mind, this book, authored by one of the leading neuroscientists in his field, covers the neuroscientific perspective on reading.

It was from this book I learned the surprising fact that nearly all readers, in all languages, read in nearly the same way. I found this surprising because of my time spent learning Chinese, which has a script that seems utterly unrelated to the alphabetic code we use in most European languages.

5. Why Read? by Mark Edmundson

A stirring apologia for the humanities, Why Read? provides perhaps the best rationale I’ve heard for reading more (and better) fiction.

Edmundson is critical of critics, those literary types that tackle a great book with excessive theorizing, close reading, psychoanalysis and other forms of dissection that, to him, serve to show off the analytical skills of the reader rather than the purpose of great literature. And what is the point of reading great literature? To be changed by it. To have the themes and descriptions give you tools for deciding how to live. This sort of explanation would have caused me to raise my eyebrows not too long ago. Wouldn’t it be easier to read philosophy, which directly tackles such questions, rather than an entertaining work that merely reaches them obliquely? The idea that someone could read The Iliad and derive from it a way of life borders upon the absurd. (The epic, you shall recall, begins with Achilles’ temper tantrum over the forfeiture of his war-won sex slave.)

Yet, I think Edmundson did a good job arguing his point. Stories are felt in ways that arguments are not. Reading The Count of Monte Cristo in my youth did more to shape my feelings about the idea of committing to a long and patient plan than any rational analysis about such an approach did.

Therefore, while I think direct instruction and books that plainly tackle one’s questions are the best way to answer them, I think good literature and philosophy can help you ask better questions of your life in the first place. For that, they deserve a place in your library for more than mere entertainment.

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That’s it for this month. Next month, my focus is shifting to Outreach, the first foundation for maintaining and building connections with more people. I’ll share some thoughts on that in the next update!

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P.S. – Quick Update on Fitness

I decided to redo my original fitness test from ~5 months ago. Some progress:

• 1.5 mile run test. Original: 11 minutes. Now: 9 minutes, 20 seconds. (Estimated VO2 max: 47.4 → 55.3 mL/kg*min.)
• Consecutive pull-ups. Original: 3. Now: 10.
• Consecutive push-ups. Original: 24. Now: 49.