10 Lessons I Learned Reading 172 Books in 2020
Before anything went down in 2020, I decided enough was enough, I am going to read all of my books in one year. I wanted to do this because I had books I hadn’t touched for a decade. What was I doing with them still unread? I felt ashamed of them, and I wanted the closure of finishing a job I started long ago.
It was a daunting task, since it meant I needed to read 300 books, but I did some quick calculations. The average book is 100,000 words and I read around 300 words per minute. That gave me 30,000,000 words to read. I boiled everything down to what ended up being 4.5 hours of reading a day to achieve my goal. I figured I would do this by eliminating every spare minute I spent browsing my phone, watching TV, or playing games, and use that time to read.
Two 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch gave me an hour of reading time at work. I figured I could read more on weekends, about 16 hours if I maximized all of my spare time, and given my extra hour from work, I only needed to read a couple of hours each evening; less if I read faster.
Needless to say, I was hyped to finally read all of my books because I thought it was achievable. The hype gave me the energy to work at my goal, and the extra bonus would be developing the discipline of eliminating distractions in pursuit of a single goal.
Even though I ultimately failed to read 300 books in a year, I still read 172, and that’s with taking the last few months of the year off. By quarter four of the year, I figured out what I wanted to do with my life (learn to code) and so I stopped reading and pursued my new goal in earnest without any feeling of guilt. After all, I had already broken my record for most books read in a year, and I had only myself to answer to. Here are some of the lessons I learned reading so many books.
1. Your book appetite is bigger than your book stomach.
It’s easy to accumulate books and hard to read them. I had amassed more books than I could read in many years (assuming I’d read them slowly and carefully) and I kept buying more. There’s nothing wrong with reading a lot, but you need to be careful about how you choose to spend your book time. I ended up failing my goal because it was too big because my reading appetite grew out of control. Many of my books were well over 100,000 words. As hard as I tried, I could not read 1,000 page books in a day, and I own over 70 such books.
2. If you feel inspired to read something, read it immediately.
The year before I did my reading challenge I listened to Yale’s free online Civil War course by Professor Blight while I drove to work. It inflamed my desire to read Civil War books, and as a result, I picked up a dozen books at a local used book store. When I got home, I put them on my book shelf and proceeded to ignore them because I had other books I was getting through. This was a huge mistake. By the time I started to read those books, almost a year later, I lost all desire to read about the Civil War. I had finished listening to the course months before, and the passion I once had died down, perhaps forever.
I should have started reading those books the moment I got home with them, but I had developed a habit of getting excited about a book, going out and getting it, and then shelving it because I would always think, “I own that book now, so I have plenty of time to get to it later, let me finish this other book I’m working on.”
This is like seeing a long, highly acclaimed film on Netflix, adding it to your watchlist, but opting for shorter mind candy every time you want to watch a movie. By the time you feel like watching the bookmarked film, it’s gone from Netflix. In the same way when you finally get around to reading an old book you bought years ago, one you felt strongly about when you first got it, you may feel so numb toward it that you may as well have never bothered to buy it to read at all.
So, please, please read an author or a title the moment you feel inspired to, even if you don’t finish the book or your mood turns sour once you get into it. That’s far better of a choice than never getting around to it. In a similar token, play through your Steam library of games you bought and never touched.
3. Speed reading is not for everyone.
For some, sure, speed reading is fine and dandy, if you can remember what you read and you still understood it the same as if you slowed down. For me, I understand and remember more when I slow down. It simply isn’t worth it to read a lot but forget what you read. When I was trying to “get through” books I was wasting my time. I would speed up my reading and lose track of what was happening or what important points were being made. I had such a time urgency to keep churning through books that I was digging a book grave of lost knowledge. It’s better to stop a book, maybe even throw it away, then speed read your way to the end so you can get to the next one.
4. Reading is mostly a pastime.
Learning is not the same as being taught. When I read a history book, I learn (and usually forget), when I read a book on grammar, I am taught better grammar, and when I practice, I get better at grammar. Many books are interesting in the same way a good show or movie is interesting. If you think reading a lot will make you a wise and interesting person, think again. Studying what you read will make you wiser and more interesting, because you will have absorbed the lessons from the book and have the memory to discuss it at length. But don’t try and learn from every book you come across, many of them are only as good as entertainment.
5. You cannot rush reading.
This point bears repeating, there is no point in hurrying a book. You can’t cheat your way to book knowledge in the same way you can’t cheat a workout and get super fit.
6. The best writers (to me) are those who write clear.
I read Les Miserables and Wuthering Heights. The former was highly enjoyable and easy to understand, but still deep and interesting. The latter was difficult, and many times impenetrable, and I remember little from it other than the difficulty. It would require close reading, rereading, studying, and notetaking to plumb the depths. I don’t feel like doing it. The more books I read, the more I got tired of authors who were purposely obtuse or sophisticated (looking at you Henry James). I believe it is the duty of the writer to make their sentences clear. A book can be clear and still an all-time great.
7. Biographies are mostly disappointing.
I read a bio on Evelyn Waugh, and I guess I was hoping it would be a literary study of his work as a whole and how it related to his life, or vice versa. Instead, it was bland, featuring many pointless bits of info on his life and times. Not that I haven’t read good biographies, I’ve read several great ones, like on Nietzsche and Kant; but I read a biography because I am curious why and how so-and-so is memorable, or how they became an important figure of history, and how they dealt with their era. I’m sure there are many biographies like this, but I find them rare.
8. You don’t have to like great authors because they’re considered great.
Or, someone you like and respect loves a particular author. For example, take Henry James. I’ve read Leon Edel’s condensed biography (still 1000 pages) on him, I’ve read half of James’s works, many of his short stories, and I don’t like the guy. I also fall into the camp of preferring his early works over his later masterpieces. I forget who said it, it may have been Zola, but a French author had criticized Henry on his lack of realism, on the lack of grittiness in his novels. I agreed with the criticism. I no longer find Henry James’ works appealing, and, for that matter, Evelyn Waugh’s works. I’ve read almost everything by Waugh and I think I’ve only enjoyed two of his novels. Take it from me, you can’t force yourself to like something because others think its great.
9. The more I read books about history, or from history, such as old novels, the more I began to crave good literature about my own time.
I used to be snobbish about contemporary novels, but a lot of the great authors I admire were steeped in the latest novels of their own time. In the future I aim to find some novels that are recent. My desire is to better understand the perspective of others who have lived through the same era as me. It’s like being able to live multiple lives in my own time. This lesson was the most unexpected for me because I was close-minded here. No more!
10. I prefer novelists who have had interesting lives, or wide experiences.
For example, one reason why I kind of dislike Henry James, is because he was a bachelor for life. He wrote about love and marriage and children and all that, but he himself never had a wife or kids. Since I’ve had the life experiences of marriage and raising a child, I find I can’t take him seriously as one who has lived the full human experience. Charles Dickens is much more interesting in that respect, he had a difficult and mundane job in his youth, he had physical pains and problems (had an operation on a fistula without any painkillers, can you imagine!), he had many children (and had a little room separate from his house for him to work in. I can totally relate Charles, I got nothing done during quarantine with my family), he had a marriage that turned sour, he was involved in a tragic train accident and helped people who were dying, he read his Christmas novellas to the public, and so much more.
In Conclusion
Do what thou wilt when it comes to reading books, but at least get them read and take the time to get something from what you’re reading. After all, there must have been some reason why you bought or borrowed that book. Was it referenced by someone you like? Did you get it on a whim because it was an old paperback and you love hunting for obscure treasures at library sales?
Think back on why you wanted to read something. Probe your motivations and decide where they are coming from. Many of my 172 books were collected because I thought I was going to be a high school history teacher (a now failed chapter in my life). And while I gained a lot of closure when I was reading through them, the feeling of closure didn’t last long. So, looking back, I wish I had stopped reading many of the books that became a slog. The number one lesson, one I will gift to readers who didn’t skim the 10 lessons but read this to the end, is this: learn how to know when to put the book down.
