Reflections After Reading 1000 Books
I’ve been tracking the books I read on Goodreads and I recently crossed over the 1000th mark for books read. It took me about 15 years to read this much, and I still plan on reading a lot more, but now I wish to reflect a little on what all those books have meant to me, what they’ve done for me, but also what they haven’t been able to do.
What They Have Done
Books have given me second natures. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes I wonder if I my observations and thoughts are permanently tinged with the voices of a thousand authors. Things may remind me of something I read, and many times when someone says something I am reminded of a book. I guess this is sort of like how people share memes, or commercials they’ve watched, or popular shows and movies and how the mere mention of them lights up a lot of information at once.
I mull over the distinct lack of a concrete knowable increase in knowledge I would have thought books would’ve given me, but the longer I reflect the deeper the well goes. There’s more humming around in my subconscious than my surface consciousness is aware of. Not only can you discover you remember more than you thought, you start to make weird connections and jumps between books. A flurry of thoughts can emerge but I caution you, it takes time. After all, one does not read hundreds of books without investing considerable time. I have learned how to have the patience to start thinking.
Because of this, I am never bored. I always have too many things to think about; not just daily life goals, work, paying bills, relationships, and entertainment, but ideas, concepts, puzzles, reflections, and interesting side notes and tangents. Sometimes for fun I try to think of a thing I would have to explain through a novel, like the importance of having boundaries. Before I know it my mind is off to the races constructing a plot, characters, setting and scenes. What’s that thing called again? Oh right, the imagination and because of books mine is almost never quiet.
Books continually get me excited about knowledge. I may have read a thousand books, but I will tell you I have barely scratched the surface of what’s out there. I rarely reject a book because I think I have already learned about that thing. Books keep things fresh and stimulating, they never get old (well, maybe if you’re on your 10th Tarzan novel).
What They Haven’t Done
Books didn’t make me smarter and they didn’t make me more interesting to others. For childish reasons those two things were the primary goals when I decided I wanted to be a reader. For one thing, it’s too easy to fall into the education trap that Richard Feynman mentions in his Surely You’re Joking book. The trap is this: we may memorize or think we understand information but if we can’t use it out of context, do we really know it?
Applying knowledge outside of context is extremely difficult. It’s like solving a riddle, except harder because you don’t even know if there is a solution. And no matter how many books I have read, application of knowledge hasn’t gotten easier. I should also mention I still haven’t been able to translate literature into knowledge. For all I know, literature is nothing more than high brow entertainment. I felt like I thoroughly understood John Updike’s very good Rabbit series, but maybe the only thing I ultimately took from it was a slightly better understanding of the Silent generation in their historical context. Surely, one can learn more about culture through literature, right? I guess just as one can learn about culture through television and music, one can read the writings of others to get a sense of their values, their observations, and what they perceive matters.
What I’m getting at here is the more I read, the more I realized I needed to reflect deeply on what I was reading. Knowledge is messier than I originally thought when I was going through school and later, college. I thought knowledge was something you unlocked like increasingly difficult or different levels in a video game. I thought a lot of knowledge needed prerequisites, such as algebra before geometry. But then things didn’t sink in and what did sink in floated to the top again. There is a huge mass of information I consumed from books and haven’t retained or made use of. Even still, I can counterargue this point and say how I am more careful about making judgements and coming to conclusions than I was before book reading. Unless that’s simply maturity with age, but I know I have experienced thousands of instances where I thought one thing, then read something, then realized I didn’t have the whole story. When you have consumed enough experience from others you adopt a kind of second nature.
Reading a lot of books definitely made me reflect on what I was missing from them, what they couldn’t fulfill. For instance, I never got more respect, or a better job, or won arguments on account of reading a lot. To this day my wife still questions even my most well read opinions. It is also extremely difficult and cumbersome to relate something an author said to someone in passing. I can’t explain something as well as the author did, who sat over the page and wrote and rewrote and edited and argued and so forth. That is one of the chief pains of reading, knowing but not being able to tell. Some people seem good at this though. As for me, I have only had success when I am allowed to lecture, but that would require a listener with patience.
Books continue to be an inward and personal thing. Luckily, you can tailor your reading experience to suit whatever tastes you have. I have looked through some of the other heavy readers on Goodreads, and I noticed a lot of people read a ton of graphic novels and young adult fiction. I read neither of those genres, but I have no metric to say my reading of classics, history, literature, and non-fiction is any better or has been more fruitful for me. Ultimately each of us decides how and what they want to read and after a thousand books, I still can’t tell you what my plan is, all I can say is I am drawn to some books and repelled by others.
