Read what you love
Ficciones by Jorge Jorge Luis Borges is a collection of short stories containing a broad spectrum of themes ranging from sci-fi to philosophy. It is clear that books and films following its publication in 1962 have taken direct inspiration from the worlds Borges creates in only a few pages. Inception is undoubtedly inspired by one short story, The Circular Ruins, which introduces the notion of dreams within dreams. People claim to have read Ficciones’ short stories, but, as far as I can tell, few people understand them.
I’ve had this experience with Yuval Noah Harari’s work. Judging by the recommendations and volume of people I saw posting a copy of Sapiens to their Instagram stories, I assumed that Harari must be dishing out some sort of magic formula to happiness, or success, or wealth. However, I found myself starting from the first page over and over again. This routine carried on for about a year as I stumbled to the halfway point of the book.
Since I found the first half of the book sufficiently challenging, I thought I was qualified to recommend Sapiens to friends. Maybe they’d also struggle through the book and would consequently resonate with my perception of “intellect”.
A few months later, some of these people reported back to me that they had not only fully read Sapiens, but also Harari’s other work on top of various academic articles and interviews on the history of humankind. This was far from beneficial for my ego.
However, in the years following, I realise that nobody had really read Sapiens to the point where they fully understand it. As time goes on, you become more confident in (1) not reading for the sake of reading, and (2) continuing to read even if you don’t understand something.
I still haven’t read Sapiens to completion, but I have read those bits which interest me most – The Unification of Humankind and The Scientific Revolution – and did read those sections with the aim of understanding them. I skimmed and skipped the bits that weren’t as interesting to me.
Although a fiction book masquerading as a philosophy book, The Glass Bead game is extremely similar. Lots of my fiction-reading friends own it and have claimed to have read it, but few of them have understood it. I’m also one of those people.
Does simply owning a “complex book” make us intelligent? Similarly, does speeding through one of these books while failing to understand its teachings make us intelligent?
Aiming at less than 100 solid books. Anything beyond that is madness.
(@illacertus, 2016)
As I’ve gotten older, this is a quote that I resonate more and more with. Our brains can only contain a finite amount of information. We also forget information quickly, often without us realising that the knowledge we have so carefully collected has decayed away in the night.
If you read mainly fiction for pleasure, then I guess that this point is irrelevant. But, if you read for knowledge and information to apply to your personal life, then what’s the point in reading just for the sake of reading?
So, it makes sense to cultivate your own personal library of books, blogs, articles, and authors that you resonate with most, and revisit them on a regular basis.
These days, I mainly read things related to philosophy, startups/business, and tech – to satisfy my own intellectual curiosity.
Adeel Hasan 