Category: Writing

I am so puzzled by my own reading habits.

For a start, I read six or seven books at a time. I always have a pile of books by my bedside table, usually from different genres, and I pick which one to read based on my mood.

I don’t read from where the bookmark is, but I flick through the book and start reading whichever page or verse catches my attention.

Very soon, I am looking for a pencil, which I have several in the near vicinity, to underline words or phrases or sometimes whole paragraphs.

I skip paragraphs or sometimes pages, but then there are sentences that I read and reread, until their beauty sink in my soul, leaving me in eternal happiness.

At this point, invariably, I stop reading, close the book and start thinking. Sometimes that thinking leads to writing.

The result is that the book doesn’t get read.

I am envious of my writer buddies, who can read books from cover to cover within a week.

Why can’t I stick with a book, finish it and then move on to the next one?

Do I have attention deficiency?

Am I unique in my approach to reading multiple books, or are there others like me?

The goal of reading determines how you read. 

Reading the latest Danielle Steel novel is not the same as reading Plato.

If you’re reading for entertainment or information, you will read a lot differently than if you are reading to increase understanding.

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.” — Francis Bacon.

While many people are proficient in reading for information and entertainment, very few are willing to improve their ability to read for knowledge.

Mortimer Adler, an American philosopher, educator, and popular author, literally wrote a book on reading — How To Read A Book.

Adler identifies four levels of reading:

1. Elementary Reading
2. Inspectional Reading
3. Analytical Reading
4. Syntopical Reading

Elementary Reading is a basic reading skill taught in elementary schools.

Inspectional Reading involves systematic skimming and superficial reading and gives you the gist of things. Sometimes this is all we want or need.

Analytical Reading is thorough reading.

Syntopical Reading, also known as comparative reading, represents the most demanding and difficult reading of all. It involves reading many books on the same subject and comparing and contrasting the ideas, vocabulary, and arguments.

This task is undertaken by identifying relevant passages, translating the terminology, framing and ordering the questions that need answering, defining the issues, and conversing with the responses.

The goal is not to achieve an overall understanding of any particular book but rather to understand the subject and develop a deep fluency.

This is all about identifying and filling in your knowledge gaps.

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, was well-read, smart, critical, and possessed a tendency to write in a personal tone — with references to and reflections on — his own thoughts and his own life.

Montaigne considered himself a pretty lazy reader. “I leaf through now one book, now another,’ he wrote,’ without order and a plan, by disconnected fragments.”

His only rule in reading was to pursue pleasure. “If I encounter difficulties in reading,’ he wrote, ‘I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there. I do nothing without gaiety.”

Doris Lessing, a British-Zimbabwean novelist, wrote:

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

Patricia Lockwood, an American poet, and essayist have put it this way:

“There’s a way of reading that is like writing. You feel in collaboration… You have a pen in your hand, you’re going along in a way that’s, like, half creating it as you go. And you’re also strip-mining it for anything you can use… you’re sifting for what could be gold.”

I am feeling better now. 

I am not the only one with weird reading habits. A lot of people have different reading habits.

What are your reading habits? Do you start a book and don’t put it down till you have finished it? Or do you read with a pencil in hand and write on the margins.

Or maybe you use one of Adler’s four stages of reading a book.

Drop me a line in the comments section.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Sometimes our writing is not coherent.

It happens to me a lot.

Little insights come in snippets, and don’t matter how much I try; I can’t seem to connect those ideas into one coherent piece.

It frustrates me a lot.

However, over time I have learned to accept it.

One of my writing mentors once told me, “Writing is receiving. Receive as it comes.”

Then I learned about Yoshida Kenkō.

I first read about Yoshida Kenkō in Isabel Huggan’s memoir Belonging.

Isabel Huggan was trying to finish her memoir but was frustrated for not finding a way to organize her work.

In the last month of writing about her life, Huggan stayed in a friend’s house in Tasmania while her friend was away. She thought isolation might help her structure her book. But she kept on struggling for days, not getting any solution to string together a collection of stories from her life.

Then one night, she spotted a book in her host’s bookshelf — Tsurezuregusa (Essays In Idleness) by Yoshida Kenkō — and she found her answer.

Yoshida Kenkō was a Japanese writer and monk of the fourteenth century who wrote the most studied works of medieval Japanese literature.

While working on Tsurezuregusa, he wrote his thoughts in 243 fragments of varying lengths.

Kenkō desperately tried to connect those essays in some coherent manner.

When he couldn’t do that, he just pasted them on the wall of his cottage in frustration.

He followed a random model of the composition called ‘follow the brush’ — a form congenial to Japanese writers and readers who felt it was a “less dishonest” method to present their thought than trying to connect them using fictional elements.

Kenkō didn’t try to impose any pattern on his pure and honest experience. Neither did he try to transform reality. Instead, he left each thought as it is.

Something a relaxed reader finds more enjoyable to follow and appreciate. In moving from one subject to another, a reader can take joy in tracing subtle links between them.

Making patterns is left to the open-minded reader, allowing an infinite number of variations to occur.

“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty, in everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting and gives one feeling there is room for growth and improvement. The impermanence of its state provides a moving framework towards appreciation, towards life.” — Kenkō

Isabel Huggan decided to abandon her futile attempt to connect her stories and follow Kenkō’s method.

Later that same night, awake because of the noise of wind and rain slapping against the glass, Huggan looked around for something else to read.

She found Promises, Promises, a book of essays on literature and psychoanalysis by Adam Phillips. And it confirmed what Kenkō suggested six centuries ago.

In a chapter on clutter, I read how a teenage boy dresses each morning by throwing his clothes in a pile behind him and then picking what he is going to wear with his eyes closed. Clutter invites us to make meaning in the absence of pattern. Clutter tantizes us, lures us into a relationship with material in a way that is far more seductive than discernible order. In clutter, you may not be able to find what you are looking for, but you may find something else instead. Clutter may not be about the way we hide things from ourselves but about the way we make ourselves look for things. It is as if a self-imposed hide-and-seek.

— Adam Phillips

Both authors reached the same conclusion.

Sometimes there is no way to put the pieces together.

“It is typical of the unintelligent man to insist on assembling complete sets of everything. Imperfect sets are better.” — Kenkō

Maybe this is what we need to do as well.

Photo by Joshua Medway on Unsplash

This is what Annie Dillard had asked Alexander Chee’s class (writer of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel). She wanted this to be the standard for their work.

What a great question to test the quality of your work. The ultimate goal to strive for.

When I think of a dying person I think of my mother. I sat by her side the whole night, alone, holding her hand. We didn’t say much because she was drugged, but if she was awake what would I have read her. What would she like to hear?

She would have like to hear stories from her past. Nostalgic stories. Of good days. Maybe of a bad one too. Because they always ended in something good. I have written some of those stories but they wouldn’t have cut it. They lacked emotion and they lacked hope. Writing for a specific reader help bring more life to your writing.

I would have read her Helen Garner’s, The Spare Room, Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie and John Green’s The Fault in our stars.

I would have read her poetry too. Poems she liked and used to recite to me. Then there were songs. Songs I heard her sing when I was a little girl. There is something in songs and poetry. They touch your heart.

She would have enjoyed Dylan Thomas’s poem “Don’t go gentle into that good night.” She was a fighter after all. She fought till her last breath.