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Anonymous
Two considerations about reading and writers 2017-02-01 10:23:32 Post No.
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Two considerations about reading and writers 2017-02-01 10:23:32 Post No.
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>Extensive reading vs. Intensive reading
I notice that many people are worried about the number of books they read a year, instead of how much they absorb from it.
The invention of printing, and later on the magical invention of cheapness in the book market, made it possible for common people like you and me to have hundreds and hundreds of books upon their shelves. All of this gives a great feeling of owning to oneself the whole of the Western Canon, and makes one wish to peruse it from Homer to Lobo Antunes without ever skipping a single author. I know this feeling, and I often end up reading more books than I should, specially if I'm on vacations.
However, one should know this: it does not matter how much you read, but rather how much you get from it. Thus, Dante didn't read Aristotle's Poetics, but he got so much from the writers he did read that it made no difference for him whatsoever.
Same applies for the speed of reading. Many people don't know it, but the great men of the Ancient world probably read more slowly than we do. The reason is quite simple: writing, at the time, was extremely rustic, and ortographic techniques such as punctuation, spacing, and lower-case letters were actually invented during the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, during the time of Charlemagne. Not only that, but all copies were manuscripts, which meant one had even more difficulty in reading them. In other words: simply passing your eyes over the page and reading the words was harder to do back then.
Even during the start of the modern age, when reading became easier, most great people didn't read as extensively as we do. Spinoza, for instance, only had 161 books on his library, according to the auction made after his death. Sure, he read many books which he didn't own, and maybe he sold some, but he probably didn't read 1000 books like the average GoodReads user does.
From looking at Mary Shelley reading list I conclude that, in 1820, she read at most 68 books, eleven out of which were plays that today would fit in a single volume. I don't have the actual numbers right now as I didn't save them, but I remember the average was something like 45 pages a day. Notice that those readings are probably not all complete - if she writers on her diary 'I read some Milton today' that doesn't mean she read the whole book - so the estimatives are actually generous to her.
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>it is necessary to read in the original and the writer needs to be a polyglot
Not at all, my friends! In fact, the vast majority of great writers - not only novelists, but poets too - usually read in just some two or three languages. I will give examples:
In Spinoza's own library, we have almost only Latin and Spanish books. That doesn't mean he didn't know other languages well - he spoke Dutch, after all -, but it means he wrote what he wrote without reading stuff from too many languages. His books in Hebrew, for instance, were but three.
In the library of the great Yeats we find that he almost only read English works. Out of 2,284 books catalogued, a surprisingly small amount is written in foreign languages. We see that he knew French, but probably didn't read too much of it, and his Flaubert was in translation. With Italian he seems to have struggled a bit, because, although he has Italian books, most of his Dante seems to be in English. His Virgil and his Homer were in English too.
With Fernando Pessoa, we see that he read Portuguese, English, and French. As all Portuguese speakers, he also read Spanish, and he has Dante in the original (easy to learn when you know Portuguese). His knowledge of classics such as a Virgil and Homer, however, was based on English translations.
Moral of the story: you don't need to know English, French, Italian, German, Greek and Latin. Knowing two or three foreing languages is already more than enough.
Yeats' Flaubert: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/WilliamButlerYeats&deepsearch=flaubert
Library of Yeats: https://www.librarything.com/profile/WilliamButlerYeats
Library of Spinoza: http://ladrondespinoza.blogspot.com.br/
Shelley's reading list: https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/MShelley/readalph
Pessoa's library: http://casafernandopessoa.cm-lisboa.pt/bdigital/index/aut/index.htm
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nice reminder, like the references to Shelley and Spinoza.
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>>9049001
You're wrong.
Reading inclusively instead of exclusively and broadening your scope allows you more tools as a reader and writer. Only a weak critical thinker would have the mental gymnastics to defend narrow reading.
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>>9049001
I absolutely agree with you. 2016 was this decade's year that I read less, 6 books in total, and the absorption from each and every one of them was much greater than the years before.
Usually, I would read between 25 and 40 books a year, in a great state of pressure i'd put myself on, most of them non-fiction, and now I can only remember them if I see them on my shelf or if I go through my list of books I read.
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Ty for quality post OP. Even if people disagree with your notions, it's still a thoughtful contribution
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>>9049050
You don't need all the tools in the world. Homer, Plato, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Whitman, Pound and Joyce will probably give you tools enough.
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>>9049001
While I agree that mindlessly consuming as many books as possible is stupid, I don't think we can expect to find a worthwhile takeway in every book we read. Just now I tried to remember all the books I read last year. I read 24 but could only remember about 12 of them, only 6 of which I would say made a deep impact on me. I definitely don't regret reading most of those that I don't remember, I found something in them at the time.
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>>9049234
That's the importance of being selective. If you browse through the libraries I have posted, you are going to see all of their books, or at least the vast majority of them, were classics.
One shouldn't waste one's time reading deeply into cheap writing, or even cheap literature. The only excuse is if you're reading it in order to do something else - as when you read a tourist guide before visiting a country.
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>>9049254
But we have to trudge through a lot of shit to find the good stuff. I know in my case that some of the best books I've read are the ones I had no expectation of at all, and often the ones I had the highest hopes for turned out to be the worst
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>>9049329
Their libraries aren't big.
They don't read too extensively.
By extensively I mean around 100 books a year, which is what meany people strive to read in literary forums I've been to. If you go on GoodReads, it's not uncommon for people to have read 1000-5000 books. The most common goal is 52, though - one a week.
Assuming Yeats had read his whole library during the last 50 years of his life (probably he hadn't), that's less than 50 books a year.
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>>9049001
I agree. I read very slowly, but I feel that if I try to speed up then I'm not really absorbing what I'm reading. I've had to train my brain to not try to speed up, and I've also realized that if I try to hard then it doesn't help me read faster and absorb more, it makes me frozen and unable to move across the page with my eyes from exhaustion. So I have to find a happy medium so I can just relax, absorb as much as possible. I've always been a very slow reader, but I don't know how I could absorb the works that I'm reading down to every detail that I'm able to understand otherwise.
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