As I’ve written in previous essays, I love reading, but the culture around reading is frankly absurd. People talk about reading non-fiction books is as if they came with superpowers. When you finally drink the Kool-Aid and start your reading journey you’re full of excitement. You’re on track to being genius and all you want is to get there faster. And then you realise that there are others who have been reading for decades. You feel like you’re behind. These people are obviously way closer to being a genius than you so you feel like you have to catch up. You can’t really undo the reading of others so your only option is to read more and to read faster. You begin to rush through books only focused on the numbers. The only metric you care about is total books read.
This kind of belief system leads to what I call ego-reading.1 What is ego-reading you wonder? Well, it’s actually quite similar to ego-lifting.
Ego-lifting in the gym is all about the heavier you lift the better. And you’ll do anything to get there. Usually this involves sacrificing proper form, putting your own health at risk. The goal is to be able to say that you bench/squat/deadlift etc. [INSERT HIGH WEIGHT]. You might not brag about said weight, but it’s about the ability to do so. The motivation for ego-lifting is “saving face” in front of other gym-goers and in front of yourself. You don’t want to be caught lifting a light weight.
With ego-reading the focus is on getting through as many books as possible. So you can say you’ve read [INSERT HIGH NUMBER] books. Maybe you casually drop said number to whoever gives you a listening ear or you never mention it. Maybe it’s just something for yourself. However, part of it can also be a peer pressure element from what you see on YouTube, Substack, Goodreads, etc. Most of the people you see on Goodreads for example, are the top reviewers and they often have read 100s of books. So there’s a pressure to fit in.
Both ego-reading and ego-lifting are about getting results as fast as possible at the sacrifice of actually doing the work.
Some of the core symptoms of ego-reading include:
Being focused on reading as many books as possible
Reading books that you like the idea of having read
Trying to remember everything you have read
Being Focused On Reading as Many Books as Possible
This is what ego-reading is all about. You commonly see this behaviour online, people saying they read 52 books a year, others trying to one-up them by saying they read 69 etc. As if there was linear relationship between number of books read and “success.”2 I always assumed I was immune to this behaviour as I never formally set numeric reading goals. However, I experienced this symptom in a different way. I used to get a massive kick out of finishing a book. Therefore, I was trying to finish every book as fast as possible. Every finished book felt like I was one step closer to becoming “successful.” I was reading books to finish them, not necessarily to understand them. In the most extreme phase of this, I’d sometimes finish a book and start the next one directly after with no break. This behaviour was reinforced by online reading platforms such as Goodreads. Often the first thing I did after finishing a book was marking it as “read.” This was my “did you really go to the gym if you didn't take a selfie” moment.
Reading Books That You Like The Idea of Having Read
Ego-reading isn’t just about the quantity of books, but also about reading a lot of the right kind of books. Blasting through 10 children books a day obviously doesn’t count.
A barrier to starting to read is not really knowing what books you like. So, you start by reading the books that you think you should be reading and that’s not always enjoyable. I started reading pop psychology books because I was studying psychology and I thought “psychology students should definitely be reading pop psychology.” I didn’t like a lot of these books and at this stage almost never read pop psychology books. I’ve heard others gravitate towards lists like: Books That Everyone Should Read At Least Once. Or reading books where you think that having read them makes you seem educated/well-read/intelligent/deep etc.
It’s good if you pick a book you think you should read and hate it because this will actually teach you a lesson. Just because people hype up a book doesn’t mean YOU will like it. The same way you can watch an Oscar-nominated movie and think it’s garbage. Reading a book that everyone seems to love and you dislike, is the best medicine against this symptom. A worse situation to be in is reading books you think you should read and finding them mediocre. You’ll slowly lose your desire to read and wonder what all the fuss was about.
Trying to Remember Everything You Have Read
Hoping to turn into a human encyclopaedia isn’t fundamentally related to the other two symptoms, but it often co-occurs. When I started reading I expected to magically remember all my notes and highlights. However, this is unfortunately completely unrealistic. Yes, you will gain information from books, but you will forget it almost as quickly as you’re “gaining” it. It’s kind of like shovelling sand through a sieve. Most of the contents will flow out the bottom with just a few little pebbles remaining. And even those pebbles will mostly disappear over time. As I wrote in a previous essay:
I made a list of 51 non-fiction books I’ve read over the last 5 years, and it turns out that I cannot recall a single piece of information from 35% of them. Even for the books where I do remember some bits of information, it’s not a lot. After taking a random sample of 5 books and assessing how much I remembered from them, I found it averaged at about one piece of information per 101 pages.
The information we gain from books mostly falls into two categories: the fun-fact category and the wisdom/life lesson category.
Information from the fun-fact category doesn’t help us be better humans or to survive on a deserted island, it’s information we use to impress others. For example, did you know that a sizeable amount of US soldiers in Vietnam were addicted to heroin, but once they returned to America, most of them just quit cold-turkey? If you truly care about fun-facts like this you can make an effort everyday of revising them, but I see little use in trivia unless you’re training to become a Trivia champion.
The information from the wisdom/life lessons category might feel more appealing. But I am sorry to say that merely reading books won’t turn you into Gandalf because “there is a huge difference between reading a lesson and learning a lesson.” The entertainment derived from reading aside, the people that truly gain something positive from reading are those who think critically about information they gain, know what to discard, and then manage to incorporate things into their lives mindfully. This process is pretty straightforward yet incredibly difficult. In fact, reading more might actually make this even more challenging because there’s more information to sieve through. Thinking back to my past 5 years of reading, I struggle to think of any practical day-to-day benefits I have gained from reading. Aside from people perceiving me as more “intelligent” because I read for fun which to me isn’t accurate and therefore not a valid benefit. And getting more references, which again isn’t super useful.
Recently, I watched Jeff Cavaliere’s push-up checklist and it turned out that I had been doing push-ups wrong for years. I was very surprised by how many things can go wrong with something as simple as a push-up. Similarly, things can go wrong with something as simple as reading. One reason why things go wrong is because there are so many societal expectations around working out and reading. If certain people didn’t equate strength with manliness or reading with intelligence, then there wouldn’t be so much ego involved.
My push-up form didn’t instantly become flawless, but I’m working on it. Similarly, it took me a while to stop ego-reading, even after I realised I was doing it, but I got there eventually. As with many things in life, noticing a problem is the first step to solving it.
I am definitely not the first to write about such a concept.
People like to pretend that the relationship between reading and “benefits gained” (whatever that means) is linear. Not all books are perceived equally. There are aphorisms that I have taken more from than entire books I’ve read. There are essays I’ve read that are worth more to me than a good chunk of books I’ve read. There are books that I’ve read that I’d trade for entire bookshops full of books. Also, you can reap benefits from rereading the same book for decades. Think of a nun reading the bible.