Reading for fun
Why you should read
You read for work. You read for school.
Why not read for the heck of it? Reading-for-the-heck-of-it, is the kind of reading I am referring to in the rest of this essay.
Reading for leisure is experiential, not transactional. Emotional gain trumps informational gain.
Reading is the original isekai. The best way to stop thinking about my own problems is hearing someone else’s.
Books are primitive mind-reading technology, the closest thing to a Pensieve, someone’s intellectual and emotional imprint laid on dead tree skin.
What if I could meet an interesting stranger, hear their life story? With books you can do that.
This form of reading is ephemeral. I catch fleeting glimpses of worlds that fade away. There is a locality to it, like an art gallery, I experience it fully in the moment that I am reading, but forget it quickly afterwards.
And that’s okay.
For a long time I felt guilty for not always annotating, highlighting, note taking, maximizing the time/energy spent on reading. My failure to reverse entropy staring me dead in the fce.
Now I embrace the impermanence. [1] Like an orchestra or the opera [2], the experience itself is worth it, don’t have to point to direct artifact (review, essay) etc to justify the read through
This is why I read. Because books call to me. And I drown in them.
What you should read
I have no idea. Whatever captures your attention.
The right one will pull you in and keep you wanting in a way that almost nothing else can match.
I don’t force myself to finish books.
I mostly read fiction.
When I’m reading well written fiction I embody the characters. I don’t go out of my way to empathize; it’s a emergent consequence of being deeply invested in the inner lives.
Reading fiction is a deeply emotional journey, and yet, paradoxically, I remember very little of this journey. To some degree, the same is true for many of the personally enriching experiences I have had in my life. I may forget the episodic or experiential content of such events, canonic or iconic as they may be, without prompting. But they are nonetheless formative experiences with non-linear impact on my life’s trajectory. To forget is not to lose. (We are simply LSTMs.)
Well-written, narrative non-fiction also hits. Think Harari for History, Mukherjee for Biology. The danger with such narratives is their one-sidedness and reiteration of some central mantra through numerous anecdotes.
All to say - just read what you feel like reading.
And it’s okay if you don’t take notes, or can’t point to some concrete value you derived from the experience.
Appendix
[1] Upon prompting, I’m able to tap into my latent knowledge from the book, it’s just I often don’t have pre generated responses on demand. Writing is an effective way to reflect and consolidate this latent knowledge.
[2] I’ve never been to the opera. I just liked the alliteration.