“What Does It Mean to Read a Book?”
A Personal History of Reading – Part 3
This week, I wanted to come back and continue talking about my personal history of reading, a topic I have written about here before and for which I received some generous feedback.
To give you a recap, in the first post of the series, I revisited my childhood and teen years and explored some of the key moments (and books) that put me in the direction of establishing a lifelong reading habit.
Continuing with my narrative in my second post, I zoomed in on my college years, which I described not only as a period where I widened my horizon but also as a time at which I look back with regret since I felt (and probably still do) that I haven’t done as much as I could as far as my intellectual development went.
In this third installment, I want to take you back to my time in grad school where the whole idea of what reading meant and what it entailed radically changed for me. It took on a different form, which I didn’t know even existed.
Here is what I mean.
Before grad school, reading was a simple, uncomplicated act. I just picked up a book, started from the beginning, and read it from cover to cover. Of course, during my undergrad, I was assigned specific book chapters or articles, and I read those too (okay, let’s just say I read most of them). But in general, I wouldn’t consider a book read at the time unless I read every single word written in it.
When I started my master’s in the U.K though, it didn’t take too long for me to realize that my habitual reading style would just not cut it. I ran into the classic dilemma of having too many things to read and not enough time, but not in a good way.
Every week, we were assigned a ton of material for each class, consisting mainly of articles and book chapters but also whole books at times. If I stuck to my usual habits and tried to read every word, I would not have time to do anything else.
The problem was that I didn’t have a clue about what else to do. What’s worse, none of us, meaning the people in my cohort, didn’t have any guidance on how to navigate this rather stressful issue, either. We were just thrown into the deep end and told to swim. If we wanted to go through this somehow and (to continue with the metaphor) not drown under all the scholarly material we were told to read for class, we better come up with our own strategies.
And that is what I did, or at least tried to do. To be fair, labeling what I did as a coherent, well-thought-out strategy would be a major overstatement. But then again, if I said I just winged it, it wouldn’t make a good story, would it?
My “strategy” consisted of two parts: 1) I picked and chose what I read, leaning more towards material that I thought may be useful for me further in my academic career. (i.e., history). And 2) since I considered my master’s to be a stepping stone for my PhD, which meant I had to do a good job of it, I started spending an ungodly amount of time in libraries, trying to read the material I chose as thoroughly as possible. In that sense, I still haven’t completely given up my usual style of reading. The time to do that would come later. For now, I was just trying to be more efficient with my choices on what I should read to get the best possible result in a class while also ramping up the time I put into my work.
And lo and behold, it worked. I finished my master’s and graduated with a Distinction. By the time I got the news, though, my master’s was fast receding from my mind because I had more pressing matters to attend to. I had already started my Ph.D. in the U.S. even before I was done putting the finishing touches on my master’s thesis, and this time I definitely had to alter my relationship with what “reading” meant to be able to cope with what was expected of me in my program.
In one of my first meetings with him, my PhD advisor gave me a 30-page bibliography on the history of the Ottoman Empire and told me to pick 15 books from it, which I was supposed to read that semester. This was only for one class. I had two other classes where I was also assigned one book per week, which meant that on average I had two to three books to go through every single week. And this time, contrary to what I did in my master’s, I could not “pick and choose” to my heart’s content, either. Not only was I to read those books, but I was also supposed to write reviews of them, identifying their key arguments, talking about their weaknesses, and all the other kinds of fun stuff that history PhD students generally do.
To say that I was overwhelmed would be a major understatement. I was in panic mode. How the fuck was I supposed to read three books a week and write something on them? It was simply impossible. At least that’s how it seemed to me until I finally learned that the way you read a book as a PhD student was vastly different than the act I mentally coded as reading until that point.
Intentional skimming was the name of the game. I honestly don’t remember where (or whom) I picked it from. My guess is that it got passed on to me, almost through a form of osmosis, from the more experienced members of my grad student cohort. One way or another, though, I started training myself in the art of skimming to pinpoint the key arguments of a book and basically disregard the rest, which was more difficult said than done.
And you didn’t even go through the whole book either. You didn’t have to. The way most academic books are written, you could just read the introduction and conclusion and be familiar with what the book was arguing, the literature where it situated itself, the sources that it used, and its methodology. That was it. That was all you needed. If you wanted, you could also skim the rest to get a sense of what each chapter was about, but that was not mandatory. The main thing to pinpoint was the book’s core argument and its contribution to the literature. If you could do that, you were good to go.
I don’t need to tell you that this was both a revelation and a game-changer for me. Here was a whole new way of reading that I didn’t even know existed. Once I got the hang of it, though, it made perfect sense. Plus, it was the only way to survive my Ph.D. When it came to preparing for my candidacy exam, I had to go through close to 300 books in four distinct fields, and there was no way I could do that if I didn’t know how to read properly, grad school style.
As useful as it was, though, this style of reading also got me into trouble once with my advisor. I wrote a review of a book for him that I read using the strategy that I had just described. I made a rookie mistake, however, and cited page numbers only from the introduction and the conclusion for the points that I had made. Having read it and immediately recognizing how I went through the text, my advisor gave me a "D," something that just doesn’t happen in grad school. Written on it was a single comment: “What does it mean to read a book?”
Until next time!