How 'Voracious Readers' Miss Out On The Real Benefits Of Reading
How many books are too many to read?
The voracious reader
He wakes up before dawn, he goes to push the coffeemaker button in the dark. With eyes still sticky from sleep, coffee on the nightstand next to him, he starts gobbling up page after page of his current read. He needs to read 55 pages before leaving his house at 9am to go to work. He proudly calls it fast reading, and only reads the first bit of the first paragraph and considers it understood.
He set this goal for himself to read 185 books this year. Since he shared it with his followers on instagram, he feels the pressure to deliver. The need to receive the likes, the comments, the wows holds power over him.
If he’s lucky, he will find some 15 minutes or so after lunch to listen to the summary of another book and check it off as read. That’s the only way to keep up with the 15 books per month challenge. Some books take a little longer than 2 days to finish, some others he chews up in one day. But he has another trick up his sleeve. He listens to some books while walking back from the office or waiting in line at check-out at his local mini market. The stress of keeping up with this challenge is offset by the dopamine rush he feels when his followers praise his ‘incredible’ achievement online.
It doesn’t last more than a few short seconds though, so he’s rapidly motivated to start - and finish - the next book. He lives for that dopamine rush, it’s the blanket solution for an unsatisfactory job he doesn’t have the courage to leave. For an inexistent girlfriend he doesn’t have the energy to meet. For a couple of shallow friendships he doesn’t have the patience to deepen. Dopamine saves him from it all. So he reads. A lot.
People read for many reasons, you probably read for a different reason than I do. But since it got trendy to be a ‘voracious reader’ or a ‘speed reader’, more people chase the vanity metric of having read an impressive number of books per year. Because I think this is where the difference lies. We turned reading on its head: we went from reading to having read. It’s bulimia, but for the brain. For the ‘voracious’ readers, it’s about quantity, not quality.
When I hear the term ‘voracious reader’ I can only think of the American TV show ‘Man vs. food’ in which the protagonist once challenged himself to eat 180 oysters in one sitting, or a two-kilogram steak in one hour. Being voracious is clearly not about the food - or the books.
What does ‘to read’ even mean?
This brings me to a bit of etymology, which I love. ‘To read’ comes from the Old English rǣdan. It’s related to the Dutch raden and the German raten. It means to advise, to guess. The early meaning also included to interpret (a riddle or a dream). So reading is what we do with what we read, it’s interpreting the topic and giving it meaning. It’s not ticking off from a long list of book titles.
To me, a reading challenge is about the ‘reading’ part of the phrase. Not about the challenge part. It’s how much inspiration one gets, the lessons about worlds they would not have known otherwise; about the questions they pose about themselves, about life, or simply about how to make better banana bread.
Three risks of reading too fast (while reading too much)
There is a mirror effect when we read, we see ourselves in the characters we read about. When we gobble up books too fast it’s like putting on a pair of those shoes with a wheel in the heel and sliding past a mirror a little bit too fast. We see just a swoosh of color where our body should have been. There is no time to let the story simmer and reveal something that could add to our life in any way.
Even if what we read does simmer and we do internalize it, we end up having more discoveries to put into practice than we have time for. Because we’re always on to the next book, the next idea, the next discovery. And what is the point of learning so much, so fast, without the chance to put it into practice?
The third risk is the closest one to my heart: there is no time to appreciate the language when reading too fast. I know how many minutes we writers can spend on finding precisely the right phrase. I know how many synonyms we check in search of that one that sparks something inside us as the word we were looking for. Reading fast is like going on an electric scooter through a museum and claiming you’ve seen all the paintings.
One essential skill that reading cultivates in us
Empathy.
Reading fosters empathy. We create mental images with our brains out of the printed words we read, and we manage to feel certain emotions for the people we read about. It can be real-life examples in a nonfiction book about learning to be more productive, or a fictional character in 19th-century Japan. With the help of mental images, we put ourselves in the shoes of completely different people. And if what we read about is similar to our lives, then we learn we are not alone in our experience. Another one has lived it, somewhere on the other side of the planet maybe.
To develop compassion, tolerance and ultimately empathy for someone completely different from us and our worldview - needs time. And when reading fast, wanting to finish that book only to jump to the next one, we rob ourselves of the necessary time to develop that essential life skill.
What is more desirable: to read 6 to 10 books per year and give yourself the time to let them simmer in you? Or to read 72 books in a year, be a bookstagram superstar and get that dopamine rush for about three seconds?
Why do you read - and do you set annual reading challenges?
Excellent … “Reading fast is like going on an electric scooter through a museum and claiming you’ve seen all the paintings.” … such a good way of putting it. And the etymology 👌🏻
Thanks for sharing this article with me Monica. I appreciated getting to see your perspective on this topic and I agree that reading for numbers misses the point. I particularly enjoyed the etymology as I do believe it is important to understand where our words come from.
I will say that I think a person can be a voracious reader and not be focused on numbers. Different people will naturally read at different speeds. Nothing wrong with that. I think the issue becomes when the focus becomes the number of books. Even a person who is a "slow reader" could miss out if they were trying to reach some arbitrary numerical goal without really retaining what they read.