The People Who Don’t Read Books

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

The Atlantic

My summary of the article

1. What could not reading books lead to?

   abysmally ill-informed, maliciously incompetent, and morally bankrupt.

2. We have never before had access to so many perspectives, ideas, and information. Much of it is fleetingly interesting but ultimately inconsequential - not to be confused with expertise, let alone wisdom.

3. Many books should not have been published, and writing one is an excruciating process full of failure. But

   when a book succeeds, even partially, it represents a level of concentration and refinement - a mastery of subject and style strengthened through patience and clarified in revision - that cannot be equaled.

   Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader - those precious slow hours of deep focus - is also a virtue.

4. Late in Anna Karenina, in a period of self-imposed social exile in Italy, Anna and her lover, Vronsky, are treated to a tirade on the destructive superficiality of the “free-thinking” young men - proto-disrupters, if you will - who populate the era and have been steeped in “ideas of negation.”

   “In former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought,” Vronsky’s friend Golenishchev observes. “But now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities.” The problem then, as Tolstoy presents it, was that such an ambitious young man would try, “as he’s no fool, to educate himself,” and so would turn to “the magazines” instead of “to the classics and theologians and tragedians and historians and philosophers, and, you know, all the intellectual work that came in his way.”

5. Conventional forms of learning sometimes get outlandish contempt from our own era’s brashest and most lavishly rewarded young men. They share with previous freethinkers a prideful refusal to believe that the past has something to offer them. Like the freethinkers that provoke Golenishchev’s scorn, these autodidacts now embed themselves in a worldview in which “the old creeds do not even furnish matter for discussion,” as Golenishchev puts it.

6. We have grown wildly estranged from genuine wisdom or the humility with which erudition tempers facile notions of invincibility.

7. The quote “You could fill a book with all I know, but with all I don’t know, you could fill a library” is a helpful visualization, perhaps the most basic and pragmatic justification for deep reading. And though correlation is not causation, I submit that we’d save ourselves an enormous amount of trouble in the future if we’d agree to a simple litmus test: Immediately disregard anyone in the business of selling a vision who proudly proclaims they hate reading.