How I read

From Mohn und Gedächtnis, Anselm Kiefer, 2019-2020

1. Sometimes, I read for the pleasure of entering a mental world I hadn’t anticipated; sometimes, I read to be transformed. This essay is about the latter kind of reading.

2. When I want to be transformed, I chase my reading, to use Robin Hanson’s phrase. “Hunting has two main modes: searching and chasing,” Hanson writes. “With searching you look for something to chase. With chasing, in contrast, you have a focus of attention that drives your actions.” Searching is when I’m reading without a clear aim and continue to read even if I’m unsure about what the author is trying to achieve. Chasing is when I have a question I’m pursuing.

3. Chasing makes you more active and critical of what you read. This helps you learn more. As Hanson writes, “search-readers often don’t have a good mental place to put each thing they learn. [...] Chasers, in contrast, always have specific mental places they are trying to fill with what they read, so they better integrate new things they learn with old things they know.” When you chase, you continually ask yourself whether what you are reading “is relevant for your quest, or whether the author actually has anything new or interesting to say.” This means you drop books that don’t advance your understanding about the questions that matter to you, so you can find the books that do answer them and transform your thinking.

4. Of the roughly 300 books I start each year, I finish about 50. I skim a lot. Books are not sacred. I have to be ruthless in saying no to most of them (as well as to many other things in life) so I can spend an appropriate amount of time on the books (etc.) that really do challenge me and push the edges of my thinking. I once spent more than 100 hours thinking about 40 pages from Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations (at the end of serious meditation like that, I often find myself with notes for an essay about the ideas).

5. A surprising amount of the value of reading comes from stopping to think about what I’m taking in. I say surprising because I often feel like I get things right away. But with good writing, this is an illusion: it keeps getting more and more interesting the deeper I process it. As