No, seriously. How did we all come to that narrative, that books are meant to be finished? And if we don’t, then comes the guilt, the self-flagellation, the sense of failure. Because of that defeatism around not finishing books, I started to not want to read books at all, unless I knew beforehand I can and want to finish it. On the other hand, it’s so easy to ‘finish’ reading a social media post, and to have a false sense of productivity after reading a handful. The dopamine hit after hit, from ‘finishing’ post after post on Facebook, is so addictive.
No wonder people don’t read real books anymore.
That’s why it was so mindblowingly refreshing when I heard Naval Rakivant’s way of reading - he doesn’t care to finish, at all. @lukezsmith posted about it recently:
[Naval’s] ‘throwaway’ perspective on books. Like most people treat articles or blog posts, Naval treats books. Start a book and then get bored five minutes later? No problem, skip forward a few chapters to see if it gets better. Still no good? Bin the book.
I love Naval’s nonchalance of not needing to finish books. What I got from him was how he saw books as vehicles for learning, questioning, and for pushing him onwards to explore other ideas that come up as a result of reading a book. He doesn’t finish because sometimes an idea in a book would make him branch out to another book to explore that idea deeper, like falling through the rabbit hole, to see how far it goes. To him, books are for following his curiosity. He thinks finishing it just to be able to say you finished it is a vanity metric at best.
It was deeply humbling to hear him talk about finished books being a vanity metric, because I was complicit in that too. The knowledge gleamed from the book had always felt more like a side quest, and any application in real life more happenstance. But his approach was also so liberating. It made me more aware of why I read and why I should read, and allowed me to feel less guilty if I don’t finish, or if I just sped through some sections which I thought were filler.
Most importantly, books should trigger me to think, to ponder the implications of this new piece of knowledge, to ask questions about its validity, and to springboard from that to more books, more knowledge, more growth.
If learning and growth is my new purpose to reading, then physical books start to feel limited in its form. Because it’s easy to put a physical book away if I only aim to finish. But now, if I aim to learn, I’ll want to take notes and pen down thoughts to specific lines/paragraphs for longer term reference. I’ll want to bounce back and forth between books, and come back to the bookmark where I last ended, when I need to. To do all that, reading digital books on Kindle seems to work better. But I love the immediate visceral enjoyment of holding/reading a physical book.
Feel so conflicted now having to choose between the two formats. To add to that confusion, now audiobooks are coming into the picture - super efficient to ‘read’ through books quickly, but also hard to write notes and bookmark.
Anyone experimented with a way that preserves the visceral feeling of holding and reading a physical book, while being able to jump to the audiobook when needed, while also being able to save notes/bookmarks in its digital version for future reference?