Reading Choices

Reading Versus Reviewing

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twitter_reviewerOver the past several years I’ve transitioned from reviewing books simply being my way of remembering books to reviewing being a means of communication and dialogue about books through this blog. Along the way I’ve found that there are at least some aspects of reviewing that are in tension with just plain old reading for fun. A few of these are:

  1. The preference for new books. Reviewing tends to focus on recently published books. I was made aware of this the other day when I remarked that a book from 2009 (!) was an older book. When I was just reading, I paid no attention to these things.
  2. Reading to a deadline. This is particularly so if you request a review copy of a book. Most of the time, publishers hope you will write a review within 60 days. When you are just reading, you can get around to that book whenever you want.
  3. Thinking about the review while you are reading. Actually, I think this makes me a better reader as I am consciously thinking about the flow of the book, how I will summarize, what I want to highlight. I often don’t do these things if I am “just reading.”
  4. The temptation to read and review what people seem to be interested in. It’s fascinating that my most popular review of this past year was on Exposing Myths About Christianity. It wasn’t a bad book by any means but hardly the best I’ve read. Far less popular was my review of The Drama of Ephesians, which I thought a far better book. I just have to remember that I don’t get paid for this so viewer stats really don’t mean much. It’s what I’m interested in and even if just a few find out about a good book, it matters for them.

What all this does is help sharpen the focus of what I am doing. Above all, I am conscious that there are so few books out of the numbers being published that I can actually read in whatever life remains to me. I think about the exhortation of the Apostle Paul in Philippians 4:8:

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

I don’t see this as confined to religious ideas which sometimes can be as untrue, ignoble, corrupted, unlovely, and despicable as any trashy novel. In whatever I read, I try to choose books that explore the good, the true, and the beautiful in life–whether in matters of faith, good science writing, a well-constructed mystery, or a biography of someone who has lived a worthy life. My tastes range across all these categories and more which is why you might encounter a review of a theology work one day and a baseball book the next. One day I’ll review a current book, another day one ten or fifty or a thousand years old.

And that leads to what I’m trying to do in this blog. David Brooks, in The Road to Character (reviewed here) speaks of wanting to initiate a conversation about our moral ecology and about what makes a virtuous life. While I have nothing of the reputation of a Brooks, it is something akin to this that I’ve been trying to do, whether writing about books or my experiences growing up in Youngstown. Along with classic thinkers, I believe that the well-lived life is one lived in pursuit of the good, the true and the beautiful. In what I read, think, and write about, I want to explore the sources of goodness, truth, and beauty, celebrate the various expressions of that, and consider how we might pursue such things together in a civil society.

So, if you are trying to make sense of why I review the stuff I do, both new and old, and what might be behind the other things I write about, this is the best clue I can give you to the methods in my madness!

The Company We Keep

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Some of my companions

Some of my companions

We are formed by the company we keep.

That is a truism we have probably heard in one form or another from our parents or religious teachers from our earliest years. For some of us, the company we keep with God, or whatever we believe is ultimate, is profoundly formative. We can trace how families, friends, and colleagues have shaped our lives. Sometimes, we express regret when someone we know makes poor decisions shaped by ‘bad’ company.

Since all the above is pretty self-apparent, I’m not going to dwell there. Rather, I’d like to think about the company we keep as readers. Do we consider that the books we read (and other sources as well like blogs, social media, and various feeds) may also be forming us as persons in some way? Do we weigh how, consciously or unconsciously, what we read shapes how we see the world, what we value, and how we act? While I do believe that reading choices are a matter of taste to the extent that we enjoy reading different things from one another, I also believe that reading choices are not neutral. Our books may simply reinforce our beliefs and view of the world, could potentially skew our view of reality, or open up the world to us in new ways. Books have the power to enrich our mental life, or feed the “darker angels of our nature”.

This is not an argument for censorship nor for banning books. The same book that could be illuminating for one could be unhelpful for another. I think our speech freedoms, which include the freedom of authors to write what they will, and readers to choose, continue to be worthy of protection. Rather, this is an argument for mindfulness in the choices we make, considering the ways books might form us, just as those with whom we associate.

I don’t want to moralize about how others should make these choices but share some of the things, as best I can understand myself, that shape the company I keep in the books I read.

1. Is this a work that advances the good, the true and the beautiful? In this regard, I’m not looking for polyannish books, with sugary sweet outlooks. Rather, even in the portrayal of the evil and the bad, does it assume a moral universe? Does the book consider the pursuit of truth a worthy pursuit and not something to hold in contempt or cynicism? Is there an excellence of thinking and writing suitable to the genre of the work?

2. Is this a book suitable for the season of life I am in? It is a danger for me to read intellectually challenging books at times when I am mentally and emotionally challenged and cannot really engage their content. I’ve also become more aware that books that may insinuate doubt or despair may not be the best things to read when I am physically depleted or emotionally spent. I’m not saying I avoid such books but rather that I engage them when I have the mental and emotional wherewithal to assess them more objectively.

3.  This said, I want to ask myself if I am listening to voices that will reveal the blind spots in my own thinking or just reading books that reinforce my comfortable way of seeing the world. As a white, male, North American Christian from the Midwest, am I reading women, ethnic minority writers, those of other faiths and political persuasions, those from other parts of the world as well as other parts of the country? I will never understand completely what it is to grow up African-American in this country. But to listen to African-Americans, for example, can engage my imagination to begin in small ways to walk in their shoes and question the unthinking judgments I might be inclined to make. To listen to writers from the Majority World can help me better grasp the impact, for good and ill, that the West has on the rest of the world.

4. I do choose books that I think in one way or another I will enjoy and find life-giving. Particularly in the realm of fiction, I prefer books that are not laced with gratuitous violence, sex, or conspiracies. I personally do not find myself unchanged when I read such material, and that change not for the better. Character development, plot, and the quality of writing matter far more. If a book that I read does not in some way inspire and nourish my pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful in the rest of life when I’ve read it, I feel it a waste of time. Is it a book that will tell me what I already know, or help me explore what I know more deeply in a way that enriches my thinking and enlarges my perspective?

5. C.S. Lewis once counselled reading one old book for every new one we read to avoid the danger of chronological snobbery, our propensity to think that “the new is the true.” I’ve found Socrates, The Bible, Athanasius, Virgil, Boethius, Dante, Milton, and Chesterton as enriching as David McCullough, Anthony Doerr, or N.T. Wright, or even C.S. Lewis! I don’t achieve Lewis’s ratio of old to new but find our Dead Theologians reading group a help in reading older works.

I‘m curious how others think about the influence of reading choices on our character and how you make choices about the “company you keep” in books.

Do You Read Like a Professor…or a Student?

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A friend sent me an article that provoked this question, “Why You Read Like an Expert — and Why Your Students Probably Don’t.” It all comes down to what we do when we first pick up a book. For some of us, if it looks interesting (or is assigned) we turn to page 1 and begin reading. What distinguishes many professors is something called a “sourcing heuristic”–that is they follow a set of practices to assess the source they are considering reading. Many of them will flip over to the back cover, look at what it says about the author, who has endorsed the book, and who has published it. They will flip through the bibliography and look at who they cite (if it is a work of scholarship). They might pull out a smartphone and look search the author’s work–what else have they published, has it been widely reviewed and what did they say.

Why does this matter? It really doesn’t unless you care about the credibility of the author. But in an era where anyone can post something on the internet, or self-publish something that looks professional.

I suspect that some of you used a sourcing heuristic before following my blog. You looked at my “About” page, you Googled me, you looked at my Facebook page or LinkedIn page. You looked at what I’ve reviewed and written about to decide if that was of interest to you and if I had any clue what I was talking about. That’s fine with me–I do the same thing.

What I’ve reflected on is that most “rules of thumb” are not reflected upon but rather develop as we immerse ourselves in whatever disciplines or professions or serious interests we pursue. We learn of the publishers that publish the quality works in this field. We know the leaders or the “stars” and we either read their works or the ones they endorse. We find out who writes helpful reviews in our fields of interests, whether it be medicine or mysteries.

Something else that shapes our sourcing heuristic is our “community of discourse.” We all tend to have people who share our outlooks, our values, our beliefs and our natural inclination is to read the things they are reading.

What this raises for me is that sourcing heuristics can be walls or windows, depending on what our rules of thumb are and how deeply we’ve reflected upon these. Do we listen to important voices outside our fields or to those who hold a different perspective. Do we use sourcing heuristics to find the best of what is written by those in different communities of discourse, not just ours? After all, it doesn’t quite seem fair to read the best of what we like but inferior examples of perspectives that differ or disagree with ours.

The discussion in the article reflected the academic world. What I wondered is whether these folks practice any sort of sourcing heuristic for their more casual reading, if they do any! Does quality of writing matter here? I hope so. I suspect though that the sourcing heuristic that rules generally is that of the favorite author who reliable spins a page-turner.

Have you developed a sourcing heuristic? What are your rules of thumb in deciding whose work to read?

Should I Read This Book?

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Yesterday, I wrote about unfinished books. But it occurs to me that one of the best ways to finish a book is to make good decisions about which books to start in the first place. Particularly, this is an important question if you are buying the book. How does one figure out what to read in the first place? A few thoughts, and I’d be glad to hear how other readers think about this.

1. Many e-books will allow you to download a preview for free. This is usually just the first chapter and no guarantee that the rest of the book will be as good or better. This is “try before you buy.”  This is a good idea if the author, or genre is new to you.

2. Of course, another way to try before you buy is to borrow the book from the library, physically or electronically. It is always a greater disappointment to put down a book you’ve paid good money for.

3. Generally, books you find in the bargain bins are more likely to be ones you will lay down. They are usually there for a good reason!  But there are always those wonderful exceptions. Generally, if a book is selling at or close to retail (unless you are buying it secondhand) that’s an indicator that sales are such that they aren’t trying to unload surplus stock.

4. Are you entering a particularly hectic season of life? If you think you will have to lay a book down unread and then have a hard time picking up the train of thought without re-starting the book, you might do just as well to wait until a time when you can read your way through the book without long interruptions.

5. Why are you interested in reading this book in the first place? If it is simply because everyone is reading this book, or you liked the cover, you might take time exploring the table of contents a bit further or ask yourself, “am I really interested in the history of the American Whig Party?” (my family will get this one!).

. Different seasons of life call for different books.  I might really enjoy a spy thriller or a mystery at the beach or at an airport. I might take an interesting biography or a more serious novel for quiet evenings on a fall getaway. Cold winters’ nights might be a good time to wade through that multi-volume history of the Civil War. The early hours of the day are best for me to read thoughtful books on faith-related subjects. The beginning of spring training or World Series season is always a signal to me to read a good baseball book.

7. I have friends (and some reviewers) whose reading tastes seem close to mine. If they’ve liked a book that I think I’d be interested in, then I feel more assured in picking it up and starting it. Of course, not all the things my friends are interested in are the same as my interests!

Those are a few thoughts. It is not a sin to put down a book. Sometimes we will start out on a book when we are just not ready for it. I’ve come back to books years later that I’ve put down and found that for whatever reason, I’m now ready to read them. And if we gain insight into our book choices through the books we lay down as well as the books we finish, that is valuable.

How do you decide when to buy or read a book?