Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the modern tendency to read many books quickly but without deep understanding, prioritizing quantity over quality.
Joshua Foer points out a significant shift in how we engage with reading in contemporary society. He argues that while we have access to a vast array of books and often read many, we do so without the deep focus and critical analysis that true understanding requires. This trend stems from a cultural pressure to keep pace with the overwhelming amount of information available, leading to a superficial approach to literature that emphasizes the number of books read rather than the richness of the experience with each one.
In practice
In a presentation on the importance of focused reading, this quote can illustrate the need for deep engagement with texts.
We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.
Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear.
I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.
There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.
There's no doubt who was a leader in space after the Apollo Program. Nobody came close to us. And our education system, in science, technology, engineering and math, was at the top of the world. It's no longer there. We're descending rather rapidly.
One of the greatest pleasures of my life has been that I have never stopped learning about Good Cooking and Good Food
LECTURER, n. One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.
Somehow, there is this feeling that women require remedial financial education, and so everything must be dumbed down. The reality is that we all need a lot more education, but guys just go ahead and invest anyway.
Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives
If my books can help children become readers then I feel I have accomplished something important.
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