Since childhood I’ve been swinging a hammer, and have often felt the pain of slamming my thumb. And I know the pain of pounding that same thumb several more times in the same day (youwzah!). See building houses is in my roots, it’s in my blood. And I have the scars to prove it. One little mark reminds me of the time I shot a pneumatic framing nail completely through my ring finger (through flesh and bone). But it wasn’t all pain and blood. I can also tell you wonderful stories of learning from my father as I watched him build and create.

Long before I was trusted with a pneumatic nailer, my father taught me the proper setting of a framing nail. The process isn’t complicated. With the left hand you hold the nail steady and with the right hand you tap the head of the nail a few times, just enough so the nail will stand on its own. Then once the nail is set, you move your left hand out of the way and pound and sink the nail down with a few mighty swings. (Or, if you miss hitting the nail head squarely, it shoots across the room like a bullet).

Reading is a lot like setting a nail. As your eye scans back-and-forth across a page, streams of information pours out quickly and you have just enough time to tap those concepts into the surface of your brain. But if we read too fast we fail to comprehend deeply, and those nails will not hold and they will eventually fall out and be forgotten.

If setting a nail is likened to superficial comprehension that happens while we read, sinking nails tightly can be likened to the slow discussion of books with others. Here we slow our minds, we focus our thoughts, we express our understanding of our reading and we are shaped by others as we shape one another. Our minds slow and focus and allow us to sink a few of those nails tight.

But you cannot sink every nail. A good reading group will determine which of the few nails to drive tight. And the group can decide which nails to leave loose. But choose carefully. It’s the ideas and passages from books that are discussed most carefully with friends that are sunk the furthest, and those sunk the furthest are the ones you will carry the longest—likely for the remainder of your life.

It is true that reading is mostly a solitary task, and a very important one. Comprehension, on the other hand, is a community project. Which is why scholars, those experts in the art of comprehension, include lengthy bibliographies in the back of their books and order those books by name. Every scholar—every honest scholar at least—acknowledges the importance of learning from others. And they’re happy to acknowledge it.

It’s the average reader that needs persuasion about the importance of reading in community. And I am convinced that we forget so much of what we read not because we are poor readers (although this certainly could be the cause); rather, I believe we forget so much of what we read because we are selfish readers. And we all suffer for it.

Literacy and good books provide us the nails, disciplined reading sets the nails, and our community helps to sink those nails.

“There is so much to be gained from reading, but my call is not merely for Christians to read, but to read more, to read more broadly, to read more broadly together.

Reading more makes reading easier. The more material you have been exposed to, the more you will be capable of reading. We need a grid on which to hang facts and perceptions. Reading gives us categories, and the more categories we have, and (what is more important) the more solidly these categories are fixed in our minds, the more we will be able to glean from what we read and experience.

Reading more broadly keeps us from getting into ruts. Narrow reading makes the world itself seem narrow. Broad reading reminds us that the world is enormous. It also allows us to see the same thing from different points of view.…

Reading broadly together will keep me from always being on a new crusade to the bewilderment of Christian friends. The Christian purpose of all of this reading is to glorify God. Reading alone may do this, but when we become passionate about an issue, it is nice to have company. When we have seen things rightly, others can support us. When we have missed the mark, they can correct us. It is gratifying, however, when the new viewpoint which seemed so exciting to me is adopted by the others. When I make a new discovery, it will often seem implausible for the simple fact that no one around me sees what I now see. If friends travel the same road, all is different. Those of my readers who have come to Reformation convictions understand this, if they have been lucky enough to have fellow travelers.”

—Rick Ritchie, “The Well-Read Christian: Why Bible-Lovers Should Be Bibliophiles” in Modern Reformation (July/August Vol. 3 No. 4 1994; pp 18-23).

HT: JT

Some original, famous, and counter-intuitive advice on reading comes to us from the 18th century writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson (1709—1784).

For example: It was never his practice to read books from cover-to-cover. And only a few books were worthy enough to be read completely, meaning, after reading to the end he returned to the beginning to read the first half he originally skipped. Advice like this is uniquely Johnson. So I’ve collected a few choice excerpts, mostly borrowed from James Boswell’s, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Everyman’s Library 1906).

Enjoy:

“Idleness is a disease which must be combated; but I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” [Boswell 270]

“What is read with delight is commonly retained, because pleasure always secures attention but the books which are consulted by occasional necessity, and perused with impatience, seldom leave any traces on the mind.” [The Idler #74 (September 15, 1759)]

Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON: “I have looked into it.” “What,” said Elphinston, “have you not read it through?” Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, “No, Sir, do you read books through?” [Boswell 462]

Friday, April 7, I dined with him at a Tavern, with a numerous company. JOHNSON. “I have been reading Twiss’s Travels in Spain, which are just come out. They are as good as the first book of travels that you will take up. They are as good as those of Keysler or Blainville; nay, as Addison’s, if you except the learning. They are not so good as Brydone’s, but they are better than Pococke’s. I have not, indeed, cut the leaves yet; but I have read in them where the pages are open, and I do not suppose that what is in the pages which are closed is worse than what is in the open pages.” [Boswell 542]

Walter Jackson Bate: “His equivalent of a library was, of course, his father’s bookshop. Balked by the school procedure from reading either for substance or even for style in any genuine sense, his immense curiosity found outlet in independent dipping into books and skimming them. And his habit of instantly ‘relating’ one thing to another, which Mrs. Thrale rightly thought one of the secrets of his mental superiority, enabled him to get a point quickly, to see its ramifications, and to anchor it to a growing corpus of general thought that was imaginatively and fertilely alive. Here, in this kind of reading, simply because it was done without deliberate purpose, and not confined within a conscious program or demand, the inner protest and instinctive mulishness declined, though it did not completely disappear. For this sort of reading could be viewed as a kind of escape. It could hardly be called ‘work.’ Even so, a certain mulishness remained… This appears, for example, in his growing habit of not finishing books. Later, as if to make a virtue of necessity (since the habit was to become thoroughly ingrained in him), he enjoyed starling others—particularly pedestrian and solemn scholars (just as he enjoyed startling snobbery of any kind)—by flaunting his inability to ‘read books through.’” [Samuel Johnson (Counterpoint 1998), 34—35]

He said that for general improvement, a man should read whatever his immediate inclination prompts him to; though, to be sure, if a man has a science to learn, he must regularly and resolutely advance. He added, “what we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.” He told us, he read Fielding’s Amelia through without stopping. He said, ‘if a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it, to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination.” [Boswell 656]

Dr. Johnson advised me to-day to have as many books about me as I could; that I might read upon any subject upon which I had a desire for instruction at the time. “What you read then,” (said he,) “you will remember; but if you have not a book immediately ready, and the subject moulds in your mind, it is a chance if you have again a desire to study it.” He added, “If a man never has an eager desire for instruction, he shall prescribe a task for himself. But it is better when a man reads from immediate inclination.” [Boswell 766]

In the morning of Tuesday, June 15, while we sat at Dr. Adams’s, we talked of a printed letter from the Reverend Herbert Croft to a young gentleman who had been his pupil, in which he advised him to read to the end of whatever books he should begin to read. JOHNSON. “This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep to them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?” [Boswell 1154—1155]

HT:AM