Read like someone who can afford to forget most of what you read

November 19, 2011 Tony Reinke Douglas Wilson, Reading, Writing

A tip for writers from Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life (Canon Press, 2011), pages 36–37:

We test students right after they read something mostly to ensure that they have in fact read it. From this, many have drawn the erroneous conclusion that the only good that can be extracted from the reading is that which can be displayed on or measured by such a test.

This is wildly inaccurate. Most of the good your reading and education has done for you is not something you can recall at all. . . .

Mark every striking thing that you read. You won’t remember everything you read, and you won’t even remember everything you mark. Nevertheless, it is not a sin to remember some things or to mark them in such a way as to be able to find them again. I use blue highlighters on everything, to such an extent that one of my granddaughters assumed, reasonably enough, that this is what I use whenever I am “coloring.”

But you are not cramming for a test. You are simply marking things because this is a good way to read with your eyes open. You read widely to be shaped, not so that you might be prepared to regurgitate. Read like someone who can afford to forget most of what you read. It does not matter because you are still going to be shaped by it.

Interview on Book Reading

November 3, 2011November 3, 2011 Tony Reinke .Lit!, Books, Reading

By reading his blog and his books over the years I have a deepened respect for my friend Trevin Wax. If you don’t read his blog, you really should take the time to subscribe.

Today Trevin posted an interview with me on the topic of book reading and my new book Lit!. Trevin is an experienced interviewer and asks questions that get directly at important points. He asked questions like these:

What are the different ways one should read a book? Why should certain books be read one way and other books read another way? And how can you tell the difference?
How much time and attention should we give to classic literature?
How have you found classic literature to be spiritually beneficial?
You recommend marking up books. Why?
Name a few novels that you’d recommend Christians consider reading.
How can we read discerningly from Christians in other theological streams?

You can read the full interview here.

A Sobering Reflection from a Lifelong Reader

October 28, 2011October 28, 2011 Tony Reinke Reading

Yesterday afternoon I grabbed Mike Bullmore and interviewed him about reading. My aim was to write an article on how he led his church through a year of reading biographies together, which I did and can be read here. But at one point in our interview he shared the following reflection:

A sobering thing happened to me recently, I looked around at the books on my office bookshelves and I realized I won’t get to read them all. I thought I was going to, and I’m not going to make it. So, that’s alright. But I had this cherished idea that I was going to master all this stuff. And now I realize that I won’t. So you’ve got to be selective anyway.

For a finite book lover like me, that is quite sobering.

Storing and Cashing Book Gold

October 14, 2011October 14, 2011 Tony Reinke .Lit!, Reading

To experience long-term benefit from my book reading I have discovered that I need a keen eye for what’s important on a given page and a good storage system to retain and to later find what I’ve read over the years. These are important practices for any book reader, and it’s a point that A.G. Sertillanges captures well in his book The Intellectual Life (1934). [Note: I rarely quote from the book because it makes me (a blue-collar grunt from Nebraska) appear pretentious, or more so than normal.]

Sertillanges writes:

If we had to trust memory to keep intact and ready for use all that we have come upon or found out in the course of our life of study, it would be perfectly disastrous. Memory is an unreliable servant; it loses things, it buries them, it does not answer at call. We refuse to overload it, to cumber the mind; we prefer liberty of soul to a wealth of unusable ideas. The notebook gets us out of the difficulty. …

To remember the right thing at the right moment would take a degree of self-mastery that no mortal possesses. Here again notebooks and pigeonholes will help us. We must organize our reserves, lodge our savings in the bank where, it is true, they will yield no interest, but where they will at any rate be safe and ready at call. We ourselves shall be the cashiers. (186–187)

Now of course there’s a place for Scripture memorization. We must not forget it! But for all other books his point is a very important one. So in Lit! I devote some ink to briefly explaining the importance of locating golden nuggets of truth on the pages of our books (pages 115–116), the importance of marking the gold (148–149), and then I explain how I use a computer database to store the gold for future use (117–118). I commend these three practices to every reader, whether you prefer printed books or ebooks, and whether you’re an intellectual or just a dufus like me.

Top 10 P.G. Wodehouse Titles

October 7, 2011October 7, 2011 Tony Reinke Douglas Wilson, P.G. Wodehouse, Reading

British humorist P.G. Wodehouse penned close to 100 books in his prolific career. That’s great for him, but it also means I find myself up against the dashed difficult problem of determining where to begin. So to help me navigate the options I contacted the man who introduced me to Wodehouse a number of years back, Douglas Wilson. “As a general rule, the Blandings Castle books and the Jeeves books are the best,” he told me. And then followed that summary with “a rough and ready list” of 10 titles that take the biscuit:

Now that’s a bit more manageable.

Any other Wodehouse fans out there? What are your favorites?

[Note: the character sketches were pinched from this blog.]

Lit! Class Audio

October 1, 2011October 1, 2011 Tony Reinke .Lit!, Reading

Happy October everyone!

As you may recall, back in September I taught a 3-week course on reading at Covenant Life Church and the class content amounted to a very brief adaptation of four chapters from Lit!. There’s never enough time. The audio is now available along with the handout pdfs.

Class 1: A Theology of Books and Reading
58:41 | download mp3 (28.3 MB) | download pdf handout | listen here:

Class 2: Deciding What Book To Read
59:29 | download mp3 (28.7 MB) | download pdf handout | listen here:

Class 3: How To Read A (Nonfiction) Book
52:33 | download mp3 (25.4 MB) | download pdf handout | listen here:

Note: Since teaching this brief class at CovLife I’ve been asked to teach this material in other church settings and at a local college. I’m happy to do that. If you would like to make a request please leave a comment with your email address and I’ll be in touch. Thanks. Tony