If you’ve fallen out of the habit of reading books, you’re certainly not alone. Consider how often posts circulate on social media (itself a big part of the problem) about studies showing a rapid increase in the number of people who don’t even get one book read per year. How best to get back on the literary wagon? You might try going straight for the hard stuff, as it were, by taking on a novel like Moby-Dick. But that, according to the view articulated in the video above by The 48 Laws of Power author Robert Greene, would be like stepping back into the gym after years away and trying to bench press 300 pounds. Rather than starting with Melville’s masterpiece, build your way up to it — but once you get to it, you’ve got to finish it.
“You want to train yourself to finish books, and not constantly be going from one to another to another,” Greene says, and that holds even for those you may not enjoy. “When I read a book that I hate, that is boring, and I make myself read all the way through, I kind of take angry notes about it: God, this is ridiculous, this is so stupid, I hate this, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You can react to the book, you can have a dialogue with it, but you want to be able to have the patience to get through a 400- 500, 600-page book.” To return to the weight-training analogy, a shorter book to start could be “kind of easy, and it could be in a subject that interests you,” but upon finishing it, you should “choose something that’s a little bit difficult and a little bit complicated.”
The idea is deliberately to choose books that challenge you, a quality that doesn’t come from length alone. If one gives you an impression that “it’s not how you feel politically about the world, it’s not how you feel spiritually about the world, it’s something that’s a little bit outside what you would normally encounter,” take it as a sign that you should read it. Approaching the matter from the other direction, Greene also advises not to “just choose things that you think are entertaining and fun, because that’s going to make you lazy, and it’s going to make you weak, and it’s going to make you always look for things that are entertaining, fun, and distracting.” An airport-thriller-heavy diet may work for Malcolm Gladwell, but it’s unlikely to work for you.
As an example of a challenging read, Greene points to any of Robert Caro’s four biographical volumes about U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, one of which runs to well over 1,000 pages. He could also have suggested Caro’s earlier The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, one of those books — alongside not just Moby-Dick, but also the Bible, Ulysses, War and Peace, and even Pride and Prejudice — that even many serious readers only pretend to have made it through, or indeed started. Whatever the material you use, Greene says, “I beg you to train your mind like you train your body, to go through something that’s a little more difficult, a little more challenging, that’s going to take some time for you. That’s the way to develop the habit of wanting to read, and to have the patience to read more books.” No pain, no gain, as the bodybuilders say; bear that in mind when you get to Melville’s distilled course on cetology.
Related content:
20 Books People Pretend to Read (and Now Your Confessions?)
5 Books You Can Read Again .… and Again and Again: Here’s Our Picks, Now Yours
7 Tips for Reading More Books in a Year
The Nature of Human Stupidity Explained by The 48 Laws of Power Author Robert Greene
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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