Lying About Books
Tyler Cowen notes that “46% of the surveyed men lie about what they have read — to impress partners — and 33% of the surveyed women admit to lying about their reading habits.”
I have to say that I’m so accustomed to the idea of lying about one’s reading habits that my first thought upon reading this was “what’s wrong with the other 54 percent of men?” Then I wondered if maybe they weren’t just lying about lying. And then I started thinking about how there are plenty of people besides potential hookups who you might want to try to impress by lying about which books you’ve read; indeed, it strikes me as the sort of thing that’s more useful as idle chit-chat than a dating strategy.
I wonder if you see a substantial difference based on educational attainment here. It seems to me that college (at least as we did it at Harvard) largely consists of lessons on how to pretend to have read various books. How many section discussions of British Moralists 1650-1800 (by far the best introduction to the subject!) did I bluff my way through?
104 Responses to “Lying About Books”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
December 14th, 2008 at 10:16 am
I submit that this is one of those blog posts best left unpublished.
What evidence I have seen definitely suggests that bluffing your way through life as an intelligent person is the main thrust of a Harvard education, way beyond lying about books.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Ah this is an excellent thread to ask these questions:
How good is Bertrand Russell’s “The History of Western Philosophy” as an introduction to philosophy for someone who (foolishly) slept through most of his philosophy classes in college?
Are there any introductions to modern philosophy that’ll get me to understand Hegel without turning my brain to mush?
December 14th, 2008 at 10:26 am
From the linked article:
That is the part that boggles my mind.
—–
In a world with tiny bluetooth headphones and cellphones, it’s amazing a robust Cyrano industry hasn’t sprung up.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:28 am
well, willie, i myself have read all of russell’s works.
they’re not that good.
also: hegel? i’ve read every book he wrote. rubbish. all rubbish.
(and i didn’t even have to pay harvard tuition!)
December 14th, 2008 at 10:28 am
I think this underestimates how many people simply don’t read at all. If you don’t read, like (likely) half the population, it doesn’t occur to you to lie about what you don’t read.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:29 am
The best part is when you realize that the people who brought up the book themselves have never read the book. I’ve never read Henry James, but I know enough to know when someone is lying about it.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:29 am
“I submit that this is one of those blog posts best left unpublished.”
I believe that Matthew is rather proud of his ability to talk in a seemingly intelligent manner on topics he actually knows nothing about.
It’s the mission statement of his blog.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:32 am
I slogged through Russell’s “The History of Western Philosophy” the summer after my freshman year at college and I doubt I absorbed even 10% of it. A few years ago, though, I read Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn To Decadence,” which covers some of the same ground — a delightful primer to Western Civ narrated with erudition and charm.
Matt, you really need to read Sean Wilentz’s “The Rise of American Democracy,” even though it will likely takes months to finish. Any so-called political pundit who avoids that book is a charlatan.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I must be dating the wrong women; books don’t impress; Cosmo or Vogue maybe?
December 14th, 2008 at 10:50 am
It’s never occurred to me to lie about what I read. I clearly must either spend too much time reading or not enough time trying to impress women. I guess if you count “trying to discuss what I think of a book without having actually read it” as lying, I have lied, but if asked I’m always upfront about not having read the book in question. It’s just usually the case that I’ve read its Wikipedia article or something else about it, and so I have an idea of what the author discussed in the book. I’m usually more interested in the ideas than the book itself anyway.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:52 am
I slogged through Russell’s “The History of Western Philosophy” the summer after my freshman year at college and I doubt I absorbed even 10% of it. A few years ago, though, I read Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn To Decadence,” which covers some of the same ground — a delightful primer to Western Civ narrated with erudition and charm.
Thanks.
Well I’m halfway through Russell right now and I’ve found it somewhat interesting and very informative. That might be because I knew so little to start with. I’ll check out Barzun. Seems like a great book.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:54 am
When people ask me if I read this blog, I say no.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:55 am
I’ll submit a slightly more positive spin on this practice than simply “lying” about what you’ve read. I think one of the more valuable lessons I learned in college is the ability to extrapolate the meaning of something by skimming it. We live in a world with too much information to actively engage every word of it, so it’s valuable to be able to talk intelligently about something without taking the time to slog all the way through everything we come across, particularly if when you do read, you read slowly, as I do.
Now, if this process leaves you with with a flawed or significantly incomplete understanding of the material than it’s not terribly useful and potentially damaging if you make yourself look like an ass. On the other hand, 99% of discussions about a book aren’t going to require the citing of page numbers. If you can speak intelligently about the central themes and characters of a fiction work or the major arguments of a philosophical work than you’ve gotten the most important information from that work.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:55 am
As long as we’re confessing our sins on a Sunday morning:
By the end of an entire course on Joyce’s Ulysses I had actually read over half of it, including some entire chapters. I think I’ve read more of it than 99.9% of people who claim to have read the damned thing, so lying about reading it is incredibly easy to get away with.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Also, any suggestions on books by or on Rawls?
December 14th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Don’t you think, Matt, that there’s some preemptive insulting going on here? It’s like you’re guarding against people who might actually be better read than you, or something, by impugning on everyone the crime of lying about how much they’ve read. There was a post on Slate’s XX Factor blog last week that was pretty much the same: everyone lies about having read books! Which, I’m sure it’s a pure coincidence, protects the author of the post from ever feeling like she isn’t as well read as someone else. Lame, and in bad faith.
Personally, I have my bookcases divided between books I’ve read and books I’ve haven’t. Some books stay on the latter and never come off. Some on the latter are only cracked about halfway down the spine, so that’s just fail on my part. But some eventually make the way from the latter to the former.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:59 am
You know, the reading load for you liberal arts guys was outrageous when I was in college. I’d take four engineering courses and one history course, and that history course took up half my time. That history course would assign five hundred pages of reading every week. If I took nothing but history courses, I’d be reading four hundred pages a day. No wonder nobody actually did all the reading. Man, math was so much easier. You either got it or didn’t. And no amount of reading would change that.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Russell was a smart reader, an important philosopher in his time, and a good communicator. The book was a best-seller for a good reason no doubt. i wouldn’t encourage reading it now, though. Its flaws that earned criticism then only make it more useless after more than 50 years.
He was addressing a wide audience, which encourages quick, sweeping generalizations that a textbook survey wouldn’t allow, and he was eager to supply them, given the strong point of view of his own work that hasn’t held up terribly well. He also reflected his fascination with philosophy before Descartes, which means less of what a course today would emphasize most, and that stands out more today, since he obviously couldn’t cover what are now mainstream contemporary voices that might well have half a textbook to themselves. Last, he was talking, and it’s hard to experience philosophy except as an argument, meaning through the original texts.
There are lots of good introductions to philosophy. I can’t really recommend one without conflict of interest, as I work for a textbook publisher, but look around. As you look, it may help to know that they are divided by several factors. First, they can be texts (with an author’s voice explaining it all), readers (selections from philosophers, often edited down), and hybrids of the two. Second. they can be organized chronologically, thematically (say, ethics vs philosophy of mind, or ethical theory vs philosophy applied to contemporary ethical problems), or again a mix.
Good luck. I’m a huge believer in not trying to know it all, just to get exposed to a few books in their entirety, let them get you excited, and then read more over time. You could pick a couple of the easier dialogues by Plato, such as the Apology, Protagoras, and Meno. You could try some of the more literary philosophers, such as Nietzsche in one of Walter Kaufmann’s volumes of him or Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling.” You could try the British classics of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume for their common-sense style. Living philosophers are often harder, but you could do worse than Matt’s idol, Richard Rorty.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:07 am
“By the end of an entire course on Joyce’s Ulysses I had actually read over half of it, including some entire chapters.”
That’s actually quite impressive. I’ve been reading Ulysses for fifteen years now. I’m almost finished. It’s a great book, but certainly not an easy read. And you have to read the Odyssey and the Bible a few times while you’re doing it.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I have to add that this is Matt’s second post in barely half a day chortling over some supposed factoid from the social sciences. They mostly just teach one to read the social sciences with suspicion and to think of any and all good scholarship, even or especially in the hard sciences, as emerging not from someone’s stunning paper but from the critical accumulation of work over a little more time.
The study of home ownership will be replaced no doubt by another in six months time, and then will come an even glibber and more counterintuitive take on it all by Malcolm Gladwell, and then Matt and other bloggers will again be in awe. I suggest we return to politics, where the blog has to contribute by arguing for certain convictions coherently.
As for Harvard, I guess either they’re more arrogant than other Ivies, or profs are too lazy to note the obvious as to whether someone actually read a philosopher, or the discussion sections are taken a lot more seriously than precepts were at Princeton, when the lecturer mostly found ways to avoid encountering us and we were graded on papers and exams. But I actually had to learn how to read, and I enjoyed it. Harvard sounds like overly good preparation for blogging.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:11 am
the ability to extrapolate the meaning of something by skimming it.
Yeah that’ll work with Hegel, or even From Dawn to Decadence. I appreciate your honesty but come the revolution when they put me in charge, you’re one of the first to go up against the wall.
Now, lying about music — albums, concerts, opeas etc. — that you’ve never heard, that takes real imagination.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:17 am
http://liginmaclari.blogcu.com/fenerbahce-antalyaspor-macini-canli-izle-fenerbahce-antalyaspor-macini-izle-fenerbahce-antalyaspor-macinin-gollerini-izle-fenerbahce-antalyaspor-macinin-ozeti-fb-antalyaspor-macini-izle-fener-antalyaspor-macini-canli-izle_31122201.html
December 14th, 2008 at 11:19 am
I dunno; I live near Harvard, *and* I’ve lived in DC, *and* I spend too much time trying to impress women. And I’ve still never lied about reading a book (unless we’re counting that equivocal head-wiggle when the professor asks “did everyone read last night’s chapter?”).
Matthew, do you think this – or even fronting in general – is more common in the Harvard crowd than the D.C. crowd? Lately, I find myself explaining to people that, just as everyone in Boston brags about being a Harvard graduate, and expects to be successful, everyone in D.C. brags about clerking for a Justice, and expects to change the world. Even the Republicans I met were world-changers; they just wanted to change the world in a way I thought was dead wrong.
But I’m sure D.C.’s changed over the past eight years. Maybe that’s not true anymore.
Willie, if you want a light-reading book that gives you a wine-tasting tour of philosophy, check out Sophie’s World.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:24 am
http://liginmaclari.blogcu.com/fenerbahce-antalyaspor-macini-canli-izle-fenerbahce-antalyaspor-macini-izle-fenerbahce-antalyaspor-macinin-gollerini-izle-fenerbahce-antalyaspor-macinin-ozeti-fb-antalyaspor-macini-izle-fener-antalyaspor-macini-canli-izle_31122201.html
December 14th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Russell is an amusing writer, but he has his own very decided agenda. his book is much more about what he thinks about any particular thinker than what historians of philosophy generally think. Most historians of philosophy at least try to put forward the most sympathetic interpretation about past thinkers. Russell views these guys as allies and adversaries and is not interested in such balance.
Still, he was a great thinker and can not be easily dismissed.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Gene, I appreciate the joke, as well as the honor of being first in line for the revolutionary executions, but I couldn’t help but think, “Why?”
Where is the value in having read something cover to cover if it provides you with no, or minimal, increased knowledge? Again, the caveat from above is still in effect so that any situation where not fully reading leads someone to a critically incomplete understanding of the work is obviously not of use. But if you read something cover to cover, taking ten hours, and understand it 100% while I skim it, taking four hours, and understand it 90%, then why is it better to have spent that extra six hours actually reading it? This is especially true since it’s unlikely that fully reading a book is going to correlate exactly to fully understanding it and that the 90% gained by skimming will almost surely contain the works main points while perhaps missing some esoterica or smaller points.
So at the end of the day, where’s the moral worth in going cover to cover? Where’s the practical worth in doing so? Why is skimming worthy of scorn if in most cases it results in the ability to converse on a subject in almost as intelligently a manner? Obviously, when I read something that I’m actually enjoying I don’t skim, but when I’m not getting much enjoyment from something why shouldn’t I just try to get as much information from it as quickly as I can get it and move on to something that makes me happy?
December 14th, 2008 at 11:38 am
I don’t know why this bothers me so much. I guess it’s just the solipsism of contemporary times: if I can’t do something, there’s no way anyone can do it. You see this all the time with infidelity. People assert that there couldn’t possible be people who don’t cheat, and why? Because they do, and there’s an implication of judgment merely in the existence of alternative behavior. That’s exactly what Matt is doing here. He’s embarrassed by the prospect of someone being better read than he is, or else he just literally can’t imagine such a thing. So he has to deny it, and he does so with the kind of sweeping generalization that is impossible for any individual to refute, short of a pop quiz on every book they’ve ever read.
Like I said, pretty lame.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Sam Freeman’s “Rawls” is the best introduction to Rawls out there. Enjoy!
December 14th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Also, about the general thread, maybe it’s a good idea to take a look at Pierre Bayard, How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.
And, a related anecdote about Umberto Eco. He says that when people visit him at home and see his massive collection of books and wonder whether he “has read them all”, his answer tends to be “My goodness, no!! These are the books I have to read for next week, the ones I’ve read are in my office.”
In depth reading of books is a luxury few adults can enjoy…
December 14th, 2008 at 11:46 am
The books by Charles Taylor on Hegel are very good, as are the books by Kojeve and Hyppolite. Skimming Hegel is impossible, although it does explain why so many people say silly things about him.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:47 am
The Story of Philosoph bill Will Durant is a good introduction to many topics. Branch from there as your interest guide. Or don’t, but you will have an excellent converational starting point.
Is there sme reason for the reflexive anti-ivy sentiment of some people here. Everyone, in every college I have ever seen, skips reading, ignores some things, and still gets by.
I do onder–what are the most lied about books? Or more interestingly, which books are least remembered and lied about in priciple. I would guess Nozick’s Philosophical explanations, Jane Austen, and Shakespear, for entirely different reasons in each case.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:52 am
No wonder it’s so hard to find a guy who’s secure enough to be honest instead of ones who are full of shit.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:54 am
I’ve read some books I would never admit I’ve read. Particularly not to women I’m trying to impress.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:55 am
I must be dating stupid women. None of them read anything.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:57 am
In depth reading of books is a luxury few adults can enjoy…
You mean can’t afford money-wise? How about the library? Can’t afford the time? How about an hour a day? You know, maybe only watch one episode a day of Law and Order, or cut a Halo marathon by an hour?
No wonder it’s so hard to find a guy who’s secure enough to be honest instead of ones who are full of shit.
Proclaiming yourself as one of the only honest men is, of course, one of the most prevalent ways of being full of shit.
December 14th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Hegel himself wrote a short introduction to his own work for the general reader that is quite readable. For useful little, potted histories, I second Sophie’s World — especially as an alternative to Jacques Barzun, who in any case wrote cultural history (from a very highly conservative, not to say reactionary, point of view), not history of philosophy. I would stick to Barzun’s books about music (Berlioz) and leave his cultural musings alone.
Speaking of Sophie’s world, I just finished reading E.H. Gombrich’s Little History of the World and was just thinking, myself, how these two little introductory books complement each other. Anyone, young and old, could benefit from reading them.
Incidentally, I believe that Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy stands up and is very much worth reading as a wonderful literary classic in his own right, biases notwithstanding. There is no one who would not benefit from reading him, as he teaches one how to think and is a model of a clear and beautiful prose style. Of course, speaking of classics of English prose, everyone should also read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, also, right away, if they haven’t already.
For those who are serious about philosophy, there is a very good encyclopedias of philosophy (published by McMillan) available and a Dictionary of the History of Ideas (published by Scribners) with individual articles to dip into for reference written by experts in the field, which probably include useful bibliographies.
There is also a fine series of films about the lives of the philosophers for general audiences by the great Italian director Roberto Rossellini, which has just been issued on DVD for American audiences. Those on Alberti and Descartes are particularly good.
December 14th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
“That history course would assign five hundred pages of reading every week”
I had my home-schooled daughter read 200 pages a day of contemporary history – when she was ten years old. She still complains about it.
December 14th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
A vigorous defense of dilettantism needs to be written. We are the grease that keeps the mighty wheels of people who actually know what they’re talking about turning. Dilettantism makes life more interesting, if not necessarily more accurate.
December 14th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
@MosBen
Points taken. I didn’t mean to imply a moral difference and obviously you as a reader should satisfy yourself and not ohers. But partly by profession (academic) and personality (somewhat introverted and anal, perhaps that’s redundant) I tend not to like what I see as fakery. Now to be sure I’ve “thumbed” many books, articles et al, but only in order to have a passing personal familiarity with them, never to discuss them with others.
Look I salute anyone who can could even skim Wuthering Heights along the lines of what you describe, as I found even the Cliff’s Notes version tedious, but I think you’d probably miss important character development. So maybe you can skim Dickens and get the essence even if you miss some plot, but I don’t think you could get the essence of Flaubert or Faulkner this way, you need to read it all. Likewise I assume noboby reads all of Gibbon (especilly since it’s often published as a one volume abridged version) and I can agree that misisng 2/3 of the detail probably doesn’t diminish understanding. I don’t think that works with Foucault, who I also find horribly tedious. Sure it’s easy to get the one sentence or one paragraph version of Foucault, any decent review can give you the thesis, but I think that you have to read all of his argument in order to evaluate his argument. This is something that I feel I owe to the author, but you’re right that it’s out of line to try to extend that to anyone else since each of us makes his/her own transaction with the author.
December 14th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
I read Ulysses in a week, with the help of Blamires. But only the first two volumes of A la recherche, so far.
December 14th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
For me, I think a lot of it has to do with the exercise of grappling closely with the author’s points. It’s not just a question of volume of facts, but of following the author’s train of thought.
From my perspective, if you skim a book in an hour and I read it closely in 4 hours, then I’ve spent 4 times as much time thinking about the issues the book raises, and that means I’ve engaged with the book more closely than you have.
Whether that’s ‘better’ or not depends on why one is reading the book. It’s quite possible that the information one seeks can be uncovered by a brief skim.
December 14th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Probably the only way to really have “read” a book, is to have taught it many times, or to have translated it. One is always going to miss things, otherwise.
December 14th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
I just read Please Kill me. Why would I lie about that?
December 14th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Are there any introductions to modern philosophy that’ll get me to understand Hegel without turning my brain to mush?
No.
This has been yet another edition of . . . etc, etc.
December 14th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Thanks for the Amazon link, I’m going to pretend to buy it.
December 14th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Screw the books. The NFL is on.
December 14th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
GtheK wins the thread.
December 14th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
I’ve never felt the need to lie about which books I have read and not. I state upfront whether I’ve read the book, read some of the book, skimmed the book for a class a long time ago, or have merely read a few reviews. I’ve read a lot of books, so this works. I really don’t understand the impulse to lie about it. I realize I could do so, but what exactly would that bring? If the person I am talking to has actually read the book I’d rather get his or her persepctive on it then pretend i know what i am talking about–something one does not need a Harvard education to do. Anyway, count me part of the 53% of people who don’t lie about it.
December 14th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Books are for fags.
December 14th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Re: Its flaws that earned criticism then only make it more useless after more than 50 years.
I rather disagree. I read the book as a senior in high School (it was “background” reading for a college prep Humanities course) and I found it a very good and nontechnical intro to the subject for any reasonably intelligent person. To be sure Russell made no pretense of hiding his own biases and the reader should be advised not to take him as gospel. But I have yet to hear of any work of comparable scope and quality.
Re: He also reflected his fascination with philosophy before Descartes, which means less of what a course today would emphasize most
IMO, that’s a very good tonic against the obnoxious bias of presentism which has spread from the sciences (where it really does make sense to focus on modern-day work) to all other areas of human learning, blinding us to the fact that we moderns are not the measure of all things, nor the last word thereon.
December 14th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Ditto #30. I read (OK, OK, I skimmed a few chapters) Frederick Copleston’s multi-volume History of Phil a few years back and really liked it. Surveys and histories of thought are great as long as you don’t just rely on one — you’re looking for someone who is smart and well-read who can illuminate some stuff you wouldn’t see otherwise and help sketch the terrain.
Dunno how seriously I would take the survey cited in the BBC piece. But as a college teacher who routinely deals with students who haven’t done the reading, I’d suggest that bluffers are more transparent than they think they are.
December 14th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
If you majored in physics, to get dates you lie about what you read, not what you didn’t read.
December 14th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
“It seems to me that college (at least as we did it at Harvard) largely consists of lessons on how to pretend to have read various books.”
That’s just great. Strangely, my education consisted entirely of actually reading reading the books we then discussed.
My special hate is reserved for those who discuss writers as if they have read them yet their only awareness comes from a survey course or some critical works by other writers. I’ve actually encountered the argument that it’s better to have read the critical evaluations than to have read the actual work, because the work itself is misleading.
I’ve never lied about what I’ve read, by the way. I haven’t had to. That Yglesias thinks this is acceptable and universal is more than a little frightening.
December 14th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
“Why is skimming worthy of scorn if in most cases it results in the ability to converse on a subject in almost as intelligently a manner?”
Because the point of reading a book isn’t so that you can converse on a subject [in] almost [as] intelligently. It’s to have read the book, in the fullest sense of “read”. One learns things from books, you know. And one learns more when one pays close attention to its reading.
“In depth reading of books is a luxury few adults can enjoy…”
This is completely untrue. If you read slowly, then don’t attempt to read as many books. But there’s never an excuse for skimming a good book. Never.
I attended St. John’s College, the famous “Great Books” school. And, yes, our reading workload measured in the hundreds of pages per day. All our classes were seminar-style where we discussed what we read.
Due to the practicalities of life, sometimes I couldn’t finish the reading, or didn’t manage it at all. My rule was that I would never participate in the discussion unless it veered onto something not directly dependent upon the reading. This was a hard rule to follow, sometimes, as a particularly interesting discussion could be enticing. And certainly there were a minority of other students who weren’t as scrupulous.
But the telos of reading these books is to gain something important from them, not so that one can impress others in, or simply enjoy, conversation about them. Discussing good books is a particular joy, and often an important part of comprehending them, but it’s not an activity that has real worth outside the context of actually having read the books.
I’ll amend that, a bit. Yglesias, slowly but surely, has painted a picture of Harvard that is not-unlike that of its strongest critics. This version is of an institution that is in its deepest sense all about seeming, about the social capital that one can acquire from appearances and associations. It has little to do with education, erudition, or intellectualism. Or, for that matter, vocation.
Among the subculture of johnnies, alumni of St. John’s College, possibly the worst sin one can commit is to pretend to or lie about having read a book. So, no, Mr. Yglesias, lying about what one reads is not universal. Maybe you ought to associate with a better class of people.
December 14th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Speaking of Ulysses, didn’t some scholar go around to the libraries of all the famous critics and authors who had hailed it as masterpiece, and discovered most had left the pages uncut (i.e. left the book unread)? I think this study was done in a pre-Web decade, because I can’t find any links to it. Moral: even critics and authors lie about reading books.
December 14th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I have a special place full of contempt in my heart for people who pretend to read books.
Also, I never understood why people would pay good money to get an education at an expensive school – and then NOT do the activities requisite to achieve that education. Why would you not read the material for class? It deprives you of an education and everyone else who has to hear you stumble through a poor explanation of the material when they could be, you know, learning.
December 14th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Wonder what writers have to say about this. Can’t really pretend to have written something.
December 14th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
First, Matt, assuming you know people who didn’t attend Hahvahd, you should no fakery goes on in nearly every LA program. In LA situations, you can read a book dilligently, but what always gets you highest marks is the ability to place the ideas of a work in the larger framework of the subject at hand. If you can explain how a piece of work fits into the canon of great works, and what it adds, you need not have read it to impress upon professors that you know what you ought to know about it.
The other surefire way to succeed in this environment is making one minor but distinctive observation about how the text operates or how it compares to other texts not under discussion in that course. This pairs criticial thinking with a thorough understanding of the work and its contexts, and if done well is probably enough to get an “A” grade.
You needn’t have read a work to do either of these things, but you do need to have spent time with a work on its own terms to give it a chance to change your way of thinking. No LA student was ever really struck by a book or idea he briefed himself on to earn the “A”. If you read a book carefully it may actually inform your worldview — and a worldview informed by rational engagement with complete arguments (or open engagements with artistic statements) is far more impressive than the ability to bullshit flawlessly, even if that bullshitting entails knowing something real about the work.
December 14th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Remember, Yglesias is a book writer. I suppose that the way he sees it, the more people willing to pretend to have read his book means more influence for him and perhaps a few more book sales (because buying a book without reading it merely requires money).
December 14th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Apologies that I chose to suggest a “living” rather than simply contemporary or modern or whatever philosopher, as a little breezier, and then mentioned Rorty. The slip is downright mean so soon after his death, and thanks that no one pounced on it (or found me too boring even to read).
I’ll second a plug for Harry Blamires as a guide to Ulysses. I feel lucky I read Ulysses in high school, when you’re enthusiastic about one thing after another, so had no trouble reading and rereading it for however long it took. I’ve given up on the Wake more often than I like to admit.
Nice line about physics majors, but I still love my Maxwell’s equations t-shirt. I’m waiting for someone to ask me to explain it, and of course no one ever does, or at least no one female.
December 14th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
I was in Matt’s section (yo, Doug Edwards if he is reading this) for our respective introdution to Rawls, and I also suspected shenanigans.
Did you actually read Dworkin’s Law’s Empire over the summer or did you just say you had?
December 14th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Why do the commenters here have such stunted senses of humor?
December 14th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Seems to me that MY himself copped to lying about reading something on a thread sometime in the past couple of months.
The need to do that sort of thing would have never occurred to me – it is an Ivy League thing?
December 14th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
I (really) just read a Toni Morrison novel; but according to the Bradley effect, I’m lying.
But guys, if you read Field & Stream, I’m interested.
December 14th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
WillieStyle:
While it’s highly entertaining, I would not recommend Russel’s History of Western Philosophy, because it also very opinionated and often downright misleading. I don’t have to offer any better alternatives, though. I think general histories of philosophy are actually not a very good starting, because one tends to come away with the impression that it’s all a bunch of more or less arbitrary thought.
As for Hegel, Charles Taylor’s Hegel is pretty good and I’ve heard Peter Singer’s Hegel: A Very Short Introduction recommended. Kojeve is great and a lot of fun, but bear in mind that he’s giving you his own, rather idiosyncratic version of Hegel. But there is a general problem, which these books will not solve for you:
- there is simply no way around reading Hegel’s works and thinking through them yourself, if you want to understand Hegel, you have to follow his thought process sentence by sentence
- you shouldn’t do this by yourself, but you need a very good teacher, who can illuminate for you all the sources and debates Hegel is referring to, and a group of people who will debate with you; so it doesn’t make much sense outside a university setting
- generally I think translations in philosophy are not so problematic if they are carefully done, but in the case of Hegel, I have my doubts if a proper translation is even achievable, though I haven’t read any
I’m not saying this to scare you off or anything, though I’m aware that it sounds like that, it’s just that Hegel is really hard and it takes a lot of time and effort to come to grips with him.
December 14th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Another suggestion on Hegel, I agree with everything Novakant said and would just add one thing. If you want something relatively painless that will give you the life and times and some sense of his ideas you could read “Hegel” by Terry Pinkard. It’s not a substiture for Taylor or reading Hegel, but it depends on what you want to get out it. If you are just curious what he is about and want something to read on a plane then Pinkard is your man.
December 14th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
It seems to me that even a “slow reader” ought to be able to read 200 pages a day with ease, so five hundred a week is not at all excessive. That’s just a few hours a day; and when one is in college one is supposed to spend four or five hours a day reading anyway.
December 14th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
I think Matt was trying to be funny about people not being honest about their reading.
Reading is my main form of entertainment & relaxation. Years ago, I found the “Reader’s Bill of Rights” to be liberating:
1. The right to not read.
2. The right to skip pages.
3. The right to not finish.
4. The right to reread.
5. The right to read anything.
6. The right to escapism.
7. The right to read anywhere.
8. The right to browse.
9. The right to read out loud.
10. The right not to defend your tastes.
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/teenreading/tipsenc/tipsencourage.cfm
For me, nos. 2,3,4, 6 and 10 are especially meaningful.
I once got into an argument w/ a guy in a bar about the right not to finish a book. He argued that there was a sort of moral imperative in finishing a book “You need to give the author the right to have the last word…” I said that was ridiculous – that if I pick up a book (in a library or shop or anywhere) and start to read it to see if I want to buy or borrow it, I have not entered into a compact and it’s up to the author to interest me enough so I’ll finish.
I sometimes even skip to the end of a novel to see how it ends when I’m only about 1/3 of the way through.
December 14th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Gene, your points are also well taken sir. See, I don’t really think my argument is with your point of view, but with Keith M. Ellis’. You quite nicely show several situations in which your level of engagement with a work might vary depending on what your reason is for reading it and what you’re attempting to get out of it. Keith’s implication that there is only one “point” to reading is where I have my objection. In some cases I want to read cover to cover. In some I don’t want to do so, but I have to for whatever reason. In some cases I don’t have to do close readings and don’t want to, so skimming will do. And in some cases it might even be impossible to skim a work due to the nature of the prose.
There’s a nasty elitism that comes for arguments like those made by Keith though.
And finally, there is real value in having a working knowledge of a work for social situations. Even if a person hated Shakespeare it is socially valuable to know his major works and understand them enough to see their influence today. An important way that we interact with people is through the shared knowledge of recognized culturally significant works and events.
December 14th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
And harold, your assumption that anyone can read 200 pages per day assumes quite a lot about the speed of the reader and the amount of time they have to spare. Let’s be generous and say that by “a few hours per day” you meant the high of five hours you mentioned in the post. Obviously, most working adults, particularly those with families, don’t have five hours per day to read. But let’s assume that they do for argument’s sake. You’re looking at 2/3 of a page per minute. Depending on the size of the type and the difficulty of the text that could be slow, average, or blazing fast. There are a lot of variables here that you simply don’t know, but by all means assume away to make your sweeping generalizations about “even ’slow readers’”.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
lighten the fuck up, people.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
“You quite nicely show several situations in which your level of engagement with a work might vary depending on what your reason is for reading it and what you’re attempting to get out of it. Keith’s implication that there is only one ‘point’ to reading is where I have my objection.”
I tried to make a distinction between really good books and, say, genre fiction or an undistinguished piece of non-fiction. With the latter, like all entertainment, I think one should do whatever one wants.
But the context of this thread seemed to me to be the sort of books one should pay attention to. No one lies about reading Stephen King, unless it’s that they don’t read him. And if a book is important enough to have a long, serious discussion about, then it’s important enough for those discussing it to have, you know, actually read it. Not skimmed it.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
I wrote that college students (not working adults) should be expected to read three or four hours a day, just as advanced piano students are still expected to practice three hours a day. Football players probably practice that amount as well. Heck, people spend that amount of time in front of a TV every day without turning a hair. If you have to do it, you’ll find you get a lot better at it.
As for myself, I still read two hours a day on the subway and I get through quite a few pages in a year. Though it doesn’t seem like much compared to my younger years. When I was younger I read four or five hours a day or more, routinely, just for fun. Obviously, I am not talking about a math, legal, or chemistry text book, but rather, a narrative work, such as a novel, history, or biography.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:59 am
Wayne Elise, one of the “Pickup Artist” experts, told a story once about one his “field trips” with a student. They were in a bookstore and the guy spotted a girl he thought looked good who was reading a book. So Wayne told him to go over and tell her, as a conversation opener, that he had read that book and it was a great book.
So the guy goes over and does that: “Hey, that’s a really good book. A really great book. I’ve read that several times.”
She looks up at him and says, “It’s a dictionary.”
I never lie about what I’ve read. I don’t need to, since most of what I read are computer texts. I’m not interested in trying to impress someone by saying I’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road’, or anything else.
The same thing applies to art. I’ve seen a lot of people start trading names of art works they’ve read.
The whole thing is on a par with hackers trying to one up each other with opinions on vi vs. emacs or whatever.
It’s chimpanzee behavior, trying to establish that you’re one up on the primate hierarchy than the next guy.
I suppose it’s better than real chimpanzees who probably would try to rip the other chimp’s balls off. But it’s not much different in attitude.
The problem with Matt is that he can’t even be bothered to read a few emails I send him which relate directly to his alleged specialty, foreign policy. Which makes his claims to such pathetic and explains why his opinions on things like Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iran are so ignorant.
Yglesias is basically a fake. Which pretty much describes most so-called “pundits”.
December 15th, 2008 at 6:13 am
People “trade” names of books they read, not to impress each other but because reading and books (and movies) are a sort of meta-communication. It is like sharing ones dreams. It is not “one upmanship” so much as that knowledge is essentially a collaborative effort and people seek kindred spirits to share it with.
In college one is expected to read a lot of books, but one can really absorb books only by engaging closely with them. Writing a paper about a book trains one, in turn, to engage more closely with and better grasp other books one reads.
In today’s world where people are supposed to prove themselves over and over and are never considered quite good enough, it is natural that everyone feels like a bit of a fake at times.
The difference between people who have expert knowledge and those who don’t is that those who do have it see the big picture and approach problems in a different way. If they don’t always have knowledge on a particular topic, they have learned the skills to bone up on it fairly quickly. To say that Matthew is “basically a fake”is basically a projection the prevailing cynicism of the day.
December 15th, 2008 at 6:29 am
“Do you read books through?”–Samuel Johnson
December 15th, 2008 at 7:19 am
Harold has a very old fashioned (and touchingly quaint) idea of college students. Maybe at Harvard students have hours and hours a day to read and maybe at a few other places where Mummy and Daddy pay your way to spend a few years thinking great thoughts, reading great books and manaaging to pad your resume with unpaid internships that help you become part of the national elite BUT the college students I know and teach (at a variety of institutions) all work and most work more than 20 hours a week. They work (ok, in part to support the cell phones and cars, etc) because they have to too to stay in college. Hasn’t Harold read anything about how college costs have accelerated over the years. And the truth is that they and they still take out loans, so not only are they indebted when they get out (thus reducing their opportunities to explore various career options before having to pay someone back some ungodly amount each month) they are indebted for an experience that they didn’t fully enjoy while there because they were working. As a professor, I started out being annoyed at these students for not doing the work and not seeing that reading 100 pages a day was absolutely essential to their education —- but over a lifetime of university teaching, I have been more and more impressed by how much they do do and how much they want to know even though the conditions of their lives make it all very hard. Yes, at times I am still frustrated by how much they don’t read, etc. but pretty much the system if screwed up. Which makes me despise the students at Harvard even more: to have all that time and still decide to fake it is just insulting to those who would do more if they could. And, yes Matt, we all know (how could we forget) you went to Harvard. Some day (or maybe not) you’ll realize it’s not the big deal you think it is. Maybe more interesting question than do you really read the books you pretend to read is to find out how many people who say they went to Harvard really did.
December 15th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Clarence,
Your points are well taken. I would caution you however that quite a lot of students at Harvard and other Ivy League institutions do work as well- dismiss Mr. Yglesias if you want, but don’t dismiss every Ivy League student.
Like Matt, I didn’t read every book I was assigned in college, but I certainly made some effort to, and I recognize that when I fell short, that this was a failing and a sin (of the species of “sloth”) of which I should be ashamed, not proud of.
December 15th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Clarence,
Are you saying the college students you teach don’t read the books assigned or don’t read at all (for pleasure)? This I can certainly believe. But if they don’t then it’s not because they don’t have time, but because they don’t make time.
December 15th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Matthew: Not everywhere is like Harvard.
Harold: “Obviously, I am not talking about a math, legal, or chemistry text book, but rather, a narrative work…”
See, some of us actually majored in scientific fields in school. Odd that you don’t count the work I did as “reading.” Also, not everyone is like you; expecting that everyone ought to be able to read as much as you do is quite solipsistic.
Anyway, I don’t have any problem telling people I haven’t read something that I haven’t read. That’s not to say I can’t have an intelligent conversation about a book that I’ve only partially read, but I won’t deliberately misrepresent myself in the process.
December 15th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Hrm. I don’t know that straight-up lying about having read a book (I can’t recall having done this) is quite as common as allowing people to assume you’ve read a book that you’re familiar enough with second-hand to hold up your end of a casual conversation (definitely done this numerous times).
December 15th, 2008 at 10:55 am
“Also, not everyone is like you; expecting that everyone ought to be able to read as much as you do is quite solipsistic.”
That’s not what solipsistic means.
“Maybe at Harvard students have hours and hours a day to read and maybe at a few other places where Mummy and Daddy pay your way to spend a few years thinking great thoughts, reading great books…”
Where I went to school, at a semi-elite private liberal arts college and reading several hundred page a day and “thinking great thoughts”, the portion of students receiving financial aid was about 60%. I, myself, was married and poor. Due to workload, both freshman and junior years make it very difficult for a student to hold a part-time job, but I have friends who did it. You seem to have a lot of prejudicial assumptions that conveniently support your conclusion.
Before this, I had attended other universities. Compared to my fellow students at the liberal arts college, these other students tended to be unmotivated, often lazy, and those who were engaged with their educations tended to be obsessed with superficial grades and with impressing their professors. It sound like yours have impressed you with their tales of woe justifying their failure to complete their assignments.
After the liberal arts college, I attended an engineering and science oriented university. Most of my friends were physics graduate students, and they worked very hard and made no excused for themselves. The few undergraduates I knew also worked very hard.
Don’t make excuses for underperforming students. The majority have gone through their educations with everything handed to them and have been either taught or allowed to think that their failures are someone else’s fault and that mediocrity is achievement.
December 15th, 2008 at 11:06 am
I sympathize with the poster who complained about having to read 500 pages per week for one history class. It’s not that much on it’s own, but it’s one class out of possibly five or six. As a non-humanities major studying math or engineering, it’s a pain in the ass to to have such rigid assignments because it makes planning that much harder. when you study physics the time it takes is variable; the longer you study, the better you understand, and the more problems you practice the better you get. Reading history is linear so you have to balance two very different types of work. I always found that my technical classes suffered the most in that situation.
Anyway, I generally got the most out of a few random classes, not my many math or science classes.
December 15th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
“Also, not everyone is like you; expecting that everyone ought to be able to read as much as you do is quite solipsistic.”
That’s not what solipsistic means.
Care to help a guy out here, then? Like I said, I was a science major (Geology). Harold is making claims that everyone else ought to be able to do the things he does, not recognizing differences in aptitude, experience, etc. In other words, what I’m saying is that while Harold doesn’t literally believe that only he exists, he does feel that only his experiences are valid. If that’s not solipsism, it’s pretty close.
I sympathize with the poster who complained about having to read 500 pages per week for one history class. It’s not that much on it’s own, but it’s one class out of possibly five or six.
Exactly. A lot of professors (not just humanities ones) fail to recognize that their class is one of many the student may be taking. I suppose we could all just take one class at a time, but then we’d spend 20 years finishing an undergraduate degree.
December 15th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Is Adam Villani is saying that someone taking engineering courses is unable to read 200 pages a night, or that he doesn’t have time to because his other courses are too time consuming?
The scientists and engineers I know are perfectly capable of reading many hundreds of pages in a week and often have to (in the form of other scientists’ papers — and books as well) in the course of their work. They then come home and frequently read fiction or history for recreation.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I actually don’t think I said the students were underperforming. And BTW, I commuted to a Research I as an undergrad and worked about 20 hours/week throughout. On the other hand, I could pretty much pay for school, books and occasional fun by working in the summer and 15-20 hrs/week throughout the academic year. Except at the very cheapest state schools, this can’t be done anymore.
So yes, lots of people at Ivies work (and my apologies to them) —
I digress, what I’ve learned over a lifetime of teaching is that often times assignments are badly set by instructors (myself included). It’s really easy to say “read the book” — not always obvious why you’ve assigned it, esp as only a couple chapters even relate to what’s happening in class. It’s easy to say that “it’s good for them” to read the whole book — but why set your students up for failure if you know in advance that they can’t/won’t/don’t do it for all the reasons I suggested earlier NOT because they are lazy or underperforming.[I’m talking about undergrads here — graduate students are clearly another case since they have elected “professional” study in a discipline).
The majority of people in institutions of higher ed in the US are NOT the traditionally aged 18-21 year olds of old. They are working adults with family and career responsibilities. To call them underperforming for failing to finish a poorly designed assignment is ill-informed.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
One guy really impressed me while I was studying: he was a full-time medical student – and everybody knows how much they have to work – and only read philosophy as a hobby. Yet he was better than any of us philosophy and literature students when it came to Hegel. We were no slouches, but still he made me feel stupid and lazy.
The problem with pretending to have read something goes beyond questions of individual morality in my opinion.
Firstly it is extremely discouraging and disorienting for less experienced students when people, and that includes teachers, habitually pretend to have read everything. They start to think that this is the norm and that they have to conform to it by reading everything, while in reality it is a lie and an impossibility. This leads to all sorts of psychological pressure for no good reason whatsoever.
Secondly, this pretense often leads to widespread and institutionalized misinterpretation and even slander.
In one case people feel defensive about their lack of knowledge in a certain field and resort to calling everything outside their field worthless, e.g. “analytic vs. continental philosophy”. This leads to a lot of annoying and insipid grandstanding based on ignorance and contempt.
In the other case they do keep up the pretense, but rely mainly on translations, second-hand opinion and inadequate efforts of their own, which then gets passed off as the real thing. Such misinterpretation based on sketchy reading and bad sources can prove to be remarkably resilient, gets carried over through generations and sometimes defines the views a whole culture has of a certain philosopher or school.
December 15th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
you shouldn’t do this by yourself, but you need a very good teacher, who can illuminate for you all the sources and debates Hegel is referring to, and a group of people who will debate with you; so it doesn’t make much sense outside a university setting
Man is that ever true, not just for Hegel but for all philosophy, even the stuff that looks straightforward. One thing I learned about doing philosophy in college is that there’s quite a large gap between thinking you understand something after you’ve read it and demonstrating that you understand it by being able to explain it to someone else (e.g., in a term paper). If you don’t have a teacher, or some other knowledgeable person who you can regurgitate to (obviously, the person has to be authoritative enough to be able to tell you when you’re wrong), it’s going to be impossible to actually get anything out of the reading (unless you’re like, so awesome it’s not even funny).
December 15th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Reading is not “for” any one thing. Reading is for whatever you want it to be for. It can be a source of pleasure, knowledge, or a way to accumulate enough information about the work that you can discuss it socially. There’s no “right” way to read, and anyone who tells you that there is is just being a douche bag.
Again, if you’re the type of person that just can’t read a book if it’s not in depth reading from cover to cover, then that’s fine. What I object to is the position taken by several here which is essentially used as a tool to show how superior they are those who have different habits or views.
No one likes an asshole, whether it’s an oaf who mocks people that aren’t particularly sporty or the nerd who looks down his nose at the terrible unwashed masses who don’t read “properly”.
Read however makes you happy, or however you need to in any particular situation.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
“What I object to is the position taken by several here which is essentially used as a tool to show how superior they are those who have different habits or views.”
I object to people who presume to know my motivations for the purposes of making an ad hominem argument.
Let’s recall that you’re defending skimming books for the sake of being able to credibly discuss them socially. Firstly, that’s dishonest. The whole point of the exercise is to mislead other people.
Secondly, I have already made it clear that I am distinguishing between light, pleasure reading and serious reading. There is little lost when one skims John Grisham. There is a great deal lost when one skims, say, Hegel, to take a major writer discussed in this thread. There is a certain class of work—whether it be literature or philosophy or history or science or whatever—that, if not read deeply and diligently, is very likely greatly misunderstood. Miscomprehension is arguably worse than no familiarity with the work at all. Also, whether or not a book is important, it still usually is a labor of love for the writer. Skimming and such are insults to the author.
December 17th, 2008 at 9:19 am
Keith, in the post way back up there that I referred to you specifically, the only thing that could be interpreted as ad hominem would be that I saw an elitism in the arguments that you presented. Ad hominem refers to attacks made on the person, not the arguments, so as my statement referred to the arguments I don’t think it applies. As to the post you referred to, I mention “several people” rather than anyone specifically because I knew that I was making inferences to motives and not arguments and didn’t want to impugn anyone specifically when it was just based off the feeling I was getting from the posts presented here.
That said, you’ve come off here, to me at least, and on this specific issue, as kind of a dick. Your posts are laced with presumptions about what is right and wrong about reading, which is by and large recreation. Secondly, though the subject began based on a post relating to lying about what you’ve read, that’s really not been what I’ve been referring to. My initial post regarded a defense of skimming works to derive an ability to speak intelligently about them. I don’t mention deception in that post, but if you want to infer that my hypothetical involved lying about what amount you’ve read rather than just talking about a book in conversation that you haven’t read completely, then so be it. In my subsequent posts I moved quickly past the initial subject of Matt’s post and into critiquing what I saw as arguments being made in this thread that books should always be read cover to cover as a matter of principle or moral correctness.
And it’s in your last paragraph that you get into exactly what I’m talking about. The level of reading a person “should” do has nothing to do with what they’re reading, but *why* they’re reading it. If a person wants to skim Hegel while really reading Grisham then that’s their prerogative. Reading is not, for most people at least, about giving honor to the author and no insult is given by reading a work how you like.
Again, you can spend your time reading however you want. What I’m objecting to is a tone that has come across in several of your posts, though to be fair my critique was not just of you but of several people making similar arguments, that makes you sound like an elitist jerk criticizing how people spend their free time. If skimming Jane Eyre gets a person what they wanted from the work, then there’s no reason to critique them. If a person skims a work and then writes a scholarly work of substandard quality about it, then their paper should be criticized if it evidences a flawed understanding of the work. On the other hand if a person skims Jane Eyre, likes the story, and talks about it with their friends, makes Jane Eyre jokes, and sees references to Jane Eyre in other works, then there’s nothing wrong with their reading.
One last possibility to consider: Maybe there are people out there that read slower than you, but are much better at skimming than you.
January 16th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
fpak banqivsm nwgpdulmk jhmvia tapifjvu yrjpfbel hkrxn
March 2nd, 2009 at 4:36 am
levitraIf you have to do it, you might as well do it right
March 11th, 2009 at 4:19 am
Incredible site!
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:02 am
It is the coolest site,keep so!
cheap brand pfizer viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 4:57 am
Thanks for the review! viagra