I recently finished reading Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back To Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, a study of the lives and work of Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foote and Iris Murdoch. Attention to these four has sometimes been over-shadowed by attention to their male contemporaries like Ludwig Wittgenstein.
I first learned about the book when it was reviewed in The NY Times Book Review, one of the primary places where I discover new books. This is the first “rule” of reading books: Find them!
While reading Metaphysical Animals a couple of additional implicit “how-to-read-books” rules were operative. Rule #2: Use the footnotes! Metaphysical Animals reminded me it was Elizabeth Anscombe who stewarded Wittgenstein’s papers and first translated his Philosophical Investigations into English, so I jumped onto the public library card catalog and placed a hold it (although you can also read the entirety of it in various pdf versions online like this one).
While I was at it I also placed a hold on some Iris Murdoch novels. I’ve been remiss in never reading her, and figured this could be my chance. I started at the beginning with Under the Net. It’s good, but it didn’t yet draw me into another one of the practices I sometimes find myself following of: Be a Completist! That is to say, sometimes I try to read everything by a particular author. But Murdoch published 27 novels—which is quite a lot—so it may take me a bit before I get back to reading more of her admittedly fantastic works.
Akin to “Be a Completist!” is another rule: Fill in the Blanks! Although I no longer believe in the canon, as if there were just one set of “classics” everyone should read, I do like canonical lists and discussions of what counts as a classic, and I’ll frequently review various kinds of lists and see what I haven’t read that I might want to. I don’t know if this is a sort of collecting or if it’s simply an act of scholarship. Or maybe on another level those are the same thing.
But this is why I like participating in the nominations process for the annual Hugo Awards in science fiction. There’s great joy in working together with a group of readers to identify the books that rise to the top, ones that everyone agrees, “Yeah, this is worth your attention.”
This summer I’ve been filling in some of the blanks. For example, I brought my collected works of William Shakespeare home from my office library. It’s currently sitting open on the fireplace hearth. I had intended to kind of work my way through the book systematically. But sometimes my eyes are bigger than my stomach.
This happens a lot in reading actually, and I recommend it as a practice. Set goals for reading that you may not achieve! Or are unlikely to achieve. It's okay. You can go buy those big fat books that you thought would be a good idea to read and you can take two or three or seven stabs at them and put them aside, perhaps for years. Because what will happen is that if you continue to persist, eventually, you may find a way in.
This happened for me during the pandemic. I had owned a copy of Finnegan’s Wake1 since I was a college student, purchasing it on sale at our college bookstore on a whim my senior year as I was graduating. I had it on the shelf for almost 20 some years. When the pandemic made me sit down, I committed myself every day to 25 pages of it whether I understood it or not.
And I finished it. And it was really fun. I mean, it was weird, and I still don't understand it. But it was also life changing. It’s the kind of read that takes you to another level. It changed how I read, and what I think I should get out of reading, the idea that I should “get” something out of reading.
Because I write reviews of books for various journals, including The Christian Century, another rule is the rule of Discovery restated. Find More Books!
Try to stay abreast of the literature. The way that I'll do this is: I'll actually go to the publishing house web sites themselves and I'll look at what's coming out next or what has recently been released.
I discover a lot of great books especially in theology and religion this way. For example, go look on Fortress Press, or Baylor University Press or Eerdmans or any number of other publishing houses and see what will soon be published or is newly released.
I used to trust the Amazon algorithm to recommend additional books this way, but have grown less and less enamored of how the secrecy of that algorithm wants to manipulate me. So if I am looking for more and more books on a specific topic (for example, recently I built a small library for our LGBTQIA+ youth quiet reading nook, or last year I built myself a self-guided syllabus on religion and trauma) I’ll google around for actual syllabi faculty have curated, or I’ll post a note in a Discord channel and ask for recommendations, then curate those into a list.
A lot of my reading habits can be encompassed in this dialectical back-and-forth between 1) trying to stay on top of what is new and 2) filling in the blanks of what is old. Right now this morning I’ll be continuing a read I’ve been attempting for years, I’m slowly making my way through Friedrich Schleiermacher’s very long but also groundbreaking The Christian Faith. Schleiermacher is one of those theologians you can’t avoid hearing about if you do theology, but he is much more frequently named than read directly. I’m working to rectify that.
But directly beneath that volume in my stack is Claude Atcho’s Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just, which is a brand new book I’m reviewing for The Christian Century that I guess is both new and old in the sense it is a new book making an argument for a set of classics in the new way we identify canons within canons.
Finally back to Shakespeare, I have started to find a way in. I discovered a BBC series on Apple Podcasts, The Shakespeare Sessions, audio recordings of some of the lesser read plays. So yesterday because I had the time and wanted to really rest my eyes while enjoying some great literature, I listened my way through Coriolanus, one of the plays I had literally never read or heard or seen.2
A Few Additional Notes:
Yes I write in my books, although not all the time, and mostly just some underlining.
My favorite book about the lifelong commitment (almost a form of monasticism) to scholarly life is A.G. Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life. It’s so good. If you’re into that kind of thing, Find It!
I’m so glad the whole Kindle/e-books thing only took up a small niche within overall book readership (in fact the last two years e-readership has been in decline). Paper is simply a better technology. I read all my books as books these days and keep stacks and stacks of them around.
There are people who love to help you find books. Visit your local indie bookstore or talk to a librarian. Or if you need a recommendation from me, ask!
Stacks of books are your friend. Often when I travel my suitcase is approximately half clothes and half books. Readers need options. I read multiple books at the same time and I have, for my entire life, typically carried more than one book with me wherever I go. This is perhaps the main trick for reading a lot. Carry a mini-library.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the general categories in which I read and which as a recommender of “how to read books” I’m actually agnostic about. You should read what you want to read, not what I read. But overall I probably spend about 50% of my time reading books in religion and theology, about 25% of my time reading science fiction and fantasy, and the other 25% of my time reading contemporary non-fiction, classic literature, or literary fiction.
I like the Nancy Pearl rule of 50 for dropping a bad leisure book: If a reader is under 50 years old, then consume 50 pages before dropping a book; If a reader is over 50 years old, take the number 100, subtract your age, and this is the number of pages to read before switching to the next book.
You can actually listen to the entirety of it read aloud: https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/hear-all-of-finnegans-wake-read-aloud.html
Ralph Fiennes did a movie version of it a few years back you can find on Youtube.
I loved this! I've always had a pile of books on my nightstand - mostly books I started and promised myself someday I would return to them. Mostly never returning to the pile - except to increase its height - became a sign of failure or lack of completion. I burst into tears when you said 'books are your friends' giving me permission to grow the stack even higher.