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A Case for Reading as Much as you Can
I read a couple of books a week for fifty-five years…and as it turns out when people write books they often take 20 years of their live where they passionately did something, reduce it to 200 pages…and then you can go online and find out who wrote the best books, that’s kind of wild…and then you can read it, and for the most part understand it, and then you can go apply it in the real world.
Jim Keller
Reading is not as trendy as it used to be. It can be straining and uncomfortable: the boring black and white of a printed page has to compete with the flashing, vibrant, visual world of Youtube and television, so it is clear that reading has an increasingly hard stance.
Reading changes your view of the world
Nevertheless, there can be something magical about reading a book. You spend a couple of hours staring at tiny black dots, and if things turn out right, you stand up a different person.
In a couple of days, books allow you to absorb a good deal of years and decades of knowledge, the condensed intellectual content of a whole lifetime (as Wittgenstein says, how small a thought it takes to fill a life…).
I still remember clearly when I read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha for the first time. It changed my life. When I got up in the…
