I Don’t Read Enough

Steve: I don’t read enough. This thought plagues me. I don’t know how much reading would constitute enough, but I feel certain that I don’t read enough. Console me, well-meaning inner voice.

Inner Voice: Oh but think of all the papers that you read for your coursework!

Steve: Yeah, I (usually) do the assigned reading for the courses I’m enrolled in, less often for the ones I’m auditing. But that doesn’t count, obviously. Better: I don’t read enough papers that I myself select.

Inner Voice: Oh but think of all the papers that you read or re-read for the courses you teach! You picked those papers since you designed the course.

Steve: Okay, yeah, I read those too. But those don’t count either. Maybe instead I mean that I don’t read enough papers that I select, and that are directly contributing to my research.

Inner Voice: But Steve, you read at least 2 or 3 of those papers every week!

Steve: Well yeah, that’s true, but think about that number! 2 or 3? Drops in the ocean. You don’t become an expert by reading 2 or 3 papers every week.

Inner Voice: But Steve, even 2 papers every week of the year adds up to 104 papers every year! And surely, all those papers that you read for your coursework and for your teaching are contributing at least indirectly to your research!

Steve: Well, maybe, sure. But I don’t really dive deep into those 104 papers. Maybe for like 10 of them, I do, to write whatever paper or chapter I’m working on. But to really be an expert, you need to read tons of papers, and you need to read them several times so that you reach some level of full understanding (or at least I need to, since I’m slow on the uptake).

Inner Voice: So, by “I don’t read enough,” you mean “I don’t read enough papers that I perfectly understand?”

Steve: Yeah, I guess?

This is a conversation I have with myself regularly. My inner voice never seems to quell the other part of me. The same is true of every grad student I know. Most of us are overworked, whether it be from grading, teaching, TAing, coursework, committee work, or more often, all of the above. But the ultimate purpose of grad school, I think, is to become an expert. To do that, you need to gather knowledge. To do that, you need to read the stuff that you’d like to be an expert on. And you need to read a lot of that stuff. And I don’t read a lot of that stuff.

Moreover, even when I do read that stuff, I seldom have time to read it closely. Reading philosophy is hard. It takes forever. For me to grasp a paper well enough to have interesting things to say about it, I need to read it, slowly, at least twice (preferably thrice). And it feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to double-close-read every paper I want to.

A student of Derek Parfit once told me a story. He dropped off a 50-page draft in Parfit’s office, then stepped out for the 10-minute walk to the bus station. Before he reached the station, he received a call asking him to return. Parfit had devoured the draft and written 10 pages of notes. I don’t know what it is to read enough, but Parfit probably read enough. He hoovered up pages. He could eat a porterhouse in a single bite, yet perfectly describe the taste, smell, mouthfeel, whatever. I can’t do that. I don’t know anyone who can.

Because I’m not Parfit, I try to think of what I’d need to give up in order to embody having read enough. I could stop taking days off, stop winding down in the evening with a movie or replaying Mario Galaxy for the 20^th time, or even stop spending time with my friends. I could shut myself up and live, eat, and sleep philosophy. I’ve tried this, and if you have you likely know that it’s a recipe for burnout. This work will not continue if, by the time I submit my dissertation, I never want to read philosophy again.

I could go back in time and convince my high school self to watch less Mad Men and read more Kant. But I doubt I would’ve understood or retained any philosophy I shoved down my own throat back then.

What else could I do? How can I read enough with these constraints? And how can I even recognize when I’m reading enough? I don’t think this is a problem that needs to be solved. It’s a feeling that I, and all of us, need to get out. But that feeling reflects a fantastical image of a creature dedicated entirely to scholarship. And we’re not just scholars; we’re teachers, friends, gamers, film buffs, insert your label of choice. I don’t want to lose those parts of myself in pursuit of some inchoate property, ‘expertise,’ ‘reading enough,’ that I can’t even recognize when I’ve attained it.

Plus, even if I were willing to sacrifice those other parts of myself, expertise isn’t something that we get in a week or a month. It takes years of regular, sustainable work (marathon, not sprint). The trap presented by the feeling that I don’t read enough is that something needs to be done about it. But that feeling is just impatience. Stay the course, the ship will right itself.