How to Read, and How to Read Well

This essay will serve as an intro to the new Substack blog. In a sense this is a return to roots—I had a blog before I even had a reddit account, and as I’ve explained in interviews, reddit radicalized me. I’m a better writer than I am a speaker, and I’m a better writer than I am a publisher too. The essay is the form where I’m most comfortable.

What’s this blog for? Originally the Substack was going to be yet another vehicle (along with the Gumroad) for supplying our audience with hardcovers and podcast access, but that has been decided against for reasons. We’re moving to a subscription model with hardcovers etc. because I fully expect IP will lose processor access at some point, and this is how we will survive it. Substack is another branch of that survival model, and I will use it to give you all something worth reading for your money. By the way, if you signed up for free, you’re not going to see much after this, the only full-length essay not to be paywalled. My family has to eat, and I would be a negligent father if I relied on PayPal for that. So thank you for signing up as a paid subscriber.

With that out of the way, on to the topic.

Since launching Imperium Press in 2019, I have never read fewer books. You’d expect a publisher to be drowning in the things, consooming books as Joe Biden guzzles Alzheimer pills. Quite the contrary. If you publish books, and if you want to do a decent job at it, you have to change how you read. When I first published Iliad, our edition of which runs to some 180,000 words, I read it I believe eight times over, looking for errors. There is no way this project would be viable if I did the same for every other book we put out, so as with everything IP, I learned as I went. I learned to read differently. I learned the art of the close reading.

This is not entirely true, I had done close readings before, but putting your name to something (hopefully not) riddled with errors does tend to light a fire under your ass. Before this, I used to read with a pen (or, in the current year, with Notepad).

It is my firm and unshakeable belief that you are better off reading ten well-chosen books dozens of times, savouring them, digesting them fully, letting them permeate you, letting them colour, infuse and phallogocentrically hermeneutize everything else you read—than you are reading 1,000 books once, however great they might be. You could do worse than these ten. Another way I used to put it before Twitter shitcanned me the second time: if you only read epic poetry and took it as seriously as the modern libtoad takes breakfast cereals, you would be the most formidable human alive. Read less, and read deeper. Yet another way of putting it: read slowly and you have close reading; read more slowly and you have philology. I am no philologist, but I do read slowly and I take great pride in it.

Reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is like trying to take bites out of a neutron star. A few aphorisms are throwaways, but many are pregnant with whole careers, maybe even entire fields of study. They are dense. So when I first got hold of BGE, I had to slow down and “read with a pen”. Out came the trusty old Notepad file, and each one of these things I summarized as best I could, jotting down thoughts as they came to me, connections as they occurred between the different aphorisms throughout the book, and then what seemed to be a disordered jumble came to have shape, form, and, if not method, at least some kind of structure. As I read the book again, I noted themes running through it, themes that skipped over whole sections, recapitulated themselves later, and popped up at unexpected times. By the end I had a set of notes maybe ¼ as long as BGE itself, and which I still refer to from time to time if the text comes up, or if I recall something from it, which I do with much greater regularity than I recall other books, because I’d read them so that they might be read as much as that I might understand them.

This is, in some sense, now the way I read every book. I don’t take notes for all of them, but I do for important ones. The last one I made extensive notes for was Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna, which I flog like a door-to-door salesman. I don’t take expository notes for books I edit, but I do jot things down, a stray reference, the name of a book explicating some point the author made, that sort of thing—often this forms the backbone of the book’s eventual bibliography, index, and other back matter. So that by the time I’m finished editing a book I have a well-rounded view of it, not only the basic thesis (if any), but a better view of the background, structure, thematic unity, and the ultimate stakes of what’s going on in it.

This is how you make connections between ideas where others don’t. This is how you see the greater picture as to where a work fits into a canon, what its significance is, and what it really has to teach. Reading slowly, maybe even philologically, enables you to draw inferences that clarify broader trends—trends which might run across millennia and which might be otherwise hidden in plain sight. Fustel de Coulanges was the absolute past master at this kind of close reading. We have some lecture notes by his students where this is noted about him. It’s this attention to detail that made clear for him exactly what the engine was that drove the whole of classical civilization, which was not clear to anyone who hadn’t read all the primary sources in the original languages including all the footnotes—and which remained unclear even to many who had.

You’re not going to be able to do all that by philologizing ten well-chosen books in a lifetime, but you’re going to get some of the way there. And you’re going to get more of the way there than you will by devouring and then forgetting 30 books a year. Until only quite recently if you had any books in your house at all, you only had the Bible and maybe a book of ballads or something. And for the majority of human history, you owned no books and you were happy—you had the songs of your forefathers, you knew them all by heart, that was all ye knew, and all ye need to know. Ten well-chosen books are a veritable Horn of Amaltheia, depending on the choosing.

But the choosing—there’s the rub.

More on that later.