READ LESS BUT TWICE—ON PRINCIPLE

A multi-trip ticket on the Swiss national railway has room for six
stamps. Before each journey you stick the ticket into an orange
machine that validates it by stamping the date and time and cutting off
a tiny notch along the left edge. Once it has six stamps, the ticket is
worthless.
Imagine a book-reading ticket with fifty spaces. The system is
otherwise the same: before you read a book, you’ve got to stamp your
ticket. Yet unlike the train ticket, this is the only one you’ll ever have.
You can’t buy a new one. Once the ticket has been used up, you can’t
open any more new books—and there’s no fare-dodging allowed. Fifty
books across a whole lifetime? For many people that’s a non-issue,
but for you as the reader of this book it’s a horrifying thought. How are
you supposed to get through life in a half-civilized manner with so few
books?
My personal library consists of three thousand books—about one
third read, one third skimmed, and one third unread. I regularly add
new ones, and I have an annual clear-out when I chuck the old ones
away. Three thousand books. It’s a modest library in comparison to
that of, say, the deceased Umberto Eco (thirty thousand books). Yet
often I can only faintly recall its contents. As I let my gaze wander over
the spines, my mind is filled with wispy shreds of memory mixed with
vague emotions and the occasional flashes of a particular scene.
Sometimes a sentence will drift by, like an abandoned rowboat in the
silent fog. Rarely do I remember a compact précis. There are a couple
of books I can’t even say with certainty I’ve actually read—I have to
open them and hunt for crinkled pages or notes in the margin. At such
moments I don’t know what’s more shameful, my Swiss-cheese
memory or the apparently negligible impact of so many of these
books, though I do find it reassuring that lots of my friends have had
the same experience. For me it happens not just with books but also
with essays, articles, analyses and all kinds of texts I have read and
enjoyed. Little of them has stuck. Dismally little.
What’s the point of reading a book when the content largely
seeps away? The felt experience at the moment of reading matters, of
course, no question. But so does the felt experience of crème brûlée,
and you don’t expect it to shape the character of the person gobbling it
down. Why is it we retain so little of what we read?
We’re reading wrong. We’re reading neither selectively nor
thoroughly enough. We let our attention off the leash as though it were
a dog we’re happy to let roam, instead of directing it toward its
splendid quarry. We fritter our most valuable resource on things that
don’t deserve them.
Today I read differently than I did a few years ago. Just as much,
but fewer books—only I read them better, and twice. I’ve become
radically selective. A book earns ten minutes of my time, maximum,
then I give my verdict—to read or not to read. The multi-trip ticket
metaphor helps me be more drastic. Is the book I’m holding in my
hands a book for which I’d be willing to sacrifice a space on my ticket?
Few are. Those that do make the cut I read twice in direct succession.
On principle.
Read a book twice? Why not? In music we’re used to listening to a
track more than once. And if you play an instrument, you’ll know you
can’t master a score on the first attempt. It takes several concentrated
iterations before you can hurry on to the next piece. Why shouldn’t the
same go for books?
The effect of reading twice isn’t twice the effect of reading once.
It’s much greater—judging by my own experience, I’d put it at a factor
of ten. If I retain three percent of the content after one reading, after
two readings it’s up to thirty percent.
 I’m continually astonished by how much you can absorb during
slow, focused reading, how many new things you discover on a
second pass, and how greatly your understanding deepens through
this measured approach. When Dostoyevsky saw Holbein’s The Body
of the Dead Christ in the Tomb in Basel in 1867, he was so captivated
by the painting that his wife had to drag him away after half an hour.
Two years later he could describe it in near-photographic detail in The
Idiot. Would a snapshot on your iPhone have the same degree of
effectiveness? Hardly. The great novelist needed to be immersed in
the painting in order to make productive use of it. “Immersed” is the
key word here. Immersion—the opposite of surfing.
Let’s refine this a little. One: degree of effectiveness—that sounds
technical. Can you make that sort of judgment about books? Yes, this
type of reading is use-orientated and unromantic. Leave Romanticism
for other activities. If a book leaves no trace in your brain—because it
was a bad book or you read it badly—I’d count that as a waste of time.
A book is something qualitatively different from crème brûlée, a scenic
flight over the Alps or sex.
Two: crime novels and thrillers are excluded from the ticketing
system, because with few exceptions you can’t read them twice. Who
wants to re-identify a killer?
Three: you’ve got to decide how many spaces your personal
reading ticket should have. I’ve limited mine to one hundred for the
next ten years. That’s an average of ten books per year—criminally
few for a writer. Yet, as I said, I read these excellent books twice or
even three times, with great enjoyment and ten times the
effectiveness.
Four: if you’re still young, say in the first third of your active
reading life, you should devour as many books as possible—novels,
short stories, poetry, non-fiction of all stripes. Go nuts. Pay no
attention to quality. Read your fill. Why? The answer has to do with a
kind of mathematical optimization called the secretary problem (see
Chapter 48). In the classic formulation, you’re trying to select the best
secretary from a pool of applicants. The solution is to establish the
basic distribution by interviewing and rejecting the first thirty-seven
percent of applicants. Through indiscriminate reading, or—in statistical
terms—by taking multiple samples in the first third of your reading life,
you’ll get a representative picture of the literary landscape. You’ll
sharpen your powers of judgment, too, which will enable you to be
drastically selective later. So don’t start stamping your reading ticket
until you’re about thirty, but be ruthless thereafter. Once you hit thirty,
life’s too short for bad books.