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I don't keep count, but I probably read a few dozen books a year. My childhood reading habit fell off some time in high school and I have not yet fully recovered. I find that while once I was able to read hundreds of pages in a single sitting, I now find myself reading a chapter or two each of five different books in a day (this takes me somewhere between 45 minutes and 2 hours depending on the day and the books). Presumably I have the internet and my cell phone to thank for ruining my attention span, but at least this way I'm still making my way through a very long backlog of ebooks, impulse purchases at thrift stores, and recommendations from friends, bloggers, and friendly mottizens.
I think around these parts you will find an interesting mix of people with reading habits like yours or mine, defenders of Richard Hanania's thesis that books are a waste of time (some of which is deeply felt and some of which is just reflexive contrarianism), and those whose revealed preference is the latter but feel bad about it.
I disagree so strongly with Hananina. Maybe that works for "slop" nonfiction: something like Atomic Habits or a Cal Newport book (maybe slop isn't the right word because I enjoy these books, but they can easily be distilled into a blog post), but for more complicated works of nonfiction like serious philosophy or historical analysis where mountains of evidence and argumentation need to be presented to convince the reader, a few page blog post will not suffice. And fiction is just not easily able to be replaced by the short form. The short story is fundamentally different from the novel (although not worse), and TV is not a substitute for the kind of inner insight into another person's mind we get from the written word.
I would also argue that reading changes the way we think about the world. Neil Postman argues this at length in Amusing Ourselves to Death, but a culture based on the written word is going to care much more about the logic and consistency than a culture trained in the deceptive, apperance based world of television. Rob Henderson, Bryan Hobart, and Ted Gioia are all reading stans for reasons similar to this, although it worries me that the first two authors mainly seem to consume popular nonfiction: very little serious scholarship or works of fiction.
Yes, it's a sign that somebody doesn't read literary fiction, history, or serious philosophy. It's also a result of a culture where serious engagement with text isn't valued in education (or in wider discourse). Even a typical university education will have a lot of surveying intended to give you a paragraph-length summary of some great work in your head, and the problem is worsened for autodidacts who aren't forced to spend serious time with any texts, unless they get obsessed with one. Needless to say, this results in a wider culture where people think what matters is getting a lot of summarized versions of other thinkers in their heads, then bouncing those legible, easily-digested summaries off each other in blog posts and podcasts. It's particularly amusing in philosophy when people try to summarize thinkers who really can't be boiled down into a paragraph-length take, ending up in a sort of Philosophy Comics-esque collection of caricatures.
Couldn't have put it better myself. I once dated a philosophy PhD student, and while she had a very deep understanding of the nitty gritty in her specific subfield, her understanding of other (very important mind you) philosophers was very much a paragraph level hot take. Pissed me off to no end.
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