In a humorous and wide-ranging interview for The Observer Effect, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was asked how he reads so much. His response resonated with me:
“I’ve really read all the time since I was a little kid, it’s been a lifelong thing. It’s basically trying to try to fill in all the puzzle pieces for the big discrepancies. A great term is ‘sense-making’. Essentially, what the hell is happening and why? The world’s an incredibly complex and erratic place and trying to figure that out…it’s kind of a lifetime occupation.”
Reading is a part of me. Whenever I am without a book, I find myself searching for one to pick up. I am an academic reader, a beach reader, a car manual reader (yes, back when I had a Wrangler, I read it’s manual). I’ve been known to read when I show up early for meetings, when I’m waiting in line, when I first wake up and just before bed. I brought a book with me to prom. You can judge me all you want, but Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex is an un-put-down-able book.
I’m also very much a “sense-maker.” I was that kid constantly asking my parents “but why?” about everything, and not because I thought it was funny to irritate them. I love mysteries, I love philosophy and spiritualism, I love science, all because I enjoy the balance that comes from attempting to solve unanswerable questions. I think that’s what we’re all trying to do, each in our own way; we are constantly sense-making. For me it’s through reading and writing, for others maybe through listening or speaking or running or meditation.
One of the great gifts of the current pandemic has been the extra time at home, and I’ve been obsessed with the trend towards tackling big books as a result. Another incredible venture capitalist Catarina Fake writes about this gift on her blog. I love her idea of chronicling her reading of many-paged books, and just might copy her as I am halfway through the 700-page House of Leaves, and am considering either Infinite Jest or Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs next.
I’m also learning more about the concept of deep reading, committing to reading every word on the page without skimming and staying with a text for an extended period of time instead of reading in bits and pieces. Ezra Klein discusses his deep reading habits on his podcast, and you can even join or start a deep reading book club where you and a group of people take turns reading a book out loud together (in person or virtually), annotating and discussing as they go. As my ability to concentrate becomes more and more scattered as a result of doing everything from home, where my “office” is also my “gym” and is just down the hall from my bed and also the kitchen, this practice is super comforting to me. It’s challenging, but has the potential to put me into a rare flow state where I’m perfectly synced with the words and can get a much more satisfying learning or storytelling experience than I would get from reading for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.
“The world’s an incredibly complex and erratic place and trying to figure that out…it’s kind of a lifetime occupation.” I think we’re all really feeling that right now, amidst so much uncertainty. I hope we all continue our life’s work of sense-making, and I hope we all keep reading big books.