Reading & Heuristics
Someone recently asked me if I keep a list of books I’ve read, am reading, or plan to read. In fact, I used to be much better about this. In college, I was fastidious about keeping a tidy LibraryThings account. I toyed around with Goodreads, too. In reality, however, I think there’s something about record-keeping for its own sake that elicits jouissance. I don’t value my opinions highly enough to offer reviews of things with any reliable regularity.
People are remarkably committed to keeping logs of the movies they watch, the food and wine they enjoy, or whatever. While researching in Paris last year, my newsletter often included reflections on what I was reading. By no means do I regret this. In fact, it’s my style: irregular, aphoristic, and fragmentary. It would be nice, however, if there were a way to publicize the scattered ephemera of my reflections on the literature I’ve encountered. I’ll return to this topic another time.
In the past, I’ve written about my research process (here, here, and here), but I don’t believe I’ve written about my reading habits yet. I’ll feel no shame if I admit that my reading choices are inspired largely by you. When I see someone on Twitter post about a book or article they enjoyed, I’ll often make a note of it.
When it comes to fiction, I know what I like: speculative, dystopian, horrific, modernist, etc. Bataille is a favorite for his ability to provoke nausea and discomfort. Houellebecq, despite his odious politics and attachment to discredited conspiracy theories, remains a pleasure to read. Joyce, Faulkner, and Steinbeck rank among my favorites, too.
As an aside, I find it humorous that, despite having produced a podcast, I don’t listen to them very often. Reading has always been more expedient for me than listening.
When it comes to reading non-fiction, I usually read with a purpose in mind. This means I read actively, underlining quotes and writing summaries for safekeeping. These extracts are very personal and aren’t intended for public intelligibility. I keep what resonates, what provokes, or what I simply find wrong about a given text. These findings join a growing personal database of interlinked citations. This web is a second brain, a generative engine for textual analysis and production.
I can’t deny the deep materiality of this process. Whether I’m working with a physical book or with a PDF document, book covers and titles often mean more to me than they probably ought to. A good title can compensate for an otherwise mediocre piece of writing.
My thinking, for most subjects, is guided by heuristics. OED unhelpfully defines heuristic as “a heuristic process or method for problem-solving, decision-making, or discovery; a rule or piece of information used in such a process.” It’s a practical approach to problem-solving that doesn’t guarantee perfection but furnishes good-enough goalposts allowing you to discover solutions for yourself. Anyone can learn these heuristics.
Scholarship is a discourse community: a live and living field. In many ways, it resembles a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Everyone is ostensibly at work for the same purpose, but we all know that isn’t the case. These heuristics are structuring structures: they are what Kant termed conditions of possibility. They elaborate on the contours of what knowledge for a given subject is possible. It depends on one’s field; however, there may be any number of heuristics that permit the asking of particular sets of questions. When you master these heuristics, you’ll find that your ability to read about anything at all increases quite rapidly.
