Portrait of a Man Reading by Paul Kotlarevsky, circa 1916
The Fountain:
A Guide to Deep Reading
"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."
Mortimer J. Adler
This is the manner of deep reading.
Against your intuition—the temptation to charge forward and act on the book—deep reading is instead about opening yourself up to new ideas.
You can work on a farm until your bones break, but if you never made sure the soil was fertile, your sweat is wasted and you'll end up starved.
Before we look at the why and how of deep reading, we need a brief rewind to Ancient Mesopotamia. (I promise this is relevant)
Because the messenger's mouth was heavy
and he couldn't repeat [the message],
the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay
and put words on it, like a tablet.
Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.
Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, c. 1800 BC
For ages, civilizations grew through the tongue and stories were inherited around a fire, but this could only take us so far.
When the Sumerians put reed to clay and carved out small tablets of cuneiform, they gave information a permanence; until you could trap data in the clouds five thousand years later, nothing would transform writing quite as much as this.
The point here is something we forget: reading and writing are human inventions.
A baby will learn to crawl, then hobble, then trip, and finally walk upright, but without proper lessons, words on a page will always be meaningless scribbles.
Since literature is 'of the mind,' it shares its complexity; there are neither rules nor equations, and instead we must swat through a swarm of debate and interpretation.
What do we do with a book?
What is the 'right' way to read? If that exists at all . . .
Deep Reading
To say there is a 'correct' way to read is dangerously close to dogma, almost incompatible with the idea of art itself.
. . . but that's a lazy conclusion.
We're not talking about smut, nor YA fantasy, nor the beginner self-help stuff you get in a corporate Secret Santa; if we narrow it down to the books that transmit wisdom—classics, memoirs, expositions, essays, novels—then we can safely assert something closer to 'correct'.
Deep reading.
A dialogue between you and the author, where reading is no longer a one-way flow of shallow facts to memorise, but a primer for discovery, reflection, and contemplation at the highest level.
The reader uses the book to think.
New wisdom must find its place in your existing network of ideas, and hard work is the only means to form these connections, through writing, recollection, application, and other such sources of friction.
It takes great time and effort, but if you want to remember what you learn, let it change how you meet the world, and invest in wisdom—our most priceless asset—then you must learn how to read deeply.
How to Read Deeply
Over the years, no matter what I read, these tips are the essentials I find myself returning to.
Much of this comes from my experience, so don't read these like the Ten Commandments; reading is an art as much as it is a science, and we should lean into our personal flair rather than mindlessly obeying an online face.
Choose a challenge
Your choice of literature can make deep reading impossible.
By nature, learning is exertion: you go from a state of less understanding to more understanding, and unless you have an brain aneurysm mid-page, the opposite is never true.
Even when reading breeds more questions than answers, you still stepped closer to truth.
Therefore, the most valuable authors are those greater in wisdom to you; this gap means they have something to offer, and your task it to bridge it.
This means we should seek a challenge. We should find books that confuse us at first, or at least provoke a reflection—both are signal of their hidden value.
This is a game of the healthy medium.
If a book is too easy and restates things you already know, then it's offers nothing more than some light revision or casual before-bed reading.
On the other extreme, being lofty and over-ambitious will invite a crash, like if you were to read Hegel as your introduction to philosophy—you don't want to demoralize yourself for the next ten years.
The middle ground is your healthy challenge, a balance of learning with progression.
A very unscientific graph of the Goldilocks Zone
Add friction
Friction is the difference between forgetting everything in a week and wisdom that never expires.
If you fly through a book like you're skimming a work email—sure—you'll reach your page goal faster.
Who cares?
What does quantity matter if you failed to learn anything?
'Friction' is a dirty word in the hustler's world, but a reader should embrace it. It slows down the flow of information and gives you room to wrestle with new ideas, to think, to revise, to ruminate.
This is why you still remember topics from your school years, even decades later—all that studying and repetition welded the ideas into your consciousness, and while the friction was a pain in the ass back then, it paid off.
As usual, this works in moderation. Nobody expects you to write a PhD thesis on every novel you read, but listening to an AI summary on 3x speed is no better. You discern the middle ground.
These are my favourite ways to add friction:
Take notes in the margins or in a separate notebook.
Write about what you learned after each session.
Talk about new ideas, either to yourself or with others.
Explain the author's points in your own words.
Try to argue for and against the major arguments.
Reread books.
Apply ideas elsewhere, and in real life.
Make ideas belong to you
Why is modern discourse so annoying?
One reason is the TikTokification of knowledge, where our opinions are downloaded from reels and quirky infographics without any real thought to fortify them.
Nobody knows why they believe what they believe.
At best, they can parrot what they picked up in an echo chamber, but the second it falls under any scrutiny, their worldview melts into a stuttering puddle.
To avoid this, we must make ideas our own.
This really is a byproduct of friction. Rather than merely reiterating what we read, it helps to give our own take on topic: does this match what we expected? Have we seen this in practice elsewhere? Does this remind us of anything? Is the author missing something?
Questions like this adorn ideas with a 'personal stake,' something more than the text on the page, enough to truly integrate them in into what we already know.
Pretty much the source of all human knowledge
Let yourself forget
There is a bizarre notion that good learning = remembering everything.
Perhaps it's a fruit of the modern education system, where the more facts you can remember for the exam, the better.
We aren't encyclopedias though, and while a good memory is important, it's only the beginning of wisdom—what we do with this knowledge is what matters, and we ought to add depth through analysis:
Why is this the case?
What of it?
Is this even true?
Where does this come into play?
Besides, not everything deserves to be remembered. If we force ourselves to memorise every little tangent on the periphery, we may forget to distinguish what matters most.
To forget is to discriminate, and to discriminate is proof that not all knowledge is equal to you.
Screw the quotas
Page goals have their time and place. They gamify reading and keep you motivated, and against the tools of multi-trillion dollar media empires, we should take any chance we get to make reading more attractive.
Disclaimer out the way . . . I still don't like them.
I read slowly.
I jot down my thoughts throughout.
I run through it again a second time.
I write thousands of words about the ideas that matter.
It's Sloooooooooooooooow.
I only read a handful of books a year, but I read them well, and I don't need the nagging of a book goal in the back of my mind . . .
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"...get it over with..."
No thanks.
I go at my own pace and digest the content, far better than rushing to some arbitrary number that lets me feel better about myself.
You see some influencers flexing 100+ books a year, but the only way this is possible is through a diet of cheap romantasy, repetitive self-help, and a complete absence of depth.
Or they're locked in a monastery. I'm not sure what's more likely.
While quantity is not necessarily bad, it shouldn't cripple the quality of your reading.
Don't take my slowness as a recommendation—I have yet to reach my healthy middle—but it's out there somewhere, a balance between depth and progression.
Practice
Reading is the only way to get better at reading.
You can watch a hundred videos on analysis, jump between ten note-taking apps, and skim as many commentaries as you wish, but none of that replaces the daily graft.
Practice is where theory becomes intuition.
The more you read, the better you can recognise patterns of plot, logic, and structure.
The more you read from a single author, the closer you grasp their personal style.
The more genres you read, the easier it gets to adapt to new types of books.
Literature is unforgiving at times, but the only way is forward through failure, hard work, and an ever growing heap of confusion.