Why Reading is Still Relevant in the Age of Sparknotes
I started more than 10 books last year. I finished 1 of them.
I read about half of most of them and moved on to the next one. It’s challenging to sit down and stick to a book when other titles grab our attention. Why can’t we spend 2 minutes on one book and check out the next one? In the age of SparkNotes, we can.
Sparknotes, Blinkist, Instaread, and so on. We can get the essence of important books with a few scrolls. Why should we spend so much of our precious time reading?
Discover the Meaning Yourself
In middle school, I made a deal with my mom and said that I would save her a lot of money by learning math by myself if she could buy a cheap textbook for me. She agreed, and I studied hard.
For one week. Then, I regressed to playing video games.
However, the knowledge that I gained within that week stuck with me miraculously. I did a single chapter on “foiling” quadratic equations, and I was surprised to see that I was able to do them after a month later of frying my brain with Fortnite.
When I eventually got a tutor to teach me, I realized that I had forgotten most of the concepts she taught me in a few weeks. But the foiling strategy I came to understand by myself stuck for years after. I still use it.
It is extremely challenging to gain long-lasting knowledge through book summaries because we are spoon-fed information. We can only have ideas stick with us if we are the ones to “discover it” in the reading. If we toil to grasp what the text says, then we have found the author’s meaning within the text ourselves. And our brains like what we discover, not what a third-party app has.
Increase Self-Awareness
Let’s say a writer claims that religion is good for people in general. To verify this claim, we think about our own experience with religion. We might ask questions like, “When’s the last time I gave a prayer?” and dig up memories of when we did or saw something religious.
Perhaps the writer says that riding motorcycles is too dangerous. The reader could question, has anyone around me been safe on a motorbike? Did anyone experience any accidents?
Reading makes the reader question the content of the text. A responsible reader will often verify whether the claims of the author stand against the reader’s personal experiences. Maybe readers will agree with the author. Perhaps not.
But what is most important is that it is often very challenging to come up with corresponding personal memories that support or reject an author’s claim. So, by reading, we can understand which fields or ideas we lack experience in, and judge whether that field is worth studying more into. We get to understand what we don’t know. It’s a humbling experience.
Now, why can’t we just do this process through Sparknotes? We certainly can, but Sparknotes lacks the minute details that make up the whole argument. We are presented with the argument without supporting examples, which we question and verify the most. And we can only judge more if we understand the greater picture.
To make the ideas of a book stick and be more self-aware about what we know and wish to know further, pick up a book and read from start to end.