What I Talk About When I Talk About Reading

Musing #15 | A good read leads to good conversation.

In case you didn’t recognize it, the title is a riff on a famous book, a memoir by Haruki Murakami — What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Murakami writes: "For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor." He details his interest in running, training for the New York City marathon, the mental and physical process, sensations, reflections. He muses on how running relates to creative life: “Most of what I know about writing I've learned through running every day.”

For me, reading is both a literal activity and a metaphor. When you write, people assume you read a lot. And the thing they assume you read a lot of is books. They want lists of book recommendations, names of authors.

I do read a lot, but not in the way people think. Dare I say that I think reading lots of books — like hundreds per year — is overrated. I’m a fan of more dispersed kinds of reading. Bite-sized, decentralized, conversational. My favorite kind of reading is reading between the lines of whatever and whoever …