What Does it Mean to be Well-Read?

On Curating, Savoring, and Finding Awe in Books

The jazz music plays as you watch that green light across the bay. Jazz floats over the water, calling to you. Big Brother watches your every move. You escape the ever present eyes and find carnal love before falling down the rabbit hole to be hunted by the Queen of Hearts. The moors are cold, colder alone, the life of a governess and Thornfield Hall with dark secrets in the attic. Drama, conflict, intrigue, all living on the pages of books. To be well read means that your reading brings you awe, an awe that sweeps you into a different world, worlds of talking rabbits and lost love. Whether in the world of Brontë or Fitzgerald or Yarros, awe is just waiting for the right reader.

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Are You Well Read?

La Lectora by Federico Faruffini

My sister recommended a video on how to be well read a while back. Tristan of the Tristan and the Classics explains step by step how to be well read. He includes tips like selecting a genre or category you want to focus on and to read deeply in that one area until you thoroughly understand those selections of books. He walks the listener through selecting categories and books to start with. He also encourages rereading. He describes a study of genres. A reader becomes well read one genre at a time, a kind of self-education or literary degree in the genre of your choosing.

Matthew Long also discusses how to self-educate through reading in his article. Long discusses how he turned his “fairly haphazard” reading into a syllabus to be studied. Shannon Reed also dives deep into these “self-curated thematic series” in her book Why We Read. I am getting Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity vibes. A focused and naturally paced reading life. I see the appeal of a personalized reading road map and this could work really well for the reader that prefers discipline and reading primarily in one genre. I know readers who only consume mystery and others who primarily stick with romantasy. If you are one of those readers, a deep dive into your favorite genre could be a way to be well read.

What if you’re more of an eclectic reader though (like me!) In my season of raising toddling humans, there isn’t much free time in my day to day. There are not enough hours in the day to eat, sleep, exercise, and get more than a couple pages of reading done. This causes a huge rift between what I want to read and what I can actually read. What this has largely led to is mood reading. When I get a moment to sit down with a book after a day of work and family time, I don’t want to push through that classic literature piece that I want to (or feel obligated to? I am not going to scratch too much at that question right now) read.

Shannon Reed explains, “reading, even reading solely for pleasure, is real work. Perhaps the physical exertion isn’t much, but the demand in ourselves to the world of the novel (setting, time period, closeness to or distance from our known lives), as well as the narrator and their attitude toward the world, the characters and the dialogue, which is why I find most books of short stories enervating.”

In other words, reading is hard work! Enjoyable work to a reader, but still takes energy. At eight-thirty on a Monday evening, after battling a whiny toddler into the bath and scraping myself off the couch to get my our teeth brushed before bed, I don’t necessarily have the mental load to work on another chapter of Walden by Henry David Thoreau (a book that has been sitting untouched on my bedside table for months. I’ll get inspired to pick it up eventually, right?). If Walden is next on your self-curated reading list, you have to read that book to be well-read according to the description above, though. That’s the flaw I see in the system. I really like the idea of deep diving into a genre. The storytelling nerd in me wants to read and study the classics, to understand the start of story and where story has taken us over thousands of years. But how quickly will that reading list become homework? And if that homework doesn’t get done, does that make you a bad reader?

Of course not. I mentioned awe earlier, the pleasure we get from books. That’s what I look for when I pick up one of the six books I’m working on. I’m asking myself, where can I find my awe tonight, to get swept up into a story and prose( before falling asleep five minutes later.) This is the feeling I search for when I read. Kirk Sneider wrote a great piece about the need for raw awe, the commitment to slowing down (Slow Productivity again! It exists here too!), turning off technology, and committing to solitude and peace. Sneider describes the concept “as the humility and wonder, or sense of adventure, toward living.”

Technology tends to keep us at a surface level of living, a world of quantity over quality, more is better. If we just optimize our time and stay disciplined enough, we can squeeze productivity into every minute of our days. Just writing out that sentence gives me anxiety. Sneider explains that, as humans, we actually need to exist in an opposite environment. “Today, we are rapidly becoming ‘tech-vexed’- [his] word for the gradual relentless seduction for computerised life [...] many of us are more intimately connected to our smartphones than to non mediated relationships with people.” The result of this life is an increase in isolation, a world of quick (and temporary) fixes, like drugs and alcohol. Our world has sped up, and we are missing that awe.

So perhaps this feeling of awe could be the measure of being well read. If awe is prioritized in our reading life, it doesn’t matter if that awe is coming from an audiobook listened to during a long commute, or the tenth reread of an old favorite. If you’re getting that moment of humility, the words filling your bucket with joy, satisfaction, and care, it doesn’t really matter what words are in front of you. These are the feelings I look for when I get comfy with a book. No curated list. No tracking my book count for the year (and if curated lists and book counts bring you awe, more power to you!) Just raw awe and a passion for life brought to me through words.

So settle down and kick up your feet. This is your time. No one else’s opinion matters. Maybe get yourself a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. Get lost in the land of your choosing and enjoy.