On reading less
As a child, I only really read comics. And this only until I had access to a laptop capable of gaming. I read so little that I did not even do the mandatory readings for school. I can safely say that I have read around 5 book the whole of my teenage years. When, by chance, I found myself at 21 starting a bachelor's degree in Classical Studies, I was overwhelmed, first by the pleasure of reading - of knowing more, and then by the insurmountable pressure of having not read anything. All my peers, mostly younger than me, seemingly had read everything ever. I felt I was behind, that I had spent my time doing nothing productive.
So starts my obsession. I started tracking what I read on Goodreads. I set ambitious goals and took them seriously. In my first year of college I read 65 books. I was zealous in my efforts to read at all possible times, to the detriment of enjoyment. As any convert, I was depressed by the calculations I made. I want to read this many books, if I read 50 every year, then I will be 90 before I even reach halfway. It became an existential threat.
This worry, this pressure, molded a big part of my perception of time. If I had to go to a birthday dinner, I always had a gnawing feeling, scurried away somewhere I couldn't see it, only hear it, murmuring. I should be reading... As expected, I soon realized that my peers had not, in fact, read everything, and my first year efforts were more than enough to catch up with everyone. (I know this feels unnecessarily competitive, it was.)
I recently started questioning, now that I know that the more I read, the less I remember, the less I appreciate what I did read, why do I read? I realized, in the beginning, that I wanted to be a writer too. But I could only be good at it if I read a lot. So I kept reading, postponing writing, until I hit some imaginary goalpost which would unlock my newfound powers of infinite imagination and poignant prose (the goal was 500 books, btw. I'm insufferable!)
But how can I write, if I'm always reading? What's the priority? I guess it's obvious, but it wasn't for me. Only then did I started to understand that even great writers, writers I admired, didn't read so much. Their great writing came from writing. Sure, they read some things. But, more than how much, is how you read. An attentive writer will read with infinite depth one book. I read hundreds but I'm not sure how deeply. I suspected this when I came around to rereading somethings. They were completely different books! Sometimes I think about monks in the Middle Ages. They wrote fantastic things, and more often than not they had access to 20 books their whole lives. They thought about things, they wrote more than they read.
I'm trying to be more like this. I'm doing a conscious effort to reading less, and doing more. I think the philosophy should be, in a disgustingly corporate expression, "less input, more output". I must remind myself that I should live more, write more, study more, talk more. I don't think, like I did when I was 21 first learning about the Odyssey, that my time was wasted.