The Importance of Reading Books

There is a strange kind of poverty in having access to the accumulated wisdom of mankind and choosing to live almost entirely inside your own experience.

One lifetime is a small sample. One profession is a narrow window. One generation has its own fashionable mistakes. Books give us access to people who lived elsewhere, thought differently, built something we have not built, or paid dearly for an error we are still tempted to make.

That is one reason I read. It is also one reason The Grain exists.

The ability is only the beginning

“The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t read.”
Often attributed to Mark Twain; the attribution is unsupported.¹

The attribution deserves caution. The challenge deserves attention. Literacy gives us access to an extraordinary inheritance. What do we do with that access?

Reading a book requires us to stay with an argument long enough to understand it. The author has room to define terms, develop a premise, anticipate an objection, introduce evidence, and explain a consequence. We have room to question each step.

That kind of attention matters. If we repeatedly abandon an argument as soon as it becomes demanding, we make ourselves easier to persuade by whatever is shortest, loudest, or most emotionally satisfying.

Your experience is too small

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.”
George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons, through the character Jojen Reed.

A biography lets us follow decisions through their consequences. History lets us see institutions rise, incentives change, currencies weaken, wars begin, and people convince themselves that the old lessons no longer apply.

Fiction can make us inhabit a perspective we would otherwise encounter only from the outside. Philosophy forces us to examine the assumptions through which we interpret all of it.

James Mattis put the limitation of experience bluntly:

“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
James Mattis, as quoted by the U.S. Marine Corps.²

I take that as a challenge to intellectual complacency. A numerical total cannot make us wise. We can read a hundred books carelessly and preserve every prejudice we brought to the first page. The point is to let experience beyond our own test what we think we know.

Originality benefits from a little history

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”
Attributed to Abraham Lincoln; original source unverified.³

There is something humbling about discovering that the brilliant new idea you have been defending was debated centuries ago—and that someone already identified the objection you had not considered.

That discovery can save years. It can also make a disagreement more interesting. Instead of assuming that the person across from us is simply uninformed, we may recognize a deeper difference about knowledge, human nature, morality, or purpose.

Reading across disciplines has helped me see those connections. Energy leads into economics. Economics leads into incentives and institutions. Philosophy asks how we know whether an explanation is sound. Scripture reaches into what we believe about God, human beings, and the purpose of a life.

The more those threads connect, the more useful the reading becomes.

Borrow some distance from your own time

“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”
Albert Einstein, writing on classical literature in 1952.⁴

Every age has ideas that feel too obvious to question. Reading older books helps us notice them. We encounter people who were intelligent, serious, and utterly convinced by assumptions we now recognize as mistaken. That should give us pause about our own.

Older books also contain durable observations: ambition, envy, courage, responsibility, love, pride, fear. Technologies change. Those subjects remain recognizable.

Historical distance does not make an author right. It gives us another vantage point from which to examine the present. We still have to reason.

A family can inherit a habit of learning

“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”
Attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte; original source unverified.⁵

I want my children to see adults reading, reconsidering, asking questions, and enjoying ideas. A family can pass down a willingness to learn as surely as it passes down a favorite recipe.

In his introduction to Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, Alan Ryan captures the independence reading makes possible:

“Once children have mastered reading and writing, they can take care of the learning process for themselves,”
Alan Ryan, introduction to The Open Society and Its Enemies.⁶

Ryan continues by acknowledging the help of those we call teachers. The larger point is powerful: learning need not end when formal instruction ends. Reading gives a person a means to keep going.

What changed in your thinking?

A finished book invites a better question than “How many pages did I read?”

What did I learn? Which assumption became harder to defend? What did the author explain well? What remains unproven? What should I do differently?

Admiration should leave room for criticism. A book can be valuable even when I reject part of its argument. An author can illuminate one subject without becoming an authority on every other subject.

That is how I want to approach a recommended-reading list. Each entry is an invitation to engage with a work, examine its ideas, and consider what is worth carrying forward.

An unread book is remarkably patient. Unfortunately, patience is about the only virtue it can demonstrate on our behalf.

My recommended reading

I am collecting my top 100 books and other long-form works in a living reading list. The order can change as I read, revisit, and reconsider. Alongside the titles, I want to explain the ideas that mattered and the impact they had on my thinking.

Choose a subject that matters to you. Find a book worth staying with. Give the author enough attention to understand the argument, and yourself enough freedom to question it.

Then ask what follows.

Explore my top 100 recommended reads →

Quotation sources and attribution notes

Quote Investigator’s history of the reading maxim finds no substantive evidence for its attribution to Twain. The wording above is the version that prompted this essay.
U.S. Marine Corps, Sustaining the Transformation, quotes the Mattis passage.
The Lincoln line circulates in quotation collections, but an original letter, speech, or contemporary account has not been established for this essay.
Donostia International Physics Center’s Einstein literature page reproduces the passage and dates it to 1952.
The Napoleon line is widely attributed to him; an original source has not been established for this essay.
Alan Ryan’s introduction to the Princeton Classics edition of The Open Society and Its Enemies, discussing Popper’s education. The sentence is Ryan’s commentary, rather than a direct quotation from Popper.