I like books.
(See!? I already sound like a little old lady, stuck in a fusty old reading ‘nook’.)
Ok, but I do have digital books too. So, I‘m not totally ‘last century’. Sometimes I read an actual physical book, and sometimes, it’s an e-book. But the medium doesn’t really matter - it’s the depth I value, in book format.
I know - I am writing a daily post, which is the exact opposite of the ‘depth’ argument. Here, I touch on a wide variety of topics and do so in digestible (brief, and relatively shallow) nuggets. Total hypocrite.
Or….maybe, I value that too.
Every day, I read a handful of articles and posts. One (sethgodin.com), is super-brief; generally just a few lines - about business, marketing, and much more. Others take 5-10 minutes to read, such as, Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack articles - putting the news of the day into historical context. Once a week, I read Robert Glazer’s Friday Forward post about the workplace, business, and leadership.
The great thing about the digital world is that there is basically no topic you can’t find. Substack itself has dozens of different topics with thousands of writers. So, breadth of reading is easier to accomplish in this format, and you can cover lots of different topics in just a few minutes.
And then every month, I read some longer articles. I’m a big fan of The Atlantic magazine for example. Their articles are long (maybe 15 minutes - 30 minute reads), but written by top experts and always interesting, even if the topic isn’t one I would pull of a shelf independently. So the magazine format helps me increase my breadth of reading, as well as adding more to the depth. On the other hand, I also get ‘Backpacker’ magazine, which is narrower in breadth, but goes deeper into trail assessments and gear discussions for example.
Magazines are a middle ground. They curate content for you - sometimes broadly, sometimes more narrowly - but the articles can usually get a little more detailed.
And then….books. Obviously, there are books on every topic, so you can go as broad as you like with your reading, but generally you are reading only one or two books at a time. So in any given week, you are being taken on a deeper journey into an idea, an event, a life, or a subject. In a book, you can get to know the author and her protagonists better. You get to know their story (even in a non-fictional book, there must be story).
All these different formats give us different things. One is not better or worse than the other.
The main challenge that I can see is that the short and broad approach is so compelling - because of its convenience, and often its ability to share your opinion in the comments - that it is becoming the only source that some people use to gather input on the world at large.
This is not enough.
The arc of an idea, the empathy with characters, the argument of an author, or the lessons learned throughout a life (in a biography for example), can’t be gleaned in a two-minute post. We miss out on perspective and story if we rarely or never read a book. According to a Gallup poll, around 48% of Americans read at least one book a year, and around 35% read 11 or more books a year. That still means that over half of Americans never pick up a book (though the number of people reading about one or more a month is encouraging to me).
It seems to me as though many of us are more inclined to rush to find ‘the bottom line’ of a written piece and less inclined to follow an author’s story thread. We miss out if this is our goal though - we miss out on nuance, connection, richness, and above all - humanity.
My bottom line, in this very brief and not-at-all deep post, is that in order to write our next human and planetary chapter the way we want, we have to bring all our best ideas and all our understanding of character and empathy to bear. We need to keep absorbing the broad and the deep in order to create a story worthy of our own authorship.
I’m off back to my fusty nook now.