I Want to Give You Super Powers: Read

I have published a bit on this blog about how to read, why to read, and the effects of reading, such as bibliotherapy, but I have recently been struck by the question of how to read. I have met, in the last few months, several people who say to me, “I want to read more, but ...” and the “but” which comes is a variant of admitting, “I don’t really know how to get into the big or hard stuff.”

Not, “I don’t know how to read,” that is different. We are not talking about illiteracy here. I am talking about things like this Wuthering Heights: Struggling to read. A book about to be made into a movie often spawns a certain amount of reading before the film, and that’s great. I have often said a film is the externalized aspect of one reader and how the individual sees the world. But people are saying they literally can’t read it. This is a book not that far removed from our time.

I have met many college professors who are concerned about the quality of students hitting their rosters, who can’t read a full, weighty novel, and I have been struck recently by some students I have tried to mentor.

I gave them something along the lines of 1,000–1,500 words of reading and asked them to tell me what they thought of it. I will admit what I asked them to read was hard work, difficult legalese material with broad-reaching impact and a wide barrier to understanding, but this person had a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. The response I received back was AI-generated, self-evidently so, checked on three AI detectors as a 90+ percent match for not human-generated. Furthermore, it was 100% completely wrong in the interpretation of the text (which is legal text and has a strictly correct meaning). When I asked them about it, they admitted to using the AI to help. I asked them to do it again, because the crux of the career they want to get into was reading and interpretation dependent. They didn’t get back to me. (I got ghosted by a mentee... 😊 Better than being ghosted by a manatee?)

Dangerously Cute? Probabaly.

I am working with another student who asked me outright for a hard book to read. I pointed him at the Russian classics because I could think of nothing harder and worthwhile concurrently at the moment. He chose Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. It’s rough going at times, and it took him several months to read it in a way which did it justice between all the other things he did. He needed to work up to it. He is a college student already, and he had to come down from it and read lighter things after, as a choice.

This is in part to say not all reading is made equal, and not all readers are up to the same level of reading, and I don’t mean absolute literacy or grade level.

For context, I should make clear that I read and write for a living. Technical work, in clinical research, but no skill collection has served me better in life than the ability to read, understand, synthesize, and communicate that information. Despite being a physicist, the longer I work in the field, the more I am convinced it is a superpower, and it is a superpower available to everyone everywhere who has access to writing and is even remotely literate. All it takes is practice. But this is not a motivational entry. This is the first in a series that we are going to go through together for how to go from literate to using literature as your superpower to move through life.

Maybe one day AI is coming for our jobs. Maybe one day it will understand everything we do. But right now, it doesn’t. You alone can command the superpower of reading and understanding, and all it takes is willingness, a few hours a day, and following what I am going to lay down as a plan for you to follow.

It is built on successes and propping yourself up on each step along the way. I believe you can. Let’s get started together.

Next: A Reading Journey: The First Steps.