You can never read the same book twice and you should always have plenty to choose from

From Nobody finishes reading my books by Paul Bloom.  The subheading is, Or anyone else's either.  

As of a decade or so ago, when electronic readers became more common, we began to get some insight into people's reading habits.  How much they read of a book, how far in they stop, are there structure or topical issues that lead to abandonment, etc.  

Bloom's article is an entertaining update and his commenters worth reading.  

Several years ago, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax wrote a critical review of my book Just Babies. One of the things that bothered me was that Wax plainly hadn’t read the whole book. She got to the chapter on sex and stopped, with two chapters left to go.

But then I checked, and I realized that the positive reviewers also didn’t seem to make it to the end. Their reviews focused on the first chapters; at best, they skimmed the rest. Actually, by making it to chapter 5 and reading it closely, Wax was unusually persistent.

It’s not just me. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum once complained that reviewers of her book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions focused on the preliminary outline of her theory in the first chapter and ignored all the nuances and qualifications in the many chapters that followed. They apparently didn’t read most of her book.

This bothered me. I’m a fan of Nussbaum and feel she deserves better. Actually, I own this book of hers and read it with pleasure. Well, not the whole book. Just the first chapter. Have you seen how big it is?

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Hardcover) | eBay

How often do people make it to the end of books? The mathematician Jordan Ellenberg did some number crunching, looking at the passages marked by Amazon Kindle readers and estimating what percentage of them finished. This percentage is what he calls the Hawking Index, named after Stephen Hawking’s notoriously unread book A Brief History of Time. Here is the Hawking Index for some popular books:

Click to enlarge.

A lot of good considerations in the article.  My perspective is twofold - there are many books which have 100 pages of content mashed into three hundred pages of words.  It is one thing to be a miner for ideas and data and persevere when you know there is more ore in the seam.  It is quite another to blindly dig when all you are encountering is dross.  

Focusing on favorite authors increases the probability of ore in the seam but it is not an always reliable heuristic.

I would like to be better at searching for and compiling the 25 page article versions which inspire a book length treatment.  The article would be more likely to be read than the book if the article is 80-100% content whereas the book is only 20-30% content.  But I am not good at that yet.

And I do love finding, perhaps one out of twenty, those non-fiction books in which there is a new idea, a new fact, or better interpretation of an already known fact on virtually every page.  Woof, those are good books.

Recognizing that a good personal library ought to be a compilation of both books and articles is one principle that I acknowledge (without yet being good at.)

The second is that just as we never step in the same river twice (Heraclitus), no book is stable.  A book is the product of the physical object and its interaction with the reader.  Different editions lend themselves to a greater or lesser degree to intense and persistent reading or not.  And the reader himself, at any given moment, is more or less inclined to read a particular book, on a particular topic, by a particular author, in a particular fashion, to a greater or lesser degree.  

Books, readers and the reading experience are not static.  There are authors and poets whom I greatly enjoy reading now whom I had no interest in reading forty years ago.  There are some books I prefer based on season, or mood, or my intellectual ruminations, or reading environment, or some other context.

Given that your own personal reading proclivities are always in flux, all you can do is to be well stocked for all your possible reading needs.  I have close to 15,000 books and I am trying to winnow that number down but it is a less than fruitful endeavor.  Almost all books I have bothered to find and purchase are candidates for reading at some unknown time.  There are a few which were definite errors in the acquisition process and I celebrate the few opportunities to demonstrate a false discipline of getting rid of a book.  The reality is that the overwhelming percentage of books remain on the shelves to be read.

Whether I ever get to them or not is a different matter.  It is nice to have them all to hand when the need arises but, as Hippocrates observed:

Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.

All easier said than done.  Having the books, the ideas, the facts within reach is the important first step.  Not all books will be read but all of them might be read if the time is long enough, the crisis less fleeting, the decision more measured.  I revel in all of those bound companions upon the selves, regardless of the probability of them ever being read.  The possibility of the need or desire for better acquantence is always there.