(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Johnson was an English writer and lexicographer.
Reading should be pleasurable because otherwise what is read is quickly forgotten. Pleasure attracts our attention, and the art of attention is the “true art of memory”. We forget material toward which we are inattentive, so books read out of necessity or in an impatient mood are seldom memorable (Johnson 1825a, 370). Ideally, then, we read what we want when we want, but otherwise, before taking up a book we must evacuate and calm our mind: if we bring to our reading a turbid, impure, agitated mind, we will not be attentive (ibid.). Johnson asks: “If the repositories of thought are already full, what can they receive?” (ibid.). If we are distracted or read without inclination, we read in vain (Boswell, 637).
An implication of this principle is that we shouldn’t feel compelled to finish reading books which we cease to enjoy. A biographer reports him remarking: “Alas, Madam! …How few books are there of which one can ever possibly arrive at the last page” (Piozzi 1932, 179–180). He rejected the notion that books should be read in their entirety once begun (Boswell, 1116):
This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?
Referring to an essay he stopped reading: “when I take up the end of a web, and find it packthread, I do not expect, by looking further, to find embroidery” (p. 355). When describing Forster’s Voyage to the South Seas: “he makes me turn over many leaves at a time”, i.e. Johnson began to skim a book that was losing his interest before casting it aside (pp. 734–5).
Johnson rejected the concept popular at the time of copying long quotations into a commonplace-book1 because the original book could just be consulted again (Johnson 1825a, 369–370). This approach merely wastes time without assisting memory (p. 370). Writing distracts our reading, so “what is read twice is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed” (pp. 369–370). Again, then, by prioritising pleasure we remain attentive to what we read, which aids our ability to remember it, so we can avoid needing to make lengthy transcriptions, which in turn makes the experience more pleasurable.
It is preferable to read from “immediate inclination” (Boswell, 742). “Dr. Johnson”, his companion and biographer related, “advised me to-day, to have as many books about me as I could; that I might read upon any subject upon which I had a desire for instruction at the time” (ibid.). By uniting our curiosity with the opportunity to satisfy it, we learn best. If we lack a desire for any particular topic, we should prescribe ourselves one, but hopefully an attitude of curiosity will result which will render this practice unnecessary (ibid.).
Reading is pleasurable, then, when it satisfies a particular desire or curiosity, and as long as this state is maintained the process can continue. Johnson gives us permission to read according to our inclinations—trusting our instincts by monitoring our attention and mood. This attitude helps ensure that our attention remains on the text, and therefore that what is read is remembered and connected to what we already know.
We should generally read to attain practical knowledge. Otherwise, we may learn to reason rather than live: appreciating the author’s style and argument, criticising and disputing with nuance, while disregarding the chief use of the book: to affect our minds and reform our lives (Johnson, 197; Johnson 1968, 276). To gain wisdom from reading we must take responsibility for improving our understanding: “He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency; but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood” (Johnson 1825b, 357). To gain practical or moral improvement in this way requires one to actually “apply any general reproof of vice to themselves, or try their own manners by axioms of justice”; otherwise we may remember these virtuous principles but not improve our conduct (Johnson, 197).
This is not to say that one must always read for this reason. With slight irony Johnson remarks: “The author is not wholly useless, who provides innocent amusements…he who keeps men in a neutral state, may be justly considered as a benefactor to life” (Johnson 1968, 277). Imaginative literature can excel by its “allurement and delight”, as it clearly did for Johnson, the author of the four-volume Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (2010, 481). By implication, though, if a reader wants more than amusement from their reading, they must pursue books disposed toward self-improvement (Johnson 1968, 276). Further, regardless of our disposition, if we read worthwhile titles, they inevitably influence us because (p. 277):
we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas: he that reads books of science, though without any fixed desire of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral or religious treatises, will imperceptibly advance in goodness; the ideas which are often offered to the mind, will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them
In any case, we require intellectual humility so “should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time” (Johnson 1825c, 31–32). When an ancient author seems defective, or their sense dubious, we should assume they are intelligent and their expression was once forcible.
Lastly, although we should read for pleasure, we shouldn’t expect the practice to necessarily be always pleasant (Johnson, 356):
Literature is a kind of intellectual light, which, like the light of the sun, may sometimes enable us to see what we do not like; but who would wish to escape unpleasing objects, by condemning himself to perpetual darkness?
See Locke, John↩︎