It is easy to treat your reading as a list of agreements. You read something, it confirms what you suspected, and you recommend it to a friend. That feels good, but I am not sure how much it teaches you.

Three very different books in my library have made me think about this. I would not recommend any of them for the same reason.

A book I argue with

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene is not a book I want to live by. Much of its advice would make you a worse person to work with, and possibly a worse person. So why keep it?

Because people really do behave this way, and it helps to recognise it. There is a real gap between understanding a strategy and choosing to use it. Seeing a tactic described clearly makes it easier to notice when it is being used on you, and to decide that you will not be using it yourself. Disagreeing with a book is not a reason to stop reading it. It may be the reason to read it slowly.

A book I study

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth has nothing to teach me about how to live, and it was not trying to. It is a thriller about an assassin, and you already know the historical outcome. It still works, because of how much care goes into the details and how steadily the pressure builds.

I read it as a lesson in precision. It shows that a process described carefully enough can become gripping, which is an encouraging thought for someone who writes about cold storage ledgers.

You do not have to agree with a book to learn from it. You only have to know what you came for.

A book that pushes me

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon is the easiest of the three to love. It says that nothing is completely original, so you should stop waiting and start. I needed to hear that. I also know it is possible to enjoy a book like this a little too much, and use the pleasant feeling of being encouraged as a replacement for doing the work.

So even the books I agree with deserve some suspicion. The test is whether anything changed afterwards.

How I try to read now

I try to ask three things of any book: what is it claiming, where do I think it is wrong, and what will I do differently? A note on any of those is worth more than a highlighted page. That is why my library has notes rather than star ratings. A rating tells you whether I liked a book. Notes tell you what it did to my thinking, including when the answer was to make me push back.

Photo: S.M.M. Musabbir Uddin, Nilkhet market, Dhaka, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.