[Barrin92]

>Depth and breadth, in this case, are not opposite directions on a straight line

humans have limited memory, we are not machines. How many books can you remember, and not just in a vague sense, but lines, tone, structure?

Nabokov made a similar statement as the author claimed that the only good reader is a re-reader. Nobody can genuinely remember more than a few books and be familiar with them, if you read hundreds of books at the end of the year you might as well have read nothing. But every time you reread a great work, you learn something new and free your mind up to discover even more things about it.

The very best musicians will often study their favourite pieces compulsively. They have an intimate relationship with them that others have not.

I am very sympathetic to the message of the author because we seem to be living in an age where people attempt to measure literacy on a scoreboard by counting how much books they've read. Obviously this is as doomed of an attempt as being in a hundred relationships at the same time.

A good friend of mine teaches Russian literature, and when he talks about a book like The Brothers Karamazov he can get so much more out of one book than I get out of reading 50. That is something to me that resembles genuine understanding.