[Barrin92]

Nabokov's solution to this dilemma, reread. The only good reader is, as he said, a re-reader. If we're honest nobody can actually remember more than a dozen books, and if you pick the right ones there's more to learn in any of them than you can learn in years.

It's similar to the sentiment that the only way to understand a poem is to be able to recite it from memory, or the fact that some pianists play nothing else but Bach and yet reach mastery. Everything's already in there, or most of it anyway.

Requires a different mentality, one that treats reading or perception and deep study as the thing to care about, not 'absorbing information' or 'knowledge'.

Umberto Eco once pointed out that the size of the unknown, the books one has not read are magnitudes larger than the books one has read, so to treat knowledge as some sort of priced possession to climb in the pecking order is meaningless, what matters is being adequate in understanding the few things one actually has the time to study.

[laserlight]

Recognition and retrieval are different mental processes. When one re-reads a material, they recognize it. Recognition gives a false impression of “knowing” the material, whereas retrieval is a better measure of knowing. In order to get better at retrieval, one should practice retrieval, for example, by answering questions about the topic.

[testcase_delta]

Well said. A great book that covers this (and suggests ways to practice retrieval) is called Make It Stick. I highly recommend it.

[pps]

There is also good website on this topic, with free guides https://www.retrievalpractice.org/

[RMPR]

> Umberto Eco once pointed out that the size of the unknown, the books one has not read are magnitudes larger than the books one has read

If anyone else is wondering, it's in his book encyclopedia of imaginary lands

[Ch8nya]

I think you mean The Book of Legendary Lands by Umberto Eco. Encyclopedia of Imaginary places is a different book by Theresa Bane.

[paganel]

I found this related saying from Eco even more insightful (at least for me and for my particular case):

> The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

I've just turned 40 recently and I've started to realise that no, I won't get to read all the books that I already have in my library, but in the last few years (and especially during the pandemic) I think I've started to "accelerate" the purchasing of books related to fields of knowledge I'm interested in and of which I don't know that many things.

For example just yesterday I bought "The European Right: A Historical Profile" co-authored by Eugen Weber [1] because I've already read Weber's "Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914" which I found highly interesting and because I found it interesting that in the 1960s (i.e. relatively shortly after WW2) the people were still seeing the proto-European fascists as being right-wing, nowadays they would just be called populists, in other words I was interested in reading in the 2020s a book written in the 1960s about an European political movement that took place in the early 1900s. There's a big chance I will not get to read that book in the next 2-3 years, but by just purchasing it and having in my head all the internal conversation I tried to summarise above has give me an extra "intellectual" (for lack of a better word) something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber