Yes, you read that correctly.

You should be reading fewer books. Fewer websites. And clearly, fewer magazines.

The notion that quantity trumps quality, though never stated out loud, is clearly the premise behind antics like reading contests in third grade. The kid who reads the most books over the summer gets a pizza coupon.

“Any books?” a precocious 9 year old asks, and his teacher, afraid of being seen as judgemental about child reading choices, nods sympathetically.

And they’re off. Many of the students don’t care about the dorky prize so they will ignore the contest and play video games all summer. But there’s always That Kid who will race through every beginner book available in the local library, the better to win the prize. And win they will.

Harmless enough. But many children don’t grow up realizing that that was a stupid and pointless little exercise, and they grow up with the idea that knowledge and wisdom come about as a result of absorbing huge amounts of information.

They don’t.

True knowledge and wisdom come to an individual who takes ideas and ponders them and questions them and pits ideas against other ideas to arrive at the truth.

This isn’t easy. It isn’t intuitive. It’s hard work and almost no one has the desire or ability to do it.

Schools don’t help. Our present school process comes from a factory model and factories are designed for production, not contemplation.

So we are forced to go against years of early indoctrination and learn to listen – usually by reading hard books and thinking about what those people taught and said.

So you must read less, not more. And you must usually read slower, much slower than we are accustomed. The very opposite of speed reading.

And you probably have to give up reading any writers who are alive today. Not that there are no living writers worth reading. Just that it’s almost impossible to discern their value because we breathe the same air and usually think in similar grooves that those writers do. And in reading we need to learn from those who think differently from us.

Dead writers are not infallible. They are sometimes banal, sometimes shallow, sometimes just generally bad. But the one reality there is that most of the bad writers of the past are forgotten. What occurs when we read Plato or St Paul or Jane Austen is that history has determined that there is usually value there and reading these writers will not be a waste of our time.

No one has unlimited time to read. We must shepherd that time carefully, read those of value, learn from them, and follow other writers who comment and interact with the greats.