Day 122: Stop making reading ‘efficient’

Read Star Trek books instead

“William wondered why he always disliked people who said “no offense meant.” Maybe it was because they found it easier to say “no offense meant” than actually to refrain from giving offense.”― Terry Pratchett, The Truth

Welcome to A Reading Journey. This is a blog about reading. Not books, book reviews, author interviews, or any of that good stuff. That’s for other blogs. This blog is about reading. I hope that by sharing my reading journey, you might find yourself reading more or differently.

Reading Tips

Tip 133: Stop making reading ‘efficient’

I came across an interesting article with this title by Nathan Wiebke in Student Life, a publication at Washington University in St. Louis.

Nathan begins with the bad news: “The market economy may be right: Reading has a terrible return on investment. It’s not scalable. It’s easily outsourced to artificial intelligence. It offers no networking upside, doesn’t increase shareholder value, and (probably) doesn’t pair well with an afternoon Zyn. In the modern efficiency-focused economy, reading doesn’t seem to be a worthwhile investment. Humanity is divesting accordingly.”

He says that schools report that a large percentage of students no longer engage with assigned texts, but instead use AI to summarize and explain them. I am not anti-AI in general. I think there are legitimate ways to use it, as well as illegitimate ways. This, to my mind, is an illegitimate way.

I once saw a student on reddit complaining that NotebookLM had caused him to fail his exam. He had done exactly what Wiebke described - never reading the material and instead studying an AI summary. If he failed, he got the grade he deserved. The assignment was to understand the text, not the summary of the text.

Wiebke goes on: “The problem isn’t that students dismiss the benefits of reading, but that they have been taught to view it as a mechanism for extracting information. Reading supplies the content needed to pass tests, write essays, and get participation points. When students discover a more efficient pathway to information, like AI summaries, our natural response is to adopt it.” (bolding is mine)

We have here a bigger problem than AI. This is the human tendency to choose the path of least resistance, to try to cheat the system somehow, even if it’s at our own expense. People don’t need AI to fall into this trap, although AI certainly makes it easier.

Wiebke’s solution is simple: “The material people start out reading is largely unimportant; the priority should be reading for enjoyment, because enjoyment is what builds a lasting habit. Once this habit has formed, it can carry readers towards more challenging material that deepens their understanding of the world.”

I know this works from personal experience. I married someone who didn’t read unless he was forced to. I got him started reading with Star Trek novels, which are short and featured characters he already knew and liked. Once he was in the habit of reading, he started engaging with the daily newspaper, news magazines, and nonfiction in book form. His reading didn’t save our marriage, but I’m hopeful that it made him a more informed voter.

Wiebke finished his article with a challenge to his university: “WashU should be built for this type of unoptimized reading; it should be an example for the larger education landscape. That could mean funding one-credit reading seminars with no exams or creating classes that allow students to read what interests them instead of adhering to a rigid syllabus. Reading cannot remain inseparable from performance metrics. WashU needs to signal that reading exists for more than a numerical grade.”

I hope they take him up on it. What say you? Let me know in the comments.

Today’s Reading

FICTION BOOKS

Girls of Brackenhill by Kate Moretti #Thriller #Audiobook

The Pirates of Penzance by W.S. Gilbert #Adaptation #Audiobook [completed #105]

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens #BookClub #Classic #Audiobook

The Truth by Terry Pratchett #Series #Discworld #Fantasy #Audiobook

Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt #Literature #PrintBook #TriggerDomesticViolence #TriggerCult #TriggerChildAbuse #TriggerSuicide #TriggerChildEndangerment

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo #BookClub #Audiobook #HistoricalFiction #Classic #France #Literature

SHORT STORIES

“Reaper” by Dan Abnett

Kitsune Udon by Ridiculous Thoughts

NONFICTION BOOKS

The Daily Buddhist by Pema Sherpa, Brendan Barca #Spirituality #Audiobook

10 Women Who Ruled the Renaissance by Joyce Salisbury #GreatCourses #History #BookClub #Audiobook

Thoughts and Feelings: Taking Control of Your Moods and Your Life by Matthew McKay #SelfHelp #Print

POETRY

Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun by Walt Whitman

ARTICLES AND OTHER NON-BOOK READING

Woman of the Day:

The Vietnam Women’s Memorial is a memorial dedicated to the nurses and women of the United States who served in the Vietnam War. It depicts three uniformed women with a wounded male soldier to symbolize the support and caregiving roles that women played in the war as nurses and other specialists. It is part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and is located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a short distance south of the Wall and north of the Reflecting Pool. The statues are bronze and the base is made of granite. The United States Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission selected Glenna Goodacre to sculpt the memorial after previously rejecting the idea for a memorial to women.

INFORMATION GATHERING

Quotes

Breath and life, and the opportunity to try. We cannot take these things for granted. If you have nothing more, you always have that. — Alicia Keys

Journaling Prompts

How might I acknowledge the gifts of this day in the midst of the busiest moments?

Vocabulary

Métier, sometimes styled metier, is a formal word that refers to something that a person does very well.

After trying several careers, she found her true métier in computer science.

“Turning from his father’s trade of corset-making, [Thomas] Paine tried his hand at business, met and impressed Benjamin Franklin in London, sailed to America, and there found his true metier as a pamphleteer and radical.” — Matthew Redmond, The Conversation, 9 Oct. 2025

Over the centuries, English has borrowed several French words related in some way to work or working, among them oeuvre (“a substantial body of work of a writer, an artist, or a composer”) and travail (“work of a laborious nature, toil”). Métier (pronounced /MET-yay/) is another. It is sometimes translated from its original French as “job” or “career” but in that language it more accurately refers to the trade or profession in which one works (it traces back to the Old French mistier, meaning “duty, craft, profession”). In English we tend toward a narrower meaning for métier, referring either to a job for which one is perfectly suited or a particular field in which one is extremely skilled. This makes it a synonym of another French borrowing, forte.

Thanks for reading with me today. I’d love to hear from you about your reading journey, and especially what you’re reading right now.