I finished Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies last Tuesday. It's a book about the act of reading — specifically, about what we lose when we stop reading slowly.
Then I read three reviews of it.
Then I found a blog post responding to one of the reviews.
Then I read a book that Birkerts had mentioned in passing.
At some point I realized I had not actually sat down and read a novel — not just read about reading — in about two weeks.
There's a word for this: meta-consumption. You can consume so many layers of commentary on a thing that you never encounter the thing itself.
My reading log tracks what I've read and when. Looking at it now, the best months are the ones where I read long books slowly. Fewer titles, more time per page.
The worst months are the ones full of short, disconnected things — articles, reviews, threads.
Less is more. The ratio of depth to breadth should probably be about 1.618 to 1. I will now spend thirty minutes deciding whether that's a meaningful insight or a dad joke.