How to Read a Novel
adjacentpossible.substack.com

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37 points

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ingve

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6 days ago

63 comments

nilirl ・ 2 days ago

The post does not answer 'How to Read a Novel'.

Most of the post is devoted to 'Why I think fiction is useful'.

The author's answer: vicarious learning.

Author answers how to maybe rank and choose a book: Book that provides recognizable experience of human decision making is better than book that does not.

Which is fine. But not 'How to Read a Novel'.

  • vonnik ・ 2 days ago

    This is very true!

    I felt like the writer didn't really get what novels are for, and it explains why he decided he's a better fit for non-fiction. He seemed to be explaining novel utility to a bunch of imaginary STEM grads.

    Personally, I read for the metempsychosis. Like Zelig but with authors, a briefly shared subjectivity that shapes whatever I go back to when I put the book down.

    Reading novels helps me escape the tyranny of my own mind (just like reading history helps us escape the tyranny of our own time, as the man said). In a way I feel like the West meditates through novels.

  • romperstomper ・ 13 hours ago

    This is why I mostly gave up to read anything on substack - articles there often have quite catchy titles but at the end they often are not related to article's contents.

  • mock-possum ・ 2 days ago

    How to read a novel, step one: pick up the book. Gaze upon the cover. What is the title? Is there imagery? Does the face include the author’s name, or any other text? Turn it edgewise, take in the spine - and then spare a glance for the back. What might be written on the pages beneath the cover?

jihadjihad ・ 2 days ago

> But my admiration for Middlemarch and Bleak House goes beyond their portrayal of the psychological interiority of their characters. [...] Both novels succeed at something else: they invite us to think across multiple scales of experience—and to make causal and associative connections between those different layers.

To toss another into the ring, I can't think of any novel I've read that could rival The Brothers Karamazov in this regard. Possibly East of Eden, but as great as it is it plumbs nowhere near the moral and psychological depths of Dostoevsky.

  • mykowebhn ・ 2 days ago

    I agree that Dostoyevsky's psychological insights were profound. Maybe it doesn't exhibit the same psychological depths, but morally and philosophically I would also recommend Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. It is still psychologically profound (although perhaps not at Dostoyevsky's level) and it provides a very detailed picture of society in turn-of-the-century (20th century) Austria. It's one of the greatest novels about ideas I've come across.

  • KaoruAoiShiho ・ 2 days ago

    Lol I always laugh when I see people talk up Dostoevsky and any 19th century writer. It's 2025 now and literature has improved in depth and characterization as much as any other field.

    • kstrauser ・ 2 days ago

      You’re nuts. I read “Crime and Punishment” a couple years ago, and went in knowing literally nothing about it except that it was famous.

      It was astonishingly good. It felt fresh, modern, and claustrophobically suspenseful in a way I wouldn’t have believed possible for a book that age.

      If you don’t like it, fine. Preferences are a thing and we don’t all have to enjoy the same stuff. But to dismiss it as obsolete or out of touch is madness. It’s a classic for a reason.

      Along those lines, I read “Moby Dick” last year for the first time. Now I’m annoyed with everyone who led me to imagine it as some dusty tome to slog through. It’s hilarious. Ishmael’s a sarcastic smartass with a lot to say.

      Some of the classic are classics for a reason, ya know?

      • KaoruAoiShiho ・ 2 days ago
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        I might've conveyed myself poorly. Never said Dostoevsky wasn't great or not a relevant read! I was just reacting to the OP who seemed to say it's still the best ever. But we've improved everything, art, kites, the wheel. It's the same for literature, but you do have to get pretty deep into lit to see though.

        The main criticism for I have for Dostoevsky is that he's overdramatic. Yes it's great fun fiction and a vast improvement over the simpler, more idealized writing of much of his era, but some of the angst of his characters is simply cultural. He has a lot of religious influence in his work (which don't appeal to me as an atheist) and their struggles for the human soul is a symptom of his time. A Buddhist might say, just calm the fuck down man. Most people don't react to horrible situations by "crashing out", but via coping and rationalization and making the best of their situation, that's how you get consistent improvement and accrue generational uplift.

        Later writers like Virginia Woolf is able to better integrate a variety of responses to suffering, post modernists like Tao Lin even gets overly detached (everyone hates post modernists). But I think the best novel about the human condition ever written, which handles the drama, but realistically, is probably by Elena Ferrante in 2011. I'm not highlighting any underrated work here lol, it's widely acclaimed, including called the best book of the 21st century by the NYT.

        • kstrauser ・ 2 days ago

          Alright, I see what you mean now. Thanks for the explanation! Whether or not I agree, that’s a lot more nuanced than my earlier interpretation of your opinion.

          I like the religious lens of his work, though. I don’t personally identify with it, especially his particular brand of it, but that’s part of the work’s appeal to me. Similarly, I’m not an existentialist but it was neat to see the world that way through “L'Étranger” (even though Camus rejected the label).

          But I do want to push back against the idea that we know vastly more about human nature today than in the 1800s. We’ve been formally studying western philosophy, intently and seriously, for at least 2,500 years. On a timeline between Plato and today, “C&P” was written 94% of the way to the finish line. We might have better models of some details now, but we’ve had a pretty solid knowledge of the fundamentals for an awfully long time. By analogy, Monet didn’t know jack about quantum physics, but he famously explored the subtleties of the appearance of light in nature.

          I surely don’t want to take the position that older = better, either. You’re right: we’re still learning, practicing, and getting better! There’s still an awful lot of gold to be found in earlier works, though.

        • internet_points ・ 2 days ago

          > Most people don't react to horrible situations by "crashing out", but via coping and rationalization and making the best of their situation, that's how you get consistent improvement and accrue generational uplift.

          Most people I've known do not react rationally to horrible situations. Or even to good situations.

        • Boogie_Man ・ 2 days ago
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          I think what is easy to overlook with Dostoevsky is that although he is arguably the inventor of the psychological novel, the characters in his novels are largely representatives of the impact of ideologies on the lives and psyches of real people or the impact of the psyches (as impacted themselves by their life experiences) on their choice of ideology. The taking of ideologies to their logical conclusion in his character's lives is what results in "hysterical characters".

          I think to argue that Dostoevsky is not among the best psychological novelists is to slightly misunderstand what he was trying to achieve.

          • KaoruAoiShiho ・ 2 days ago

            You're right. I think it's extremely cultural to Christianity. The notion of suffering for your sins, and when bad things happen you ought to try to feel it as much as possible instead of working on pain mitigation. This is definitely how a lot of people approach life and it makes sense for his characters. But IMO coping and rationalization strategies are built into every human, a lot of angst is performative and communicative rather than "soulful". They do it because they want to be a good religious boy and communicate devoutness. I honestly don't think he gets that. When his characters perform pain he treats it as evidence of the soul’s torment which doesn't resonate with me since I don't believe in the soul.

        • antithesizer ・ a day ago

          To be fair you have to be very deep into literature to criticize dostoevsky as "overdramatic"

    • rererereferred ・ 2 days ago

      What's a good novel from the last 20 years? Genuine question. Looking back at everything I've read, it all has been older than that. I don't really pay attention to novel news so it's more like I only read stuff I've heard about in the past.

      • giraffe_lady ・ 2 days ago

        I am absolutely not trying to sustain the other commenter's claim that modern fiction is better lol. I also don't tend to stay on top of contemporary fiction, a lot of stuff gets hyped and well reviewed but just isn't that great. Or it had a lot of resonance for the specific time it was written that lessens as time passes. And of course the extreme selection bias, not all good books "survive" but most of the ones that do are good on at least some qualities.

        But there is definitely still excellent fiction being written now. The last sumurai by helen dewitt, or the gray house by mariam petrosyan I would place with the likes of middlemarch and anna karenina.

    • happytoexplain ・ a day ago

      >literature has improved in depth and characterization as much as any other field.

      It hasn't.

      1. Many fields experiencing development over the past century or two are much newer than literature, which might as well be a synonym for thought. During that time, those newer fields were, or currently are, in their early rapid-growth phase.

      2. Literature is deeply on the subjective side of "fields", so it's a lot easier to argue that it has changed, rather than that it has improved.

    • bowsamic ・ 2 days ago

      I don't like Dostoevsky but this is an insane take. Art doesn't just "get better" over time and depth and characterisation isn't everything either. Homer's Odyssey is still an incredible and fulfilling read. Literature is not some kind of engineering discipline though a lot of new writers seem to be almost like analytic philosophers in that they think newer = better while having some kind of sterile and formalistic understanding of art

      • KaoruAoiShiho ・ 2 days ago

        depth and characterization isn't everything but it's the discussion chosen by the OP, he seemed to imply that Dostoevsky had the best psychological interiority and "multiple scales of experience".

    • almostgotcaught ・ 2 days ago

      Weird take - how exactly could literature improve "in depth and characterization"? What new "technology" has been made available to authors that enables them to create deeper characters?

      • voisin ・ 2 days ago
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        Not OP, but breadth and depth of understanding about psychology have improved dramatically and exposure to diverse viewpoints thanks to hyper connectedness likely make it possible to go deeper.

        • zabzonk ・ 2 days ago
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          > breadth and depth of understanding about psychology have improved dramatically

          Provide one tiny bit of evidence for this. Do you seriously think that Shakespeare (for e.g.) did not have a profound understanding of human psychology?

          • altruios ・ 2 days ago
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            not who you are replying to - but: Shakespeare was limited by the number of interactions he had with humans. He did not have the internet.

            We also have neurology as a science now. So that's one bit of evidence for the claim.

            Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.

            • graemep ・ a day ago

              > not who you are replying to - but: Shakespeare was limited by the number of interactions he had with humans. He did not have the internet.

              The internet may increase the number of interactions, but decreases their quality.

              Looking at most online interactions it looks to me that people show less empathy and understanding than they do IRL.

              > Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.

              Does that help write better books. If the claim was true the best fiction would be written by psychologists and neurologists. Is it?

              I think that knowledge is on the wrong side (for writing fiction) of Chesterton's distinction (in a work of fiction - I cannot remember which Fr Brown story) between understanding someone from the inside with empathy and from the outside with analysis.

            • kstrauser ・ 2 days ago
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              Hard disagree. I made an analogy in another reply to Monet not knowing quantum physics. Lacking that information didn’t deter his famous explorations of light effects.

              Humans are great at figuring out how things behave before we have a great model of why they do it. And by Shakespeare’s time, we had a pretty good grasp on practical human psychology, even if we had less understanding of the mechanisms behind it.

              • altruios ・ 2 days ago
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                We are excellent at figuring things out. We get better at it over time, as we grow our collective knowledge base.

                I agree that we are great at figuring out things before we have a model of why things work. And we have a mountain of context to work from already. Shakespeare wasn't an idiot, and he wasn't in a vacuum but his 'context window' was 'smaller' than a lot of people today(quotes because dubious terminology).

                Art is improving. Science is improving. human understanding, and communication of that understanding is improving too. That is my point.

                • kstrauser ・ 2 days ago

                  I won't argue against that at all. Someday we're going to have someone with Shakespeare's brilliance and modern foundations, and I can't wait to see what that looks like.

                  (And maybe we already do have that person. I'm shamefully out of date with modern literature.)

            • KineticLensman ・ 2 days ago
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              > Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.

              Yes, but this doesn't prove that a modern author could produce a better text than a historically great author, which was the original line of thought. Or is there a specific modern text that you have in mind that proves the point?

              • altruios ・ 2 days ago

                Define 'better'...

                How about 'more accurate' as a measure...

                Then every text book is an example of this measure of better improving over time...

                How about 'more representative of the human experience'... (or enjoy/like more)

                Then we measure how well a human relates to a book: which is taste, a subjective quality that is notoriously hard to measure in any meaningful way. This measure becomes not a single measure, but a collective measure against the sum of humans who interact with it: an untenable standard - and biased towards the present anyway - which doesn't give charity to your position.

                ...So how do you measure a book to be 'better'? That's the neat part: you don't. You can measure what you 'like' more, you can measure 'features'... but we probably won't even agree on what makes a book 'better'. We like what we like, and most of us have a hard time even explaining why we like something.

          • KaoruAoiShiho ・ 2 days ago
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            If he did it's not shown in his writing, or really any pre-20th century writers really.

            • zabzonk ・ 2 days ago
              ・ 2 more

              have you read any pre-20th C writers? Or any novels or plays at all?

              • KaoruAoiShiho ・ 2 days ago

                The conflicts in his plays just aren't that profound, you know? Compared to modern "psychological turmoil" it's relatively simplistic, something like Macbeth's "ambition vs morality".

                Modern writers pull in more layers of depth, explain the ebbs and flows of motivations and identities through social forces and work more with complex ideas like self-deception and rationalization. Shakespeare's characters are generally reliable narrators in a way that later lit tends not to be.

          • daseiner1 ・ 2 days ago

            there's a reason Harold Bloom titled his book about Shakespeare The Invention of the Human

        • internet_points ・ 2 days ago

          or maybe hyper connectedness is just making writers more distracted, making it harder to see deeply into human relations, feelings and thoughts

        • bowsamic ・ 2 days ago

          In my opinion, all the best art expresses the "unknown knowns" of the human, i.e., the unconscious that has not been brought to light. Art is an expression of what is really true but not known. Knowing about it doesn't make it easier to express. To bring up the old trope, the curtains are never just blue, not in the sense that the artist is always putting in some conscious meaning, but that the choice of blue says something about the artist's human feeling even if they didn't intend it

ednite ・ 2 days ago

Steven Johnson encourages us to think across multiple scales of experience when reading 19th-century novels. I agree and I’d argue Don Quixote, written in the early 1600s, was the prototype.

Don Quixote has always been one of my favorite books because it genuinely entertains me on a deep level. Every time I return to it, I’m pulled into a world that’s funny, sad, strange, and timeless.

Long before modern psychology, Cervantes captured the messy, conflicted inner life of someone trying to make sense of a changing world.

Books like this still matter, not just as stories, but as a way to practice seeing the world in layers, something that helps us stay grounded and think more clearly in today’s fast-moving, story-saturated world.

daxfohl ・ 2 days ago

I went through the same phase a couple decades ago and also came out with Middlemarch on top. Oddly I'd never heard of it prior, and only grabbed it because it was in some classics list at B&N. It didn't seem like anything I expected to like, but I was astounded.

The one book I couldn't understand all the hoopla about was Faust. Even after reading it twice, it just seemed like a banal overplayed moral tale. Maybe it only works in German?

crims0n ・ 2 days ago

Reading literary fiction is such an enriching activity in life, I highly recommend it. If you don't know where to start (and you need to retrain your attention span), pick up an audiobook. I started with Jeremy Iron's reading of Lolita. Nabokov's prose read in Iron's voice will make a believer out of anyone.

pickledoyster ・ 2 days ago

the single takeaway from this book ad of a post: the CEO of Stripe claims to have read 10 novels/yr. Which is either a boast of how much free time he has or how he skimmed through some major novels. Third option: a lie.

  • desas ・ 2 days ago

    This is a ludicrous take. I was on vacation last week and read three books, albeit not weighty novels. I can't remember when I read as few as 10 novels per year. I'm not a CEO, but reading is also far from my only hobby.

    • happytoexplain ・ a day ago

      To be clear first: The parent is being a little unreasonable.

      However.

      There's no need to resort to insults, nor to use a single person as an example, which doesn't make sense, regardless of whether it's their "only hobby".

      Average novel reading speed is an impossible metric. E.g. WPM measurements are irrelevant to long-form reading, are irrelevant to literary reading, and don't account for processing, tangential thought, or re-reading, which are of course highly variable. And "reading time" (the subset of free time conducive to literary reading) is also basically impossible to quantify broadly. It's also difficult to categorize people by how much they are trying to read. Some people are only a little interested, some not at all. Further, this is one of those fields where the super-humans aren't actually that rare, so you get a situation where the average person reads 8 books per year despite half of all people reading half a book per year (made up numbers).

      Point of all that being, "novels a year" is one of the most culturally acceptable brags, because there is no "expected" value for people broadly. It's a hidden value, so we can say things like "yeah, I read 12 books a year, not a lot I know", and people generally won't roll their eyes at risk of appearing stupid.

      Look at how many people on otherwise-rational HN are saying "I used to read 30 novels a year," "I used to read a novel a week," as if that means it must be easy to accomplish in Western work and life culture. We're drunk on the ease of implicitly painting people who can't read as much as us as simply dumb modern westerners.

      I think it's an easy thing to do, and we shouldn't. It's not classy.

      • desas ・ 17 hours ago

        > We're drunk on the ease of implicitly painting people who can't read as much as us as simply dumb modern westerners.

        I'm not sure we're doing that. That's certainly not my intention. I know and respect many people who read zero books per year.

        I think what we're doing is showing surprise that reading ten books per year is seen as a flex or is worth lying about very publicly, and demonstrating (albeit unscientifically) that it's not that unusual.

  • patrickmay ・ 2 days ago

    That's one every five weeks. Middlemarch is roughly 900 pages. Assuming one reads five evenings a week, that's 36 pages per sitting. Each page is roughly 300 words. An average reading speed is about 250 words per minute; let's knock that down to 200 for denser works like those discussed. That's 54 minutes of reading per day.

    Hardly a huge time commitment, especially as a way to decompress from the day.

  • thesuitonym ・ 2 days ago

    Even if we assume a 12 hour average workday for a CEO (I wouldn't, but let's be generous) and 8 hours for sleep, that gives him 4 hours of time to do whatever he wants with. If his main hobby is reading, 10 novels a year would be easy in that time.

    Also, everybody knows CEOs have a lot of free time. They don't have real jobs.

  • LeonardoTolstoy ・ 2 days ago

    The claim is not that far off from someone claiming they watch a movie a week. A book probably doesn't take much more than 10 hours to read on average. 50 movies are about 100 hours. Is one movie a week a mind-boggling amount of free time?

  • veridies ・ 2 days ago

    If one reads a page a minute, which is a pretty decent rule of thumb, then a 600 page novel takes you ten hours, and reading ten of those takes you 100 hours. That’s reading for roughly 20 minutes a night over a year, taking some days off. Not the most common hobby nowadays, but hardly inconceivable for a busy person.

  • internet_points ・ 2 days ago

    My notes say I read ~30 books last year (not counting kids books =P). I don't feel like I spend that much time reading, I just ran out of good stuff on netflix. And the kids require less attention than they did.

  • KaoruAoiShiho ・ 2 days ago

    I did 30 novels a year in highschool, it's nothing crazy. Though tbf kids do have more free time than working adults, I think it would really only drop if you become parents though.

  • coliveira ・ 2 days ago

    I used to read a novel per week, and I had other things to do. I stopped this rhythm mostly because I don't see many new novels worthy the time, but it is a doable thing.

  • bowsamic ・ 2 days ago

    Are we really in an age where reading 10 novels a year is considered unbelievable?

    • OJFord ・ 2 days ago

      I don't not believe it, but some may. I suspect the average person doesn't read. (I'm even thinking just of British people, if you think that claim globally is easy due to whole countries with lower literacy/readership.)

    • zabzonk ・ 2 days ago

      Probably yes - according to some estimates the average person may only read one, or less.

      • lapcat ・ 2 days ago

        That's by choice, not by impossibility. How many hours per year do they spend scrolling through social media?

        (I ask ironically on social media. But in my defense, I'm currently reading two novels.)

  • mock-possum ・ 2 days ago

    Ten novels a year seems light if you’re an avid reader - I’ve certainly run circles round that record in the past, though I’ve admittedly fallen out of practice lately.