I have the privilege of reading for a living. Someone once asked, “What do you do for a living?” I replied, “I read.” Then they asked what I did for fun. And I replied with a huge smile, “I read.”
But not all reading is alike. There is immersive reading of a technical nature. There is escapist reading of a great thriller. And there is cursory reading where you are “browsing.”
It is this last technique I learned as a bookseller, a billion years ago. I’ll never forget a customer in our bookstore asking me, “Have you read every book in here?” I gazed at the 10,000 titles on our shelves and said, “Unfortunately, we are sort of outnumbered.”
So how do agents and editors read so much? Is it speed reading of the Evelyn Wood Course sort? At least not for me, it isn’t. It is more about the ability to read “at” a book or a proposal and grasp its essence. It is also one of the reasons an editor or an agent requires a synopsis (for a novel) or a chapter-by-chapter analysis (for nonfiction) in the proposal. Allows us to grasp the big picture much easier.
But the title of this blog promises some ideas on how to do this and expand your own abilities. I suspect many already do a form of this. And if you have more to add, please tell us your secret in the comments below.
Disclaimer: I understand that the concept of “not really reading” a book is tantamount to heresy among those of us who love books and love reading. This is not a substitute for really reading any book in its entirety. It is a method for absorbing the essence of hundreds, if not thousands, of books in a short period of time.
1. Back cover copy or book jacket flap copy. While the author probably didn’t write it, someone with knowledge of the book’s big ideas did. There is an art to writing good cover copy. Reading this is usually enough to help me understand what the book is about. Sometimes even enough to feel like I’ve read the book when I haven’t!
2. Table of Contents. For nonfiction, this can be very instructive. It is meaningless in fiction, in my opinion. It is here that you can often find the book’s structure. And depending on how detailed it gets, I can go to a specific spot in the book and read enough to know what the author is trying to say.
2a. The Index and/or the Bibliography. If there is one or both in a nonfiction book, it shows the research and the breadth of the material. Sometimes a quick glance here can reveal a depth that wasn’t apparent from the back cover copy. It can also reveal whether or not the author is from a particular theological tradition. If every book cited is Baptist, or Pentecostal, or by a Chicago Cubs fan (?), you can get an idea where this writer is coming from.
3. The Introduction and the first chapter. Or, better yet, the first 10-20 pages of any book. In five to ten minutes, one can grasp style, pace, intent, and more in those first few pages. This works for fiction or nonfiction. If you read books and proposals this way, as I have for the last 40+ years, the best books rise to the top very rapidly. If you have to process a slush pile of unsolicited proposals, this is the only way to survive looking at 1,000 or more ideas each year.
I appreciate the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon.com. So often, these first three exercises can be accomplished online and widen your search. (Having the “buy” button so close to the “Look Inside” feature is borderline evil.)
3a. If the book is a daily devotional or a daily reader, I first read today’s entry. Then read the entry for my birthday. And then read the entry for my wife’s birthday. In seconds, I have sampled the entire devotional at random. Try it with any of the devotional books you have on your shelf at home. It is a fun way to “test” a book.
4. If you’ve done #3 above, now read the first paragraph in each successive chapter in the book. Again, it allows you to browse through the whole and catch the high points.
You might say this doesn’t work for fiction, and you might be right. It can actually ruin a great novel if you didn’t really read it. I understand and agree. At the same time, there are many books I really have no desire to read, but I do want to know enough about them so that if they are referenced in a conversation, a review, or a proposal, I have at least a passing knowledge. This may irritate some of you, but I didn’t want to read The Help by Kathryn Stockett when it hit the bestseller list. So I stood in a bookstore aisle and sampled it as described. Then read a couple of reviews. It was enough for me to know its quality, style, storytelling, and so on. Now, if it had been set on Mars or on a space station in a galaxy far away and there were rapacious aliens, I might have read the entire novel!
With over 30,000 new books being published every day, we are all deluged by endless choices. Each year, there are at least 200 great new books of fiction or nonfiction that are declared must-reads by someone I know or trust. Believe it or not, I actually do read hundreds of books each year. But since I’m in the business of reading, I have to find a way to “read” more.
I still fully read a lot of books each year. I do find some books compelling enough to slow down to read. The point of this post is to show a few methods I use to scan thousands of books or proposals each year. It is a survival mechanism in the publishing, editing, and agenting professions–the ability to scan a project quickly to determine whether there is enough quality to read the rest.
[A version of this post ran in 2015. It has been updated for today.]
