With the start of a new semester, many students are returning to some reading-intensive classes.
Perhaps you are a history or English major and you are up to your eyeballs in biographies and novels to read, or maybe you’re in another field but have found yourself taking a few 200-level English courses to satisfy some degree requirements.
You may even be in another discipline that requires heavy reading even drier than what one could expect from a Humanities course. Whatever the case may be, many of you are coming to a horrible realization: to keep up in your coursework, you have to read two to three hours a day.
For some students, this is devastating, especially struggling readers who might take even longer to get through the material. After all, hours a day spent with your nose in a book seriously eats into your social life, into time for a job if you have one and (do I dare even to put these thoughts to paper?) it may even reduce or even eliminate the time you’ve set aside for video games.
So then your first inclination, and the first resort of many millions of college students since 1999, is to fire up the laptop and head straight to SparkNotes.com, that Eighth Wonder of the World.
There you may behold thousands of pages of dense material all digested and pondered over by writers who, I’m quite sure, know exactly what they are talking about and distilled down into short, easy to read summaries that give you the essence of Dante’s Inferno or Homer’s Iliad in a pithy five-paragraph blurb. Oh, who can question the achievements of modern invention when it can deliver us the weight and authority of the Ancients in the length of a Reddit post?
If you detected sarcasm just then, you read me rightly. SparkNotes may seem like a necessary part of studying in college. After all, how can one possibly keep up with all the various and sundry reading assignments that require so much time and energy to complete? You might even think, and you are not without a great deal of company in this regard, that modern students can’t be expected to read and understand texts that were written 500 years ago when diction and vocabulary were very different than they are today.
I maintain, however, that those who rely solely on SparkNotes and their digests of literary works are not only wasting their time on surface-level information, but they are also cheating themselves out of an education (which, let us not forget, they are paying for) and the chance to experience works of great art and beauty.
This first claim may strike many as rather odd or maybe even flatly wrong. After all, how could the use of a service that reduces three hours of reading down to fifteen minutes of reading be a waste of time?
Consider that something is a waste of time if it produces little of value for the time put in. Fifteen minutes reading a summary may help you pass a test, but all such information is quickly forgotten. Three hours spent reading a Shakespeare play or a sonnet sequence might be quite profitable. After all, you not only take in the plot and important themes, but after reading for a while you begin to notice the overarching structures of a work, like the way that Frankenstein, for example, parallels the myth of Prometheus (which is, of course, why the byline on the cover is “The Modern Prometheus”).
You may also notice the small things: stylistic details unique to that author, particularly charming or vivid characters, the quality of the poetry or prose itself, and, most importantly, the ways that the work connects itself to you as a reader.
Certain books seem to have the ability to hook you such that, though you may put it down, the characters, ideas and themes of the story stay with you far after you are finished reading. It is one of the pleasures of the life of the mind.
And that is why you are here isn’t it – to pursue the life of the mind? At the very least, let’s pretend that those enrolled in college do genuinely want to learn and don’t just want the piece of paper. If so, might I suggest you’ve overpaid for that piece of paper.
It brings me to my next point – to rely on vapid summaries of the required course reading cheats one out of an education. And what do we mean by an education? We mean that if one is taking a course in, say, Welsh poetry, we expect not only that they will have actually read Welsh poetry but also understand it.
After all, would you hire a mechanic who had never worked on cars before and had only read owner’s manuals? But that is not all, naturally, they must also understand the material.
The key operative word there is “understand,” a fine old Anglo-Saxon word that at one point in time meant something like “stand in the midst of.” This is precisely what we do not do – stand in the midst of literary works.
Skimming a story for the key parts is not understanding – it’s literary tourism – and reading the SparkNotes is like reading a travel review, deciding it’s as good as being there and then deciding not to take the trip.
And take it from one who knows that there are certain books that ought to make for the site of many an intellectual pilgrimage. If you take nothing else away from your experience at college, at the very least you will have hopefully read some fantastic books; books filled with ideas that will serve as intellectual fuel for your continued journey in career or education, but more importantly in pondering (as all people do) the great mysteries of life.
Thus I am inclined to the sentiment of Sir Francis Bacon who asserted, “Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
