On Books-Why Did I Stop Reading This Book?

The beauty of having an antilibrary, is that you will always have the books that you have stopped reading available to you to reconsider your decision. The concept of the antilibrary came from Umberto Eco the symbiotics scholar, as well as the author of the Name of the Rose and various other novels. He is well known for having a library of over 30,000 volumes.

Walk through Umberto Eco's Library

The antilibrary is a personal library consisting of far more books that has not been read than books that has been read. It is a point of pride and it is also a point of pragmatism.  The point of pride comes from the owner’s ability to distinguish between the reality that there is more knowledge that the owner does NOT know, because there are books that they have not read, than there are knowledge that owner does know. The point of pragmatism comes from the knowledge that the reader has an abundance of references available at their disposal to indulge their curiosity whenever they wish, even when they are not on the world wide web. Most people do not have antilibraries of course, because the habit can be expensive, the books take up a lot of space, and partly because many people are under the delusion that showing the extent of their knowledge is more important and impressive than showing the extent of their ignorance.

I am proud that I have an antilibrary, not to the extent of Eco, but I do have a collection of books that I am proud of; the majority of the books I own I have not finished reading, although I have started reading them at least once. There was a time that I felt guilty about the untapped investments in paper, but I stopped feeling guilty when I realized that I would one day go back to read the books. Ideally, I thought that I should read every new book that I bought; the reality, of course, is that I buy more books than I can read at one time, and I never not buy books because I have unread books on my shelves;  those books that I have not read accumulates exponentially with each visit to the bookstore or, with each visit to a bookstore website.

This essay is about those books that I have left behind but have returned to after a hiatus to finish and the reason for these respites from those books.

I usually give up on a book because it  just did not hold my interest, I found the slog of reading discouraging, I became easily distracted as I am reading, I disliked the writing, or I found the subject matter not as engrossing as I had imagined. There are many books that I had given up reading, as my basement full of books will attest. There are times, quite often actually, that I will find a treasure trove of unread books as I am rummaging through my basement. I will pause in my search for whatever it was that I was searching and think: “I forgot I had that”, or “that sounds interesting”.  It is like opening presents on Christmas morning, there are as many presents as there are forgotten books.

After the initial delight of discovery, I would inevitably ponder the reasons for abandoning a book. I would search my memory for the reason: was it the writing? Was it the subject? Was it the organization? What was the reason for my abandoning a book that had once held my interest long enough to pay for it, invest time and energy in initially devouring it?

One book that I can recall which followed that fate is a book that had become one of my favorites. The  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, a title that was thrown around in late night college dorm room bull sessions for many decades. I have started that book numerous times and never got traction with the story. The beginning was rather slow, and the narrative really did not gain momentum for many pages. The characters were not interesting, and the pace of the initial pages were hardly engrossing. I had heard once that one needs to give a book 50 to 100 pages, if one still cannot get any traction then it is time to stop reading. I am not sure I agree with that assessment, but I soldiered through the beginning a few times and left it alone for extended periods of time. The last time I started the book, I felt like I flew through the initial pages, as the words had become familiar since I had read them so many times previously, that momentum carried me to the point where Pirsig introduced Phaedrus, and that was when I got hooked. As it became clear that when Pirsig spoke of Phaedrus, he was speaking of himself, that was when the book opened for me, as the reading experience became an exercise in mind expansion, without the chemical aids.  It is still one of my favorite books.

Another book that is on my pantheon of great books but did not hold my interest in my first few forays into its pages was Magister Ludi by Herman Hesse, it is also known as The Glass Bead Game. This book goes back to my callow youth, Hermann Hesse was the author that adolescent boys read because it was deep and ostentatiously cerebral. We were all trying to out deep each other so Hesse was the means to do it. I had started the Magister Ludi a few times without the story grabbing my attention, the fact that it was in a mythical Germanic setting that did not have any indication of identifiable time frame made  it intriguing but also confusing. I had devoured Siddartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Steppenwolf in short order, but that fact  made no difference in my ability to be interested.  I made numerous attempts without any success.  It was not until I left the book alone for a number of years before returning to it that I was able to not only finish the book but be completely absorbed into the cloistered intellectual world of Castalia. I  eventually  reread this book a few times because it made such an impact on me.

So, what was the problem the first few times? Was it the writing? Was it the subject? Was it the organization of the narrative?

It was none of those things.

The truth of the matter is that I was not ready to read those books, my maturity level, my intellectual depth, my ability to decipher, analyze, and integrate all that was presented to my eyes by the author were not developed enough to appreciate the work. It was not that the book was not good enough to appeal to my mind, it was that my mind was not good enough to respond to the appeal. My maturity,  intellectual and emotional maturity, was not ready to understand what the author was trying to tell me.

As we age, we will, I hope, be able to integrate all of our life experiences and knowledge into our continuously evolving intellect; and as our intellect evolve, we should be able to understand ever more complex concepts in addition to be growing emotionally to be more accepting of ideas that were once out of the ordinary, foreign, and perhaps even repulsive to our provincial mindsets. The ability to return to the books that had stopped us in our tracks is certainly a sign that our opinions and intellectual depth are growing and evolving along with our life experiences.

I now look at my cluttered basement with a newfound appreciation. The boxes of unread books become the object of my attention just as the shelves of the finest bookstores without having to leave the house. I have also gained an appreciation for my young and callow self for having the foresight, taste, and judgement to have bought these books in the first place, well before he was able to appreciate the richness of his choices.

This idea is not new, The New York Times Sunday Book Review dedicates a column to authors’ reading habits, the By the Book column. One of the questions is: which book should not be read until after the reader turns 40. It is new to me however, since I had not thought about it until recently.

Unfortunately, not all books fall into this category, I find that my younger choices in books are a mixed bag. I had a tendency to follow the trend and I bought many books that had not withstood the test of time, but that too is a lesson itself.

Ultimately, the understanding that I just was not ready for the book has taken the guilt, impatience, and self-loathing out of my emotional response to seeing all those books in my basement and made me achieve equanimity, at least in that regard.

Book Review-The Biggest Bluff By Maria Konnikova

This long-anticipated book had an unusual buzz surrounding its publication because both the psychology and the poker world were expectantly waiting for the publication. Maria Konnikova is a respected journalist who has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, amongst many other publications. She has a PhD in psychology, and she was advised by Walter Mischel of the marshmallow experiment fame ˗ her pedigree is impeccable. This is her third book, but the excitement around this book is different than most other non-fiction books on psychology and her other books. She has done media podcasts, YouTube videos, interviews with numerous luminaries in the psychology and journalistic world before; this time there are media podcasts, YouTube videos, interviews with numerous luminaries in the poker world in addition. The heterogeneous interest level can be explained by the subtitle  of this book: How I learned to pay attention, master myself, and win.

The book easily surpasses the initial hype through the quality writing and honesty exhibited by the author. Konnikova’s story has been told numerous times, but it bears repeating here. She had gone through some devastating personal travails, as a result  she wanted to investigate her own decision-making process and how other people make decisions differently. This has been her research area during her professional life as a psychologist and as a journalist so it isn’t surprising; she did narrow her focus in this investigation on how personal biases affects decision making and how those biases subtly and unobtrusively change the decisions critically. She decided after watching the film Rounders that the poker is the ideal experimental ground for learning about good decision-making because the amount of uncertainty that envelopes the game all the time. The speed of the  decision-making necessary around the poker table makes it necessary for the players to be brutally honest with themselves if they are to be successful. Their mental calculations acknowledge the role that emotions play in their minds; indeed, they diligently seek out their own weaknesses in order to make their decision-making process better.

The book presents the events chronologically as we follow her adventure in poker playing around the world. Remarkably, the author talks about her complete lack of poker knowledge: she did not even know the number of  cards in a deck of cards when she started. Her goal, which is to compete in the World Series of Poker, WSOP, seemed to be impossible. When I first heard about the challenge, I thought it was a very  ambitious goal. It was not until after I read the book that I realize just how ambitious it was. The book was a great primer in the vagaries of the poker world, not just the game itself, but the interactions amongst the players, the variety of the games and the tournaments themselves. The sheer number of tournaments and variety of tournament rules were astonishing for an outsider.

Fortunately, she found a mentor who was willing to take a chance on her. Eric Seidel is well known as an extraordinarily successful poker player, but he is not well known as a teacher of his craft, for him to take on this task was a surprise. He has said in interviews that he was surprised that he was asked, but he read some of her articles and he liked the way she explored the topics that she wrote about, so he was in.  He ended up being a perfect mentor as he was gentle and yet also honest about what she was doing to herself on the poker table. In her telling of the tale, he acted the roles of the teacher, the confessor, the conscience, and the critic without making her feel like she did not belong, nor did he destroy her confidence. She did more self-deflation on her own. Seidel came off like such a Zen master that he seemed almost a caricature of Yoda,  except we all know that he is not a caricature at all, in other words, Konnikova kept her writing about him real.

She started out playing online poker games which taught her the basics of the game of poker and taught her the strategies and tactics she needed to survive, without having to deal with the real uncertainties: the other players. She read poker books voraciously. Fortunately for her, and as a bonus of the project, she had the opportunity to meet and interview many of these authors as a journalist, so she was buttressing her poker knowledge through their books while also exploring the authors philosophies.

Konnikova recounted many of the mistakes that she made during the entire year of playing, all  the mental and technical miscalculation as well as her psychological observations of herself, yet as she is describing her initial foray into online poker, she appeared to be overwhelmed and the reader is feeling overwhelmed with her. I had never known that as simple of a game as poker is, there are so much that goes into the game. The game itself has many variations; in its simplest incarnation can surprise, taunt, and torture the players if they are not adequately prepared.  

As I was learning about poker in all its complexities, I kept thinking about the engineering approach to solving this complex problem,  thinking algorithmically, in mathematical terms, in  probabilistic ways. The author disabused me of that mode of thinking. She explained that I was not the first one to think about creating probabilistic models, there is a crew of numerically inclined poker players out there. The problem, according to Konnikova, is that poker is not just a game with finite uncertainties that are strictly governed by the laws of chance, it is a game that has the infinite uncertainties that comes with combining the numerical uncertainties with the broad range of varying psychologies associated with the players themselves. Her contention that strictly algorithmic approach may be successful, but only to a point; a good and perspicacious opponent will still do better than a strictly mathematical player. Which brings us to Konnikova’s main proposition:  despite the uncertainties involved with a game like poker ˗ the luck of the draw, where you sit at table, the different players, etc. ˗ winning at poker demands the most skills from a player. Skills is defined as the player’s ability to work with the hand that they are dealt, no matter how bad a hand it is, no matter how far behind the player is in chips, and no matter what the other extenuating circumstances can be.

In poker, the best hands do not necessarily win every time; that is, many times it is the worst hands that win because the player with the best hand end up folding. So why is that?  Often, people are handcuffed by their own biases and they will make the bad decision because they are driven by their biases; more insidiously, they are rarely aware of their own biases. A major part of the skill to winning at poker is to identify and recognize how your mind is tilted. The word tilt came out of the book as it is used to describe how a player let their  psychological tendencies tilt their decision-making. The other skill is for the player to have the ability to read and recognize the psychological tendencies of all the players sitting at the table, i.e. their tilt. The final skill is to have the wherewithal to combine their knowledge of themselves and their opponents while also grappling with the uncertainties from where the cards fall.

Throughout her narrative, the author was  brutally honest and self-effacing as she describes her moments of failure, her moment of paralyzing fear, her moments of weakness, and her moments of realization, after the fact, that she just gave away money; money she could not afford to give away, all due to her inability to undo her tilt or diagnose the other players. It takes a certain courage to lay out her analytical failure, something that is rare for anyone to admit, but especially so for someone who has insight into psychology by virtue of her academic research and training.  She castigates herself for always playing safely, which is what we all do sometimes, the difference is  a matter of the extent one’s preference for safety takes us. To her great credit, she faces up to her own demons quite often. It makes the reader be on her side, the reader ends up rooting for her to succeed.

In an ultimate courageous decision,  the PhD from Columbia University in psychology, someone who has researched and worked among some of the leading luminaries in  psychology, was brave enough to hire and work with a mental coach to lead her through exploring her weaknesses. She was intellectually honest enough to see that she cannot accomplish what she wants to accomplish alone; she cannot spot enough of her weaknesses to make a difference on her own. It takes an intellectual integrity and being self-aware enough to admit to that ego crushing reality and do something about it.

The author does an excellent job as the reader’s eyes, she describes everything that she experiences in this journey very well: the tournaments, the hands that she won and lost,  and the ethos and chaos of the casino.  She was exceptionally good  at describing the vibes in the casinos and the kind of character is that she ran into in those casinos.

In the end of course,  Konnikova does win her WSOP tournament. The video of her win is on YouTube so you could see it the moment she won it. She is now recognized as a professional poker player; in fact, she still plays professionally. Poker has gotten into her blood, and she firmly believes  that poker is the best way to conquer your own fears in addition to being the best training ground to prepare for making the best decisions.

My only regret is that I lost track of some of the narrative because I am not a poker cognoscenti,  in the moments where she is delving into the technicalities of the hands, I missed some of the drama and failed to recognize the drama of the situation because I didn't know what I didn’t know. Her precis of poker being the best training ground for conquering yourself rang true with me because I ended up buying a copy of the Poker for Dummies book. Baby steps.