Why It S Important To Read Hard Books The Case For Intellectual

In our modern era of instant information and bite-sized entertainment, reading intellectually challenging material can seem like an unnecessary burden. Why struggle through a dense classic novel, a difficult philosophical treatise, or an intricate historical account when easier, more accessible options are available? However, those who embrace the challenge of “hard books” often find their intellectual lives enriched in ways that lighter reading simply cannot provide. In the context of classical education, where the cultivation of wisdom and virtue is paramount, reading hard books is not just beneficial — it is essential. Reading a difficult text requires patience, focus, and perseverance. When a book is challenging, the reader cannot simply coast through it in a passive way.

Instead, he or she must engage actively, rereading passages, looking up words, and considering complex ideas. This process strengthens the mind much like physical exercise strengthens the body. In an age where attention spans are shrinking, the discipline developed through reading demanding works is invaluable. A student who has struggled through The Republic by Plato, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, or The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer will develop the ability to sustain deep thought. This intellectual stamina prepares individuals for rigorous study in any discipline, whether in law, medicine, theology, or philosophy. Even more importantly, it enables them to engage with the weighty questions of life with clarity and insight.

Many of the greatest works of literature, philosophy, and theology do not provide easy answers. Instead, they invite the reader into a serious intellectual and moral struggle. Consider Augustine’s Confessions, where the author wrestles with questions of sin, grace, and divine providence. Or regard Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which raises profound questions about justice, revenge, and the meaning of existence. These works challenge us not just to understand but to engage, to debate, and to form our own reasoned conclusions. By reading hard books, we learn that truth is not always simple.

Life’s most significant questions — What is justice? What is virtue? What is the good life? — are not easily answered. Grappling with these texts prepares us for the complexity of real-world ethical and philosophical dilemmas. In his work The Western Canon, Harold Bloom wrote that a “reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.”

The apparent message in Bloom’s flourish is that a reader ought to be after something more difficult to attain than mere pleasure. Passive consumption of entertainment will simply not do. Instead, readers are to be fully engaged with the work in front of them, especially when the process is difficult. It’s through this difficulty that a reader inevitably enlarges what Bloom refers to as a “solitary existence,” or, put another way, an existential engagement with the human condition. However, it appears that readers, especially young Americans, aren’t invested in excavating the existential questions often presented in books. They don’t seem all that committed to investigating the philosophical implications of Nietzsche’s eternal return or the way paranoia often preys upon the mind of someone deeply entrenched in the world of John Barth’s...

As a former university and high-school teacher, I have often heard students proclaim that books are too hard and too boring to be worth their time. This diagnosis has become even more evident with the advent of uber-addictive social media platforms. Complex novels, such as Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, cannot effectively compete with dopamine-riddled dance and mukbang videos. Short, well-produced content on TikTok and Instagram and the endorphin rush they provide are comparable to illicit drugs. Difficult texts require more of the reader than passive attention, and most young people simply refuse the challenge. Even for those who wish to read difficult material, it can feel like searching for a diamond in the rough.

The so-called serious fiction of today features didactic tracts promoting the latest in progressive politics. Often, the inherent—albeit contradictory—message in these tracts features a heavy criticism and dismissal of white men and, ultimately, the Western world. Though this may be an attractive literary neighborhood for some, it doesn’t scratch the same intellectual and spiritual itch that, say, Albert Camus’ The Stranger does. In middle school and high school, your teachers probably encouraged you to seek out primary sources, which are original accounts of a topic, as opposed to secondary sources, which are retellings or summaries of... However, teachers often don’t acknowledge an important fact: Primary sources are really boring and hard to read. If they’re historical texts, they’ll have different writing conventions, which makes them much harder to parse.

Or, if they’re from the present but are academic, they’ll use language that is uncommon outside of their field. Reading a modern account that summarizes the topic, such as a Wikipedia article, can help you understand a concept much more quickly than you would’ve by reading primary sources. With the advent of the internet, summaries have proliferated. It used to be that if you wanted to learn something, and your professor’s curriculum wasn’t working for you, the best way to learn was to go to the library and find a book... But now we live in a more advanced world where challenging subjects have been summarized and popularized in YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles. Learning class material via YouTube isn’t bad by itself—I’ve certainly saved many hours by watching videos by The Efficient Engineer instead of reading my textbooks—but using YouTube as your professor won’t work forever for...

First, as you continue to learn from the internet, you’re bound to notice diminishing returns. For example, there must be hundreds of thousands of videos, articles and websites out there that explain how to multiply and divide fractions or factor polynomials. Once you get higher up into mathematics and have to deal with concepts such as derivatives and Laplace transforms, though, things get trickier. There’s still information out there, but it gets much harder to find resources that will explain it better than the textbook you paid an extortionate amount of money for. Eventually, once you reach math concepts that I’m not educated enough to know the names of, you will have to accept the sad truth that not all knowledge is free and easy to find... Some of it can only be gained from an expert in the field, which is why becoming a part of an academic community is useful.

But, much more often, it’ll exist in a textbook or journal, completely unsummarized. If, up to that point, you’ve been avoiding textbooks like the plague, what happens then? Second, a person who relies on summaries can be abused by them. The act of summarizing itself involves making value judgments about what parts of a text are important, and the person making that video may not even be aware of the judgments they made. More importantly, there’s active disinformation: Someone could simply lie about what’s in the text that they’re summarizing. How would you know that they’re wrong?

This risk of misinformation isn’t just unique to us college students, though. Most people get their facts and opinions not from primary sources, but from news outlets or commentators that do the research for them. Obviously, if you relied solely on primary sources at all times, you’d spend all your time doing research and never come to any conclusion. But being a responsible agent of knowledge means that when your brain tells you that something doesn’t seem right, you have to do the research the hard way. Still, being good at reading complex works is important in other ways. Being able to parse legal documents, tax forms or contracts can help you catch important points that you otherwise would’ve missed.

Okay, so I guess we have to begin with what is a hard book? And to be honest, it likely varies from reader to reader. Now, you're probably thinking "Oh, great, she really knows where she's going with this." Fear not, I kind of do... In my Venn diagram of interests, you will likely not be surprised to hear that I watch a lot of content about books and reading. Part of the discussion online (that the algorithm is feeding me), is that attention spans are struggling. As a Millennial -- yes.

There's always the next thing, the next video when we are scrolling, the next clickbait article, the next opinion designed to enrage or annoy. And so, we are fed a steady stream of "the next thing". This is the video that first got me thinking about this topic, opens a new window. I do recommend giving it a watch. In my opinion, the "hard books" can be books that maybe are outside preferred genres. They are the classics, they are perhaps non-fiction, maybe science fiction, maybe something else.

The point of reading hard books is to keep curiosity alive. We have the wealth of all of human knowledge in our pockets, and I know at least for me, I visit the same sites, and check the same social medias every single day. The place where I still demonstrate my highest levels of curiosity is in my reading. Reading (and I mean that in a consuming books kind of way as audiobooks and ebooks ARE reading) allows us to develop empathy for people and groups we don't intimately know, allows us to... I feel so personally connected to the act of reading. And it has meant so much to me.

It has been a lifelong comfort, and I missed it when I wasn't able to read a few years ago. Do I read for pleasure? Yes, absolutely I do. All reading is valid reading, I am merely suggesting if you feel a disconnect that maybe reading that "hard" thing for you will help bring you back to the reading you've loved before. These are my "hard" books. Books I enjoyed in spite of myself, books I wasn't sure I'd finish, books that made me think, books that changed (or validated) my opinion, and books that I felt made me a different...

The term “agents of control” likely evokes the great dystopian image of Big Brother, the classic literary symbol of totalitarianism, historically realized to a significant degree in the Soviet Union. The regime exercised a monopoly of power from its command economy to its state-run education and media to its vast propaganda machine—all of which aimed to control the horizon of meaning. However gripping it might have been, this is not the specter that haunts us now. We won the Cold War, after all. The Iron Curtain fell, the Berlin Wall crumbled. And yet, there is a widespread sense of insecurity about our freedom, about the omnipresence of things that control us, not from a single center but from multiple loci.

Once upon a time, people gathered to eat their meals; they sat around a table facing each other and gave thanks to God for the food which they smelled, touched, and tasted; they looked... In stark contrast, people are now prone to eating alone in front of the computer, television set, cell phone, or steering wheel; they frequently forget to give thanks to God for the food which... “Sex” and “gender” are not facts of nature just lying there waiting to be discovered by the neutral rationality of science. And the distinction between a merely biological “sex” and a social or psychological “gender” is not a scientific distinction. It is not the discovery of detached empirical observation or the result of experimental testing but is an a priori interpretive lens for processing empirical and experimental data whose conceptual origins lie elsewhere... Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about why we should read those “difficult” books— the ones that challenge you and make you sweat a bit trying to figure them out.

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