Somebody recently said that reading books has now once again become a very specialized activity, the way it once was.

I didn't like the argument initially. After all, reading a 50,000-word book doesn't seem like it needs any different skills compared to reading a 300-word news article.

But the more I thought about it, the more sense the argument makes. I've read several hundred books. Possibly more than a thousand. I don't keep count. I am generally reading two/three books at any given time, and finishing two/three books every month. I've been doing this for 22/23 years. The rate used to be much higher back when I was devouring pulp fiction as a kid, but now it's slowed down because I tend to read relatively difficult books.

By contrast, my roommate in college hated reading. He struggled to finish ONE collection of short stories in four years, and I don't believe he managed it.

There's got to be neural changes in my head as a result.

By contrast, 200 years ago, there simply weren't that many books to read. Most were obscure and not particularly valuable "classics" (a book isn't good merely because it is written in ancient Greek and a couple of hundred years' worth of Renaissance scholars read it over and over again because there was little else to read).

The book-reading specialists back then became experts in re-reading the same few books over and over again and milking them for every ounce of value. Sometimes they milked all sorts of value that wasn't even in there.

By contrast, the book-reading specialist today tends to do little re-reading. Instead s/he learns the skill of recombinant reading—the ability to process humanity's intellectual output as a whole rather than an atomized collection. There is a ton of redundancy, bs, and flawed portions in books today. It's like buying vegetables... you have to chop, throw away the rotten and unusable parts, blend with other chopped vegetables, make a remix stew...

The raw act of reading itself is a middle school skill. But this kind of meta-reading skill only comes with sheer volume. The pattern-recognition instincts start to kick in around Book 200 or so, assuming all 200 are not pulp romance novels or something.

Once I bought the "specialist" argument, I began noticing evidence supporting the idea.

For instance, people who read few/no books often have no appreciation for how an idea can appear in different guises in many places, often unrelated. They assume that the first version of an idea they encounter is the definitive, canonical one, and develop a functional fixedness around that encounter. They are unable to process different versions of the idea, let alone the more complex Darwinian geneaology of ideas, memetic churn, and so forth. They may understand ideas like idea genealogy and memes in the abstract, but they don't really get it. You cannot learn to swim in ideas until you actually enter the meme pool.

Or to take another instance, they really have no clue how to take a book apart critically (not physically) and identify the original parts. Big readers can do this both directly (they have read so much that they can spot the non-original parts), and also indirectly (original ideas have a certain undefinable "signature" to them). People who read maybe one book every four/five months (again assuming it isn't just genre fiction or the current bestseller) tend to have too much reverence for books to do this effectively. They lend books an authority that heavy readers don't. To heavy readers, books are merely processing input. Emphasis on processing rather than input. They say meaning is constructed by readers out of the stimulus in books. Heavy readers construct vastly more meaning than light readers.

So what does all this do to our relationship with non-readers? The same thing detailed knowledge of any specialized subject does, only much more so. It creates a certain distance, an inability to communicate across the gap, due to the Dunning–Kruger effect and the sheer lack of a frame of reference on the other side of the gap. Initially, it is a feeling of intense loneliness as you realize that you've accidentally turned yourself into an alien.

Then you realize you're not alone. You just see dead people. Your frame of social reference is the hidden river of dead authors communicating with each other across centuries of time, carrying on a conversation that is strangely detached from the regular world. Light readers cannot hear this conversation. You start to feel a bit like a medium once you can hear this conversation, because every individual book is situated in this conversation for you, where it basically stands alone for a light reader. It's like you can see the background where others can only see the foreground

You aspire to join the dead people while still alive. You start to write. You write a book. The circle is complete. You are now a civilizational ghost. A vampire of sorts.

All your friends are dead, or not yet born. You listen to your dead friends. You talk to your unborn friends. Thinking about your place in posterity for book writers is not a matter of vanity. It's a matter of connecting with dead friends, across time. Yes, it's a strange sort of silliness. Beneath the effort to sell copies and connect with living people, there is a yearning to talk to the dead in even the most ordinary of books.

Even if you don't write a book and remain forever a listener, you are still part of a group disconnected from the rest of humanity, but connected across time in ways the non-heavy-reading living will never be.

Your role in life is to take part in a silent vigil that most of the living will not understand. Through your reading, you take part in the ongoing weaving of the Grand Narrative of humanity. Though the non-readers don't know it, you are part of a millennia-long parade of dead people literally reading civilization into existence.

Come to think of it, the movie Ghost World, based on the graphic novel, seems rather aptly named, given these considerations.