The Orbital Mechanics of Reading

There are, from time to time, books I attempt to read that I am simply not ready for. They seem interesting, I start them, but I don’t make it very far. Years later I might come back to them, and find that I am ready, and I read the book with joy and delight that wasn’t evident on that early attempt. What gives? There are other times when my mind seeks out everything, when an embarras de richesses of books sit stacked on my desk and it seems I am bombarded on all sides by books that I desperately want to read and find myself paralyzed by the pull of so many different interests, a kind of Lagrange point in reading space. What gives?

I have frequently pointed to the butterfly effect of reading as a guide to what I choose to read next, but recently, while contemplating why it sometimes seems I am not ready to read a book, I have come up with a possibly better explanation. I call it the orbital mechanics of reading.

Gravity Well and Escape Velocity

Reading takes effort. Unlike film and television, which is passive, where the sound and images are provided for the audience, reading is active: a reader is presented with words and must decode and interpret those words to create the scenes, the connections, and the understanding all inside their head. There is a kind of literacy gravity well that exists which takes energy and effort to escape.

I have only the vaguest memories of learning to read1, but one thing I do remember was thinking that it was hard, and that as I stuttered along trying to make out the words, it seemed as if I’d never be fluent, never get to the point where I could soar on my own.

The earliest rockets didn’t escape Earth’s gravity but instead made parabolic arcs to the edge of space and then fell inevitably back to the Earth. It takes enormous amounts of energy to break free of Earth’s gravity well and reach escape velocity. This is true for reading as well. Enormous effort goes into decoding and parsing out the strange characters on the page. It takes more effort to allow those characters to create images in one’s head. And it takes stamina to sustain the flight. My early efforts found me making similar parabolas, up, up, attempting to read a book, only to tire or grow frustrated and fall back to the Earth.

But like with any exercise, you keep at it, build your strength, and one day, you find yourself reading a book with seemingly no effort. The words on the page have vanished, the images in your head are clear. You are floating above the world. You are reading. You are ready to begin exploring.

The Orbital Mechanics of Reading

Books, for me, have an attraction that is analogous to gravity. I escaped the initial gravity well of learning to reading when I was young. Imagine my trajectory as a curve moving out from that point in spacetime. Early on I encountered an astronomy book that had an outsized influence on me. Its attraction was strong. Its gravity altered my orbit slightly, pulling me in one direction, perturbing the initially smooth curve of my journey.

In junior high school, I encountered a dense gravitational source, a galaxy of science fiction and fantasy novels2 that pulled me in. Over the course of many years, I whisked through the galaxy, one book slingshotting me on to the next. Yet eventually, I emerged from that particular gravitational source, slung out to discover what else was out there.

These dense gravitational sources, subject areas like science, history, or even particular authors or series, make up a lumpiness to the geometry of reading space. They explain the major perturbations of my trajectory. But what about those near misses, the ones that I try out, don’t fit, but seem to fit perfectly years or decades later?

The geometry of reading space, like that of spacetime, is four-dimensional. What I think happens on those near misses is that our orbits don’t actually intersect enough for the gravity of the book to take hold. I am moving too fast, or too far from the subject of the book for it to hold me. I think, for instance, of E. O. Wilson’s Consilience as one such example. A friend recommended it to me in the late 1990s, but it didn’t stick. I was too fast or too far from its subject matter at that time. My journey continued and my trajectory was shifted this way and that by my reading, until, two decades later, I reencountered Consilience, and this time, our orbits intersected perfectly. I was better equipped from my two decades of reading to read the book than I had been two decades earlier.

At other times (now is one such time) it is as if I am passing through a field of high-density subjects that push and prod me from my path, making it hard to stick with any one, because I want to read all of them. It explains well why I am slowly making my way through a re-read of Carl Sagan’s Broca’s Brain, Martin Gardner’s Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, and Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery. All have dense gravity fields, all have a pull on me, and there are even more dense fields up ahead. At times like these, it is hard to focus on any one book because I want to read all of them.

Charting the Heavens

My trajectory is easy to chart, thanks to the list I’ve kept of books I’ve read since 1996. In one possible model, one could imagine plotting time on the x-axis, and subject matter on the y-axis. From that, one could see graphically not only the curve of my trajectory over the decades, but identify the gravitational sources that pulled and prodded my reading this way and that. One might even be able to model the relative strength of those gravitational sources based on how long they kept me in their thrall.

Charting the Future Trajectory

Here, at last, my analogy with orbital mechanics breaks down. Where astronomers can clearly predict the orbit of a comet or planet for centuries into the future, the reading horizon in front of me is necessarily short. One gravity well might grasp me for a book or two before I slingshot out toward something else. A book that seems super-interesting might fall flat. A topic for which I never gave much thought might have the density of a white dwarf and suck me in for months. It is from this unpredictable nature of where my reading will take me next that I initially came up with the butterfly effect of reading.

My reading, it turns out, is more directed than just random flaps of a butterfly’s wings. There was an initial launch, a long, slow cruise while my abilities improved. I then began encountering asteroids, planets, solar systems, and entire galaxies of knowledge that pushed and pulled my course, slowing me at times, speeding me up at others.

This also explains why, when I talk about what I plan to read next, it is just that: aspirational. I cannot see the as-yet invisible gravity wells that lie ahead of me and shift me away from that plan to something even more interesting.

And isn’t that what makes reading and learning the amazing journey that it is?

I remember the joy I felt sounding out the word “L-O-V-E” the first time and realizing thatE was silent. ︎I was all over the map here. A lot of Piers Anthony, introduced to his novels by my junior high school friend Noah. There was also Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and subsequent books. At this point in my journey, I was finishing maybe half of the books that I started. ︎