“The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes!” — Jorge Luis Borges, Prologue to “The Garden of Forking Paths”
As I write this, I’m about halfway through C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score. I loved his first book, Games: Agency as Art. On a personal level, I immediately identified with Nguyen: Asian American son of immigrants, grew up playing videogames, became an intellectual. Naturally I Googled him and found some talks he’d given on YouTube. And I have to confess: I am now a C. Thi Nguyen fanboy.
Nguyen is refreshing for a philosopher, not just because he is interested in games in an intellectual way that is rare, but because his boyish enthusiasm and his eagerness to bring his own life into his work are both genuine and endearing to me. Like a good teacher, he doesn’t feel the need to put on airs to prove his intellectual bona fides, even though he namedrops Hobbes, Suits, and a bunch of other philosophers I’ve never heard of. He does it in an earnest way that doesn’t make you feel dumb for not knowing them but rather makes you want to go out and read them. He just wants you to get what he’s trying to say.
I know all these things about him because I “know” him parasocially, from stalking him on YouTube and because of the PR he’s doing for The Score. I have now seen two long podcast interviews with him specifically about the book (one with Adam Conover and the other with Derek Thompson). And now, after consuming more than two hours of him discussing the ideas in the book, I have to confess, I found myself thinking: “Hm, do I need to actually finish the book?” Haven’t I gotten a kind of “tl;dr” version of the core ideas in the book straight from the author’s mouth? If the point of a book is to convey certain ideas to other people, and I’ve heard the author himself state the ideas that form the basis of his book spoken aloud, do I need to read the book?
Maryanne Wolf, the cognitive neuroscientist who has been the leading crusader for the preservation of deep reading, would scold me in this moment, saying that this mindset “that seeks to reduce information to its lowest conceptual denominator”From Wolf's essay for Nieman Reports in 2010, "Our 'Deep Reading' Brain: Its Digital Evolution Poses Questions" is why we don’t read deeply anymore.
Look around today, and all you see is this mindset, particularly with Large Language Models running rampant, slurping up everything ever published so it can summarize it for us. It may not be exactly the same as the author talking about the ideas in the book they wrote, but when you ask an LLM to summarize a text, what you get (very loosely) is the most probable collection of words from those that have ever been published about the book, possibly including the actual words from the book itself, reconstituted in whatever manner of prose or poetry form you request.
What Wolf is advocating for — and I agree with her for the most part — is the preservation of deep reading as a tradition connected specifically to the printed word. But the question I want to take up in my book, is: Can deep reading only happen in books?
The written version of an argument is, in a specific sense, armored. Text has to survive without the author in the room. It has to pull readers in and then withstand their questioning. A book has to be self-sufficient in a way a conversation never does.
Nguyen in conversation is animated, self-deprecating — you can see him suppressing his excitement, not wanting to interrupt his interviewer. It’s very charming, and we read these mannerisms as authenticity because orality is our native mode. For a hundred thousand years, the voice, the face, the body in the room were the only signals we had. A speaker’s manner does some of the work the argument is supposed to do.
The friction of reading is a feature of reading, not a bug. Densely packed, meticulously crafted passages should slow you down, make you argue back, sit with something you don’t immediately understand. If I’m moving through Nguyen’s ideas faster because his manner makes him easy to listen to, I may be downloading information without doing the harder work of engaging with or even questioning the argument.
This is a small example of something large. The shift toward oral delivery of ideas — podcasts, interviews, YouTube — doesn’t just change the medium. It changes the cognitive mode of the encounter. It makes ideas feel known before they’re understood.
At the end of his conversation with Nguyen, Derek Thompson distills The Score to two points: Design your own value system. Challenge yourself to do difficult things, on your own terms. It’s a fair summary. It’s also a perfect demonstration of the problem. I now “know” in a quick sense what the book is about. But I haven’t had to sit with Nguyen’s argument long enough to find out where it breaks, or where it changes me.
Here’s my value system: it’s okay to start a book and not finish it — if the author can’t pull you through the whole thing, that’s on them. What matters isn’t how many books you finished; it’s whether you got anything meaningful from the encounter.
My challenge to myself: do the difficult work of putting your ideas into words. Finish writing your book. And finish reading The Score.
