Between the end of December 2019 and Tuesday, March 17th I read 229 books. Starting with the Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood and ending with The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State by Paulo Drinot these books fell roughly into three categories. The categories, Colonial American and the US, Global Labor History, and US Women’s and Gender History, also contained subcategories within themselves. Of course, many of the monographs would have fit nicely into anyone of the categories, but that’s neither here nor there. I undertook this seemingly herculean task in order to pass a series of exams every person attempting to get a PhD in history has to take. While the exam structure varies from university to university, the general gist remains the same. Read a certain amount of books over a set amount of time, and then answer questions about them. The questions revolve more around how books interact with each other and the broad themes of the field, rather than specific questions about what certain books argue. Meaning, the questions pose historiographical queries rather than rote memorization ones.
Warning: If you don’t like numbers just skip this paragraph. Of course, to read 229 books in around 90 days is a fool’s errand. An average history monograph – read, fancy word for book – runs at around 250 pages not including footnotes, with a great many going far over that limit. The longest book on my list was 959 pages, the shortest 115. Using the average and multiplying out that would mean reading ~636 pages a day, every day for 90 days. As the average person reads at about the speed of 2 minutes per page, it would take me 21.2 hours to complete that reading. Leaving me with just 2.8 hours of sleep per day. I read a little fast than 2 minutes per page, but not that much faster and could probably get it up to 3.2 hours of sleep a night. Obviously, an unsustainable prospect.
So how did I, and the hundreds, if not thousands, of prospective history PhDs taking their exams this semester read that many books? To use the language of the chum box, by using the one easy trick that professors hate. Essentially, purposeful skimming. Because I know what types of information I’ll need to answer the questions on my exam, I can tailor my reading to squeeze every last drop of that info I can out of the book. This is possible to do because historical monographs generally follow the same pattern. They open with an introduction, and end with a conclusion. The introduction, in a well-written work, presents the basic structure of the book. It explains the purpose of the book, the author’s thesis, what sort of questions they ask, how they plan to answer them, what the source base the author uses, what other authors this book interacts with, and the executive summary answers to the questions the author asks. The conclusion generally goes more into detail into the overreaching conclusions that the book comes to. But I don’t stop there, because skipping the other 200 pages of the book would missing out on much of the meat of the book. Generally, each chapter of the work will also have intro and conclusion paragraphs, which function similarly to their chapter-length counter parts, but with a narrower scope. Chapters often also contain various sections and reading the intro and conclusion paragraphs to those sections will impart important information. Finally, if I truly want to get every morsel of info off the bone of a book, reading the first and last sentence of every paragraph should makes me familiar enough with the book to talk about it at length. Finally, after the book has been sucked clean, I check out some reviews of the book. Reviews certainly come in many different flavors, so I read a couple of them. I sparingly add them to my notes, usually just to fill in the gaps of anything I might have missed.
This system is what allowed me to read 229 books in that amount of time. Do I recommend doing it for fun, or if you truly do have the time to read 229 books? Absolutely not. Nothing can compare to reading a book word for word. The author worked hard on it, and with history books, probably spent several years writing and researching the thing. Investing a couple of days to finish the work comes down to a matter of respect. Purposeful skimming means that you often miss the rich historical details and fascinating stories that lend life to the historical and historiographical arguments. While I certainly took many notes on these books, and can use them during my exam, I remember with much more clarity the books I read in full. In fact, I often found myself just straight reading the books on the list instead of skimming. I had to force myself to skim in order to get to all the books I needed.
In some ways the end of this exam prep period brings melancholy. Despite certainly being a stressor, I will most likely never have such an extended period of time during my professional career where I can just read ever again. Reading has always been near and dear to my heart and getting this much time to read so many books on so many subjects truly makes me one of the luckiest people. Not many people get to do what they love for a couple of months and get paid for it.
On the other hand, writing the essays has taken on a different tone. It feels a little weird in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic to take a week and write seven essays about the evolution of American historiography. And the fact that I need to pass these to move on to the next stage in my graduate studies does sort of cast a pallor on the whole endeavor. But nevertheless, I think treating my writing next week as a reflection on the joys of the past months rather than a well into which I must pour all my accumulated knowledge has been helpful. Having something to do during my self-isolation also has helped me keep my head on straight. That and copious amounts of Skyrim.
On Monday I’m going to drink some chai, eat a bowl of frosted mini-wheats and get to work. I wanted to get Lunchables to eat during my exams but my girlfriend vetoed that and she was probably right. So I’ll take a quick break, make a ham sandwich and start writing again. After I’m done at five each day I’ll probably unwind with a couple episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. You know how it is.
And when this is all over? I’ll read some books for fun. Maybe start Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time Series. It’s only 15 books. How hard can that be?