Learning and the Very Loooong Book

The not-so-hidden features of learning that we receive from long-form writing (i.e., books).

When I began listening to audio books a few years ago, I decided (somewhat randomly) that I would mainly choose long books for that format, ones that can be challenging to heft around on travels, which is where I often find time for pleasure reading. When I made this decision, I had just finished a Jules Verne novel, so one of my first audio long reads was his The Mysterious Island (20 hours), which was followed by Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (also 20 hours).

At the end of 2024, I chose a novel that I had been meaning to read for most of my adult life, but its length had always made me shy away: Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, which clocks in at a whopping 32 hours of listening time. The specifics of the novel’s plot aren’t important to this post, but it describes the life’s journey of a young man through a childhood of neglect and abuse to an adulthood in which his many trials are rewarded with peace and contentment.

I listened to David Copperfield as I listen to most audio books—that is, in motion: driving on long trips, sitting on planes between boarding and takeoff, being ferried to an airport in a shared van, taking walks in my neighborhood. I started the novel in late November of 2024, and it took me almost three months to finish it. In other words, I spent a lot of time with that novel. Sometimes when I am reading a shorter novel and it really grabs hold of me, I will read it over the course of a day or two. Those reads are like hosting a visitor from out of town, where you spend lots of time together in an intense burst and then you part ways and return to your separate lives. A long novel feels more like a developing friendship, where people’s characters and habits are revealed more gradually as your interactions are spread across both time and space. David Copperfield shared his story with me on a November Uber ride from Kennesaw State University to the Atlanta airport; on an early December flight to Provo, Utah; on the drive to Cape Cod for a family Christmas celebration.

When I think back on that novel, I realize I have much firmer memories of it than I do with many other things I read, especially the shorter forms I read on a daily basis: political or academic news, posts on LinkedIn, thought pieces on education. I often read sentences or encounter ideas in those places and think: “Yes, that’s excellent, I want to remember that.” I usually don’t. If it really strikes me as worth noting, I will store it in my Instapaper folders, although it’s anyone’s guess whether I will look at it again.

The contrast with my reading of David Copperfield couldn’t be stronger. Sitting here in a coffee shop today, I can stare off into space and recall vividly many scenes: the blustery arrival of Aunt Betsey in the wake of David’s birth; Steerforth’s callous treatment of Traddles in front of the whole school; Peggotty and Little Emily’s reunion after Peggotty’s years of desperate searching. The sheer number of scenes and characters that remain stuck in my memory from 32 hours of listening seems almost miraculous to me.

But it’s not really miraculous. The firmness of those memories makes complete sense given what we know about two ways to enhance or support learning: 1) spacing it over time, and 2) experiencing it across multiple contexts. These two features have important implications for the ways in which we expose students to new ideas and information, ones that I think are increasingly overlooked as instructors gradually abandon books and long form reading for articles and summaries and podcasts and videos that can be contained within an LMS.

Durable learning emerges from (among many other things) long engagement with a subject matter, one extended across time and space. By tradition or design, higher education’s formal structures happen to support these two features of learning. Most college courses unfold over the course of twelve or fifteen weeks. Students are expected to carry skills and knowledge from week three in January to week fourteen in early April. College courses don’t spread out learning over space quite as easily as they do with time, since most of them occur in the same place (i.e., the classroom). But many of us do try to move our students into new places, as my co-teacher and I did last year when we brought the students in our Art and Science of Learning course to the campus art museum.

In a general way, then, the formal structures of higher education have wisdom in their approach to creating durable learning through the virtue of extending it over time and space. But we seem to be losing track of this wisdom when it comes to the reading experience. I’m not going to link here to the many anecdotal essays and arguments about the crisis in student reading, for which culture, students, and—yes—faculty have their share of the blame.

And by faculty, I include myself. Here’s my mea culpa anecdote: In 2003, I taught an upper-level course in the contemporary British novel, which included seven novels, including Zadie Smith’s 450-page masterpiece, White Teeth. In 2021, I was given the opportunity to offer another course in contemporary British literature. I re-titled it 21st-Century British Literature and Culture, expanded the content to include films, television shows, art exhibitions, and essays. At least half of the course content had become cultural objects that students could process in 15-30 minutes. There were novels, but their number had been slashed from seven to three. ¹

I would make a different decision today, especially in the wake of AI’s integration into higher education. AI has incredible potential in many areas of life, from medical research to creating more accessibility for many learners (and humans). But let’s not kid ourselves—its major promise, and the reason that many people use it, is that it saves us time. Who needs three hours to create a slide deck when AI can do it in three minutes? Who needs to read a whole book about brain mechanics when I can get an AI-generated summary that appeals to my existing interests?

Efficiently created slide decks and AI-directed reading summaries are not necessarily bad things, but if these become the primary ways in which we learn, engage with our culture, or even interact with each other—the quick text versus the long dinner conversation—we are losing access to experiences that have special power to reshape us by virtue of our extended processing of them. The time I commit to reading, learning, interacting, or engaging with something will partially determine whether it bounces off me or makes a dent.

Books are the perfect vehicles to extend learning and thinking across time and space. As our learning gets shoehorned into smaller and smaller bites, the particular contribution of books to formal education seems increasingly important to me. And I don’t mean textbooks, although they might have their place. To take full advantage of the learning power of extended reading, students should have the opportunity to engage deeply with another mind through the medium of a book—a foundational treatise, a controversial take, a novel that illustrates a phenomenon in your field. Let students trace the full development of an idea. Get lost in a story. Be invited to forget a character and then remember her in the final chapter. Watch an author digress and then return. Let a book make a full claim on our attention, and challenge us to act or think in a new way.

I recognize all of the barriers that get in the way of putting books on a syllabus, although all of them have solutions (such as digital and audio formats). But we have to stop bemoaning the many things we find wrong with students today—their diminished attention spans, their lack of reading skills, their lowered test scores—without acknowledging that many of us gave up too easily on this available remedy for our current ills.

This weekend I was in a bookstore and walked by a few shelves of classic literature, and a real brick of a book caught my eye: Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. I opened it to the last page, and saw it almost cracked the 1500-page mark. I checked my audio app: almost sixty hours! Seems like the perfect companion to carry me most of the way through a long New England winter . . .

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1. This was the course I was teaching when some kind of infection attacked my heart, leading to my months on life support, a heart transplant, and a stroke. Perhaps I was being punished for giving up on novels too easily? I will note that while I had jettisoned four novels, I had kept White Teeth in the course, and in fact the class was reading it the week I became sick. I wonder how many students finished it after I went into the hospital that October?