Being Well Read

Does reading a lot of books necessarily mean you are smart?

One must be weary in attempting to be well read. For many are widely read but few are truly well read.

Many people are avid readers, but retention and application of the information in the books they read often fall short of what one may expect of such diligent readers. Why is this? How do we internalize information such that they become useful to us? In the next few posts, I'll be focusing on this issue.

But for now, let me leave you with this quote from How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler.

There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores. 

To avoid this error—the error of assuming that to be widely read and to be
well-read are the same thing—we must consider a certain distinction in types of learning. This distinction has a significant bearing on the whole business of reading and its relation to education generally.