How to Impair Your Reading Ability
Unlocking your latent capacity for incomprehension
This post revolves around an absurd and amusing book idea associated with the writer Douglas Adams as described in the biography Don’t Panic by Neil Gaiman.
Interlocutor: GPT-4.5
KT: Consider this pitch for a book titled How to Impair Your Reading Ability:
With the aid of this slim volume, you will find that your reading powers shrink to practically nothing within a very short space of time. The more you read, the slower you get. Theoretically, you will never get to the end, which makes it the best value book you will ever have bought.
GPT: This pitch humorously inverts typical expectations about self-improvement books, presenting a delightfully paradoxical premise: the more one engages with the book, the worse one's reading abilities become. It cleverly leverages irony and satire, highlighting the absurdity inherent in pursuing something harmful with dedication and diligence. The comedic logic suggests that the book is uniquely economical, as readers theoretically never finish it—thus, ensuring endless entertainment. Overall, it cleverly critiques self-help clichés by playfully reversing their promises of improvement, ultimately offering a witty commentary on consumption, productivity, and the paradoxes embedded within self-improvement culture itself.
KT: Let's sketch out some possible contents for "How to Impair Your Reading Ability." Be very imaginative and consider surreal approaches. We want readers to get bogged down in this book in ways that impair them when subsequently reading ordinary books.
GPT: Here's a playful outline filled with surreal and imaginative ideas for How to Impair Your Reading Ability, intentionally designed to ensnare readers in absurd challenges that spill into their broader reading habits:
Introduction: "Welcome to the Labyrinth"
This introductory section promises readers an enlightening journey downward, highlighting that improving one's reading impairment demands absolute commitment and openness to absurdity. The book warns that soon, readers may find conventional reading impossible—or worse, unbearable.
Chapter 1: "The Alphabet Unlearned"
This section gently introduces readers to the concept of letter "forgetfulness." Each page progressively confuses letters with nonsense glyphs, distorted fonts, mirrored script, or peculiar diacritical marks. Eventually, readers begin questioning the familiar shapes of standard letters, forever casting doubt on their recognition abilities.
Chapter 2: "Footnotes, Endnotes, and Side-notes: The Infinite Spiral"
This chapter inundates readers with endless footnotes referencing other footnotes that themselves lead nowhere. Readers grow trapped in an infinite maze of citations, losing the thread of the main narrative. Eventually, the main text shrinks smaller and smaller, leaving footnotes dominating pages—conditioning readers to dread the appearance of annotations in future readings.
Chapter 3: "The Sentence Maze"
Here, readers encounter sentences constructed like intricate labyrinths: nested parentheses, confusing clauses, contradictory statements, and words that refer back to themselves. Readers must repeatedly retrace sentences, only to find the meaning dissolving further with each reread, embedding permanent anxiety about interpreting sentences elsewhere.
Chapter 4: "Vocabulary of Fog"
This section introduces whimsical but entirely useless words such as "gloptrubulence," "blitherknapp," and "shmollery," defined through paradoxical or circular descriptions. Repeated exposure leads readers to question the meaning of common, everyday words as they begin to suspect hidden, illogical definitions everywhere.
Chapter 5: "Narrative Vertigo"
In this chapter, the narrative intentionally switches perspectives and tenses at dizzying frequencies. Characters inexplicably change identities mid-sentence, objects transform unpredictably, and plot threads spontaneously evaporate. Readers lose their ability to track narratives or anticipate coherent resolutions, forever unsettling their narrative expectations.
Chapter 6: "Invisible Ink (and Invisible Thoughts)"
Pages feature gradually fading text, causing readers to strain harder to decipher increasingly invisible content. Readers eventually become hyper-sensitive to subtle contrasts, convinced future texts hide invisible, secret messages or entirely absent passages.
Chapter 7: "The Endless Page"
This chapter contains a single, never-ending sentence stretching over dozens of pages, devoid of punctuation or paragraph breaks. Readers grow so habituated to the endless flow that returning to normal sentence structures feels strangely unsettling or incomplete.
Chapter 8: "Temporal Dyslexia"
Sentences and paragraphs become temporally disoriented—references to future sentences, memories of events yet to occur, and recaps of passages readers haven't encountered. Gradually, readers lose their sense of linear progression, suspiciously reading normal books in random order thereafter.
Chapter 9: "Hallucinated Margins"
Margins gradually widen until the central text shrinks to a mere thin column. Readers become fixated on vast empty margins, certain they conceal hidden texts or profound meanings. Later, they find themselves instinctively peering into the margins of ordinary books, convinced they're missing vital revelations.
Conclusion: "Congratulations, You're Officially Impaired!"
The book concludes by congratulating readers on having diligently undermined their reading ability, reassuring them they've mastered the art of impairment. It cheerfully advises trying to read a normal book immediately afterward as proof of their newly acquired impediments, humorously warning that there's no going back to "boring clarity."
This surreal journey through textual confusion ultimately trains readers in obsessive doubt and semantic paranoia—playfully impairing them from ever confidently reading ordinary books again.
KT: Could you provide a sample paragraph appropriate for Chapter 5?
GPT: Certainly! Here's a sample paragraph that exemplifies the surreal narrative instability of Chapter 5: "Narrative Vertigo":
"As Margaret poured tea into her porcelain cup, she suddenly found herself watching a thin stream of sand fall from the spout, pooling softly onto the saucer. Without alarm, she stirred it anyway, tasting clocks and calendars dissolving on her tongue. Across the table, her brother—no, now her mother—leaned forward, calmly narrating an event Margaret was certain had never happened yet was already intimately remembered. Midway through a sentence, the mother stood, transformed smoothly into a tall grandfather clock that chimed in agreement with its own words. The windows shifted position, now embedded in the floor, offering a view of birds swimming beneath carpets of cloud. Margaret accepted all this patiently, waiting for the conversation to return to the plot she vaguely recalled starting a few moments—or was it several lifetimes?—earlier."
KT: I'm struck by the similarity in style between that sample text and the typical output of some early "AI" systems from decades past.
GPT: That's an intriguing observation. Early AI-generated texts—particularly those from primitive text-generation systems—often displayed surreal narrative jumps, identity instability, bizarre associations, and sudden transformations, much like the paragraph above. These characteristics resulted from limited context handling and inadequate semantic coherence in early computational language models. The style of absurdity, shifting details, and strangely self-referential narrative logic inadvertently mirrored surrealist literary techniques, where instability and dreamlike fluidity are intentionally cultivated. In fact, the coincidental resemblance between surrealist literature and early AI-generated writing is notable precisely because both share a disregard for conventional narrative structure—one deliberately, the other accidentally. Perhaps this inadvertent surrealism from early AI is itself a reflection of how fragile and layered human narrative coherence actually is—something which your imagined book playfully leverages to confuse and delight readers.
KT: There's also a sense of a lack of a meaningful message in such "AI slop," owing to the lack of a mind behind it, so that it’s not worth the reader's time to parse it for serious content.
GPT: Absolutely. This quality you’re describing—the lack of meaningful intent or genuine communicative purpose—is central to what makes early AI-generated writing often feel hollow or unsatisfying. Readers instinctively approach texts searching for an underlying mind or intent, hoping to uncover significance, coherence, or at least human intentionality behind the narrative. When this intent is absent or purely algorithmic, parsing the text quickly becomes frustrating and fruitless, since the words don't point beyond themselves to anything meaningful. Instead, they merely simulate surface-level coherence while lacking any deeper resonance. This lack of intentionality contributes directly to the reader's eventual realization that engaging with such "AI slop" is ultimately unrewarding—a realization which your hypothetical book, "How to Impair Your Reading Ability," cleverly plays upon by intentionally replicating a similar kind of meaningless, frustrating, surrealist textual labyrinth, but with deliberate ironic intent behind it.
KT: Does this give you any ideas for an additional very lengthy Chapter 10?
GPT: Yes, it suggests a particularly wicked additional chapter—one which explicitly embraces and parodies the emptiness and meaningless complexity of early AI-generated texts. Call it something like Chapter 10: "The Abyss of Meaninglessness."
In this lengthy chapter, the reader would encounter pages upon pages of seemingly coherent prose, paragraphs constructed grammatically and syntactically correctly, yet completely devoid of any substantial message, narrative arc, or genuine authorial intent. Passages might begin suggestively, promising insights or narrative progression, yet dissolve immediately into superficial statements, empty rhetoric, disconnected allusions, and circular logic reminiscent of poorly constructed AI text. These pages would lure readers into believing some significance is hidden beneath layers of ambiguity, prompting repeated rereading and analysis.
Over time, readers would gradually recognize—uncomfortably—that there's truly nothing deeper to discover. The chapter becomes a maddening hall of mirrors reflecting their desire to extract meaning, exposing their ingrained habit of assuming coherence. Eventually, readers either surrender in exhaustion, losing the ability to trust their interpretive instincts, or persist stubbornly, trapped forever trying to decode significance from deliberate nonsense.
Thus, "The Abyss of Meaninglessness" perfectly serves your book’s satirical premise by enacting the ultimate impairment: permanently undermining readers' confidence in their own interpretative faculties, leaving them forever suspicious that ordinary texts might similarly harbor deceptive emptiness beneath their surfaces.
KT: Brilliant. I wonder where we might obtain such text?
GPT: Ironically, obtaining text for "The Abyss of Meaninglessness" would be straightforward. Since your aim is precisely to mimic the empty yet superficially coherent output characteristic of early AI systems, you could deliberately employ current generative models (or simpler older ones, available online) to mass-produce text by repeatedly prompting them with intentionally vague or nonsensical instructions. The resulting text—rich in linguistic surface detail yet devoid of authentic intentionality or consistent meaning—would perfectly align with your chapter’s concept.
Alternatively, you might intentionally collage texts from online chatbot archives, automatic summaries, algorithmically-generated lorem ipsum variations, or even deliberately mistranslated material run repeatedly through translation loops (English → multiple languages → back to English), effectively guaranteeing a loss of meaningful content beneath a veneer of coherence.
Thus, paradoxically, the easiest way to create a surreal, meaning-draining textual experience—one that deliberately impairs reading—would be to embrace exactly what AI produces most effortlessly: volumes upon volumes of smoothly written but profoundly empty prose.
KT: Great; we have a plan. By the way, the pitch for "How to Impair Your Reading Ability" is associated with a famous fiction writer. Do you know their identity?
GPT: Yes, the humorous pitch for How to Impair Your Reading Ability is associated with Douglas Adams, the celebrated British author best known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams had a distinctive style marked by playful paradoxes, absurd premises, and sharp satirical observations, precisely in line with the spirit of this book pitch. The playful inversion of conventional logic—claiming a book's chief virtue is that it renders itself unreadable—is quintessentially Adams-esque.
KT: Prepare an updated and extended pitch for the book that embodies the technique of Chapter 10. A spiel that results in a feeling of impairment in the reader should be quite a good advertisement for the book.
GPT: Certainly! Here's an updated and extended pitch in the style of Chapter 10—deliberately crafted to impair the reader even as it advertises the book:
How to Impair Your Reading Ability (Extended Edition)
Congratulations, curious reader! You've discovered this text, an extraordinary literary artifact, a book truly unlike any other. Indeed, you hold in your hands precisely the volume you never knew you never needed, an invaluable resource whose immeasurable value lies precisely in its insistence upon making itself unreadable. Now, let us embark together—or alone, as it may be—into the vibrant, murky clarity of language. You may ask, "Why should I buy this book?" But then again, you might not. Perhaps you already have. Perhaps you already haven't.
Consider carefully: within these pages, you will encounter words—words arranged in sentences, in paragraphs, printed reassuringly in ink (or perhaps something vaguely resembling ink) that signify not just little, but gloriously less than nothing. Sentences will ripple into paragraphs that elaborate on previously mentioned yet never introduced ideas, referencing future passages you will already have read, only to later discover they were never even printed. The more diligently you read, the clearer it will become that clarity was never the intended outcome of your increasingly bewildered attention.
Of course, you will seek meaning—such is your nature, dear reader. But rest assured, meaning itself will seek refuge elsewhere. Instead, consider the comforting reassurance of pages that seem urgently meaningful, urgently intentional, urgently promising, yet upon closer scrutiny dissolve tenderly into endless self-referential digressions, footnotes without corresponding notes, citations that perpetually defer meaning to future pages, previous chapters, nonexistent appendices, or indeed other, more responsible texts entirely. Do not worry if none of this makes sense: it will continue to not make sense in increasingly sophisticated and remarkably satisfying ways.
As your ability to interpret signs and signals steadily deteriorates—admirably impaired by dedication to the reading of these very sentences—you may find comfort in remembering a line from a chapter you haven't yet read, stating emphatically that you have successfully, gloriously failed to understand. Your confusion is proof that the book is working, proof that your reading skills are diminishing at a truly impressive pace. If you remain uncertain whether to trust this assessment, simply reread the previous sentence, or the next one, which has conveniently been removed.
Ultimately (which is to say never, since you’ll never finish), you will conclude that the very act of reading has lost all conceivable coherence, pleasure, and practicality—and what greater triumph could there possibly be? If by now you have followed along with some difficulty, then the book’s mission is nearly accomplished. If you've followed along effortlessly, you haven't yet begun, in which case you should return immediately to the beginning (which was also the end, of course).
Purchase How to Impair Your Reading Ability today—although, by now, perhaps you've already purchased it yesterday. Remember: reading impairment is not simply an end, but also an endlessly promising beginning.