How to Read Books 📚

Five recommendations to get the most out of reading

I spent a lot of college reading, or more often, catching up on reading. I was an English major, and for four years, averaged a few books a week, often speccing out a pace of 100 pages/hour and setting aside a few hours of heads-down time.

That experience of my main academic obligation being reading classic works with great professors wasn’t lost on me, but by the time I graduated, I didn’t read a book for pleasure for the first year after college — all-nighters, term papers, and comparative analyses completely burned me out.

When I did pick up reading after that year, I realized that I actually hadn’t really read for pleasure much at all — a book or two during summers, but nearly all the reading I’d done was oriented towards an end result: a term paper or thesis, or trying to find the handful of non-obvious insights to bring up in seminar. And the pace at which I was reading meant my recall after a few weeks — not to mention years later — was spotty at best, especially paired with a less than ideal sleep schedule.

Reading nook in Butler Library

The way I read then was geared towards critical analysis, but when I started reading for pleasure, I wondered if there was a different way to read and tried all kinds of things — speed reading full lines at a time, reading to classical music, taking notes as I read, writing down the three most memorable things at the end of each chapter. I read on Kindle and phone and tablet and actual books and listened on Audible to see what worked best for me.

I found I enjoy reading most when it inspires new ways of thinking, and I also best retain information that way, when there’s time and space to think through things. The best way to read is going to be different for everyone, and we all have different daily routines that reading has to fit around. Balancing for that, and speaking with friends and hearing authors speak, the five best tips I know for reading are:

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1. Know why you’re reading

School assigned us homework and we answered questions to prove we’d read, which established a paradigm of reading being completion-oriented. Most of us carry that with us into adulthood, and that inertia of routine means we probably haven’t consciously thought of what we want out of reading — without that, it’s hard to know if we’re reading in ways that best serve our needs.

We read for all sorts of reasons: is it to say that you’ve read that book? Are you looking for the escapism of being immersed in a new world? Do you want to refine your thinking on something? Reading can be entertainment, intellectual curiosity, escapism, relaxation, or a million other things — no one reason is intrinsically nobler than any other, and one of the wonderful things about reading is the myriad of human needs it can meet. But our default is to adopt the reasons we read in school — to complete a book because we believe we should — when we really could be getting so much more out of reading if we thought about what we want out of it, and let ourselves read in ways that support that.

2. Do focused reading for (at least) an hour at a time

Our attention spans have decreased by about a third in the last decade. Scene cuts in kids’ cartoons are faster than ever, we carry variable reward machines that intermittently demand our attention several times an hour, and we’re being ever more conditioned to give in to shiny object syndrome. The pull to consume more is constant: we’re watching TV while on an iPad, talking to a partner and thumbing through Instagram, and speeding podcasts up to 2x. We’re twisting the spigot to get more information, but the consequence has been we’re not afforded the time to actually process the increased influx.

This trend towards hyper distraction is disastrous for reading, and really for any thinking beyond surface-level or reactionary. We’re no longer giving the text sufficient attention or actually processing what it’s saying, thinking through it, and developing deeper understanding and making connections with our existing knowledge base.

For the reading to be focused, I recommend going somewhere without any screens in sight, putting your phone on Do Not Disturb in another room, and doing nothing but reading for an hour. For parents or other people with unpredictable demands on their attention, this might be a pipe dream, but at least putting the phone aside sets you up for higher likelihood of success.

It can be depressingly difficult to not check a phone or device for an hour, but there are startup costs to immersing yourself in a book. The time it takes to enter that frame of mind resets every time you pull yourself out to divert attention elsewhere. By doing focused reading for an hour, you allow yourself to enter that state of mind, exist within that text, and actually absorb, interpret, and connect the ideas and concepts in the text to things you know already.

3. Read two books at once

This may sound like it flies in the face of ‘combatting distraction,’ and it’s admittedly a bit counterintuitive. I got this advice from Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, and he talks about how innovation occurs. Many truly innovative ideas stem from connections between two very different fields and linking them to create something totally new.

To be clear, I don’t literally mean in that hour of reading you’re reading multiple books, but rather don’t wait to finish a book before starting another. Distraction in the moment prevents us from reaching a deeper level of thinking and analysis, but reading multiple books at once helps us link analogous concepts across works.

The benefit of reading two books at once is twofold: first, as our minds process new concepts and link them to what we know already, we’re primed to have those references available as potential connections to the new work we’re reading.

My preference is to actually read books about totally different things, in different genres, or split between fiction and non-fiction — read a book of autobiographical poems and a collection of short stories, and see how it works for you. For me, I’m continually surprised with the random neural connections and overlap that I get from seemingly completely different pieces.

As for the second benefit: you know that feeling of trying to recall a word or place a familiar song or scent, and no matter how hard you think about it, it’s on the tip of your tongue but doesn’t come to you? And then hours or days later, out of nowhere, the answer pops in your head?

There’s a reason why that happens when we’re running or driving or showering, or doing anything but thinking directly about it, and I think there’s a corollary in reading two books at once: by giving ourselves a separate psychological space for another work, we let those mental background processes run, which can unlock interpretations and ideas that we may never have had otherwise, even in cases where there’s not an obviously analogous tie.

4. Once you start a book, read it at least every couple days

The original advice I heard on this was to finish every book you start within a week, from David Remnick in an interview with Jonathan Safran-Foer at the New Yorker festival. I think that’s mostly right, but there are certain books that with the amount of free time most people have, would be incredibly cumbersome to finish in a week (take Infinite Jest or Ulysses, for instance — that’d be a hell of a week with a full-time job and personal commitments).

I’ve been bad about this in the past, reading for an hour on a Sunday and not picking a book up for a week or two or more. When I’ve done this, I’d lose touch with the world the author’s created, and I could either go back and re-read to try to get back to where I was, or just power ahead. Either I’d be doing rework or trying to catch up while forging through, and both make for a less than ideal experience in consumption, recall, and deeper-level thinking.

5. Know when (or if) to pull the plug on a book

Some people have hard and fast rules for reading for a predetermined amount of time and deciding whether it’s worth continuing. We’re taught that books are meant to be finished, like there’s some kind of badge of honor for trudging through and completing a book with thousands of pages of thick writing.

My feeling is that there are more than enough books in the world and not enough time in our lives to make reading bad books worth the investment.

You shouldn’t feel obligated to finish a book just because you started it, but the reasoning for abandoning a book shouldn’t simply just because it’s difficult to read. With this logic, you would miss out on all kinds of books and learnings that you may be robbing yourself of because they’re essentially the Type II fun of reading — they may be rough in the moment, but afterwards, you’ll be happy to have read them.

Not every book will rope you in with the perfect first page. Authors should absolutely try to grab you in the intro — the onus is on them to make the writing compelling enough to hook the reader. But there will be books that take a bit to develop. Everyone’s got to figure out what their cutoff point is.

So feel free to abandon a book, but be honest with yourself about the reason you’re putting it down- there’s a difference between badly written books that aren’t entertaining and don’t push your thinking, and books that you disagree with but at least make you think in new ways.

Dream reading locale (via imgur)

How best to read is going to be different for everyone, and while I’ve found these to work really well for me, this is a menu of options of things to consider and with which to experiment. I’d mostly just encourage anyone to intentionally think through what they’d like out of reading, and seeing if trying new habits — these or others — helps support that intention.

Whatever you want to get out of the material you read, I hope that you do have the opportunity to look at your consumption patterns and see if any of these fit for you, or discover what works best for you. However you go about it, I hope however you read, you’re enjoying it and getting what you want out of it, and that you never stop reading. 📚😁

🙏 Thanks to Marie Sbrocca and Nathan Carter for their thoughtful feedback and reading drafts of this.

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