The Quest to Read More.

An oft-forgotten good habit.

The first section of this piece is about my history with reading; if you just want the practical stuff — how to read, what to read, & what I’ve been doing without the fluff, skip to the first heading.

When I was young, I used to “read” so much. Now, a lot of my “reading” was not going to pass the bar of my teachers or the librarian, but I remember in middle school in particular slowly working my way through the thick stacks of “Popular Science” (rest in peace), as well as various “eyewitness” books. These were all heavy on pictures and diagrams, and the amount of serious reading I did remains unclear, but I definitely learned a lot. I can distinctly remember pestering classmates about technologies that have now gone mainstream (like electric vehicles, and all kinds of gadgets), which Pop-Sci would consistently cover early on in their evolution. If only I had a bit more confidence and an investment account — I’d be rich!

My reading evolved with time into heavy Wikipedia dives, which ended up involving a lot more actual reading. Wikipedia is fairly easy to read because it tends to be broken up into small digestible sections. Again, I absorbed an insane amount of information this way over the years. In high school and university I still read Wikipedia — albeit largely on things that I was less familiar with: foreign cities and countries, and topics that weren’t just hard science, but I also started dabbling in urbanism forums where real people would talk about the things they found interesting — not just the things that were related.

The thing about a lot of this reading is that while I mostly just consumed stuff that interested me, especially on Wikipedia, I’d end up learning about a lot of things on accident when clicking on links for related or supporting topics. It often wasn't until months or years later in science or math classes that things would come up that I already had a pretty intuitive understanding of. I think this is when I first got a sense of the very practical value of reading.

I really was never much of a book reader growing up. I think the only book I can really remember finishing is the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Issacson (I was really into Apple — the design and its leaders in the late oughts). In university and in my last few years of high school this changed a bit: sometimes I had to read a modest book like “1984” for a class, and I went through a ton of textbooks and readings (pulled from various books) for university as well. (I also had to write a ton of essays in my last year of high school and in university, which really helped me see the value of reading as well. After all, writing is just creating something for someone else to read — or sometimes yourself.)

But it wasn’t until about three years ago that I decided to make a real commitment to reading more. In some sense, I’ve never stopped reading the type of stuff you’d have found in Pop-Sci, that stuff just lives on sites like Wired, and the Verge, as well as on blogs these days, but I also wanted to expand my reading beyond short, technical stuff. I think a real motivating factor was when a smart guy who I am close friends with and who is far more academic than me (and in the social sciences) gifted me several books for Christmas. I really look up to this person, and think they are really smart and knowledgeable, so reading the books was an easy sell (my favourite of the three was Reappraisals by Tony Judt, which almost certainly changed the way I look at the world).

I guess the appeal of books coming to me has coincided with me being out of “formal” education for a few years (as overrated as I think that is). When you’re not going to lectures and being told to do readings, you realize just picking up a book is how most people learn, and you can do it anywhere.

How I’ve Been Reading

So then, what does reading generally look like for me?

Generally speaking, I try (as much as one can with a young child) to read in blocks of at least 20-30 minutes. I find that if you read less than that amount at a time, it’s like trying to watch a video while pausing every few seconds — the thoughts just can’t be fully formed.

One thing I did a lot of when I had access to a treadmill was walk and read: this is a hugely time efficient way of getting some light exercise, but also really absorbing a book. In fact, I sort of found the fact that I had to focus my subconscious on... walking, meant I could focus more on the book at hand. I mostly read the Power Broker this way, and that’s a 1000+ page beast.

What would have made reading the Power Broker much easier is an e-reader. You really start to appreciate them when your book start being so heavy and unwieldy. Plus, with an e-reader, you can always have several books on you, giving you some options to choose from which I think is valuable. Being able to cycle through books if you get bored, or if a particular book is better suited to casual reading, definitely helps you read more. Someone I respect suggests leaving books around, and I think that’s a good approach; people use their phones because they are always with them, so if you have a lot of books around the home, it’s quite possible you’ll find one in your hands more often.

I think having multiple books goes further than this too: if you have a few books going in rotation (as I usually do these days) instead of dropping reading when you get to a particularly dry chapter, you can just switch to another book for a while — which leads to more reading.

I should also say I do end up doing a lot of reading on Substack, with probably my favourite blog being Construction Physics — this is really valuable, but of course the quality varies (as you’ll know it does in books if you read a lot), and it can be a bit harder and less satisfying to quantify your consumption.

Something I try to do, especially if I really enjoy a book, is to write a few brief notes about it once I am done in Obsidian; I can also decide whether I might want to read it again, or whether to gift it onwards to a friend.

One thing that I’ve really had to train myself to do is to be willing to quit reading something. The best example I can think of is a strong recommendation from “Mr Money Moustache”, which is the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. I should have known this would not be a good read from the title (usually someone asserting there is some fixed number of ways to think about something is a bad sign), but once I started reading, what I found was a sort of weird, procedure-heavy snoozefest that seemingly suggested setting up a family bureaucracy and all kinds of other odd stuff. It was painful to read, and I tried longer than I should have to trudge through (because I respect the recommender), but once I saw the writing on the wall I should have closed the book for good. A read that is a grind or that is annoying you might be one you’d want to put down, especially if (like me) it makes you less interested in reading.

With all of that said though, I have not been reading enough (I am stretching to reach my two book a month goal — and I know people who do that every week), and so I do need to refocus myself to try and do a lot more, because I really do believe in the value of it.

What I’ve Been Reading

Now, the obvious followup to “you should read” is... what should you read?

I might write another post at some point about interesting things I’ve read or that I am thinking about reading; if you’d be interested in that, make sure you’re subscribed!

But, I think it may be helpful to talk about how I’ve found stuff to read — that way you can be on the lookout. One thing I do is take recommendations from friends quite seriously, and of course you will build a mental model of recommendation quality over time as you do that. Blogs are also a great place to find book recommendations, and in general a lot of people will suggest things in passing, and I personally have a habit of noting those down in case I am ever in search of something.

You can also just browse, whether that be at a local independent bookstore, a chain, a drugstore, or yes — even Amazon. I’ve found some surprisingly good stuff on accident this way, and of course sometimes books mention other books you ought to read — just be open to noting them down!

Something I have been thinking about is maybe just picking up a bunch of Pulitzer’s, since a bunch of books I’ve enjoyed won the prize (could be a confound though). It just seems like a pretty good indicator of a truly good book as opposed to something thats got some social media hype.

So that’s what my relationship with reading has looked like, and looks like today. I hope to write some more posts on this topic as I grow stronger opinions and read more interesting stuff. As always, thanks for reading!