How I Read Over 280 Books in 2020

When I was a kid, I loved to read. I was obsessed with R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps and other series we millennials grew up with. But in high school, when reading became mandatory, I started to hate it, and I stopped reading. I disliked reading so much, that I cheated on just about every test we had that involved a book we were supposed to read.

For nearly a decade, I spiraled into a drug and alcohol addiction that almost killed me, and one of the reasons I stayed stuck for so long was because I thought I knew everything. At any given moment, I thought I was the smartest person in the room. It took a lot of humility to realize that I don’t know nearly as much as I thought I did, and once I did that, something happened, and I developed a thirst for knowledge within the next few years.

After wasting most of my life in my addiction and dropping out of college, there’s a lot I don’t know, so I read non-fiction books. In 2020, I read over 280 non-fiction books, and the year before that, I read 73. Reading has not only taught me about a wide range of interesting subjects, but I’ve met a lot of really cool people on Twitter who love to read too, and I’ve even been able to talk to some of the authors of my favorite books. Never in a million years did I think I’d survive my addiction and be talking to amazing professors, psychologists, philosophers, journalists, and more.