How I Read
Overview
This is in fact a 20 minute article about reading! Here’s a little roadmap of what it covers. Read whatever’s interesting — I won’t be offended, I promise.
Reading With Intent
- Playing Catch
- 7 Reading Principles
- Tools
- Measure Time, Not Books
Fiction
- Selection
- Consumption
Non-Fiction
- How Many Books Per Topic?
- Reading In Vignettes
- Selecting Books For Vignettes
- In Defense Of Taking Notes
- Aspirations
Some Parting Thoughts
Reading With Intent
Playing Catch
From the age of 4 to about 14, I read a whole bunch — the easiest way to get me to shut up was to stick a book in my face. My enjoyment of books didn’t drop off in my later teens, but my reading did — like a frog in slowly boiling water, I didn’t notice the changes that happened over several years. When at 20 years old I realized that I was voluntarily reading about 2–3 books a year, usually on planes and toilets, I was not thrilled. My burgeoning adult (boooooo) life did not accommodate nearly as much reading as I wanted to be doing, and I knew then I would have to wage war to change that — so began my love affair with systematic reading.
Fighting for reading time, figuring out different methods and processes for consuming books, and building out a reading list I was excited about came first. As I increased the quantity of my reading, I started to think about improving its quality as well. While thinking about what and how much I read seemed natural, thinking about how I read took some getting used to. Reading is usually talked about as a passive activity, defined primarily by volume — after all, you are not the purveyor of ideas and information, merely its recipient. I’ve come to realize that receiving skilfully is an art unto itself!
In How To Read A Book, Mortimer Adler likens reading to catching a baseball. While a good thrower can make a ball easier to catch, catching it undoubtedly takes skill, and can be improved upon. Getting better at catching increases the quality of thrower you can play catch with, and makes the game a whole lot more fun and meaningful — who knows, you might even go pro! In making time to play catch over the last 4 years, I’ve also thought quite a bit about how to become a better catcher, and the game of my life is richer for it.
Despite sounding like a lobbyist for Big Literature up to this point, my goal with this article is not to convince you to read more, or to read the way I do! I wrote this because I love reading and wish more people talked/wrote about how they do it. If you’re already a heavy reader, then I hope you can glean some helpful practices or ideas from my experimentation. If you’re not, then I hope this reads to you the same way a deep dive on speed walking or car painting reads to me: not immediately applicable, but either food for thought or fun confirmation that you’re not the only one who’s crazy!
7 Reading Principles (For Those In A Hurry)
These 7 principles that guide my reading. All of these principles show up and are discussed in more detail throughout the article, but you, dear reader, are special, so you get the goods up front.
- Measure quality reading time, not number of books read
- Make reading routine, but don’t limit your reading to that routine
- Recommendations are likely to be good, and make books significantly better by giving you someone to discuss them with
- Don’t wait to read great books, don’t read fiction you don’t enjoy
- Audiobooks create reading time — use this to spend more time reading
- Read in topic clusters of 3–5 books and turn them into mental models
- Take notes on non-fiction books — the giant increase in retention is easily worth the moderate reduction in reading speed
Tools
- Audible: I use Audible for audiobooks, because every YouTuber told me to. More seriously, they’ve got a great interface and a large selection!
- Readwise.io: a more recent addition, but a welcome one — Readwise syncs your highlights from everywhere, makes them very easy to tag, edit, and export, and can send you daily emails with a small number of highlights to improve recall. Still playing around with it, but so far so great!
- Google Keep: I use Google Keep to take notes, and for pretty much everything else in my life. Syncs beautifully between phone and desktop, has simple and customizable labelling and colouring, and 1-click export to Google Docs — what more could you ask for?
- Kindle + blue light glasses: to read before bed and be able to fall asleep afterwards. Yes, it feels silly to buy a product to solve a problem caused by another product, but the advantages of the Kindle for note taking/highlighting, portability, access, and nighttime reading far outweigh the $20 spent on the glasses. Also they make me look like Groucho Marx, and that sparks joy.
Measure Reading Time, Not Books
A piping hot take — “number of books read” is a shitty metric. We become what we measure, and measuring quantity leads us to pick short, easy, idea-sparse books and gun through them as fast as possible with no thought given to the quality of the reading itself. If I wanted to juice this number for LinkedIn/Quora/wherever power readers graze, I’d read Goosebumps or Mr. Men.¹ Continuing the baseball analogy, measuring quantity and nothing else results in you playing hot potato with the ball while standing 3 feet apart and expecting to be good at baseball by the end of it.
The right metric is “quality time spent reading”. By quality time, I mean time in which you are maximally absorbing and enjoying the book. This doesn’t mean it’s the only thing I’m doing, it just means that nothing is interfering — I count listening to a biography while washing dishes or going for a walk to be quality time, but would not count reading a philosophy book while nodding off on the train.
Lest the efficiency mongers of the world protest — relax, you’re among friends here — the leisurely vibe of “quality time” does not mean that I don’t fight for it. I will aggressively make time to spend reading leisurely, as very little in life is more important but lots in life presents itself as more urgent.
Fiction
A quick shout-out to fiction is in order. Shout out fiction! I’ve put a lot more thought into how I read non-fiction, but that’s in large part because fiction really stands on its own two feet. With fiction I’m mostly concerned with the fact that I’m reading and that I’m enjoying what I’m reading.
Selecting Fiction
I put recommendations from friends above all else. Books are fun to talk about — even if the recommendation is a 6/10, the fact that I get to discuss it with a friend easily brings the experience up to an 8. Beyond that, books from authors I’ve enjoyed, finishing series I started, books smart people talk about on podcasts, and books that the book club I’m in is reading are more than enough to fill up my reading list.
I only have one real principle beyond this — don’t wait to read great books, and don’t read books you don’t enjoy. If I’m excited to read a book more than what’s currently on my reading list, then unless I promised someone I would read something else, it vaults to the top. Life is long, but not that long — assuming I live to 80 and continue reading at this pace (I’m a glass half full kinda guy), I’ve got about 2000 fiction books to go. There are way more than 2000 books that I would love out there, and my excitement has had a far better hit rate than any internet list.
This also means that if I am midway through a fiction book and don’t like it, then unless I have some external reason to continue, I should drop it and move on — a great book is waiting for me!
Consuming Fiction
While I adore audiobooks for non-fiction, I’ve never been able to get into it for stories. Something about a narrator telling me what characters sound like, injecting their own emotion, and dictating the pace of the book just doesn’t jive with me. With fiction I change pace and re-read a lot, and audiobooks don’t let me do that.
I read fiction primarily before bed, for 20–30 minutes a night — depending on how diligent I am about the time I go to sleep, this may happen anywhere from 4 to 7 nights a week. This helps me get to bed by making getting in bed more appealing, helps me wind down, and sets a solid baseline for the amount of time I spend on fiction in any given week. Reading routinely builds momentum, making it far more likely that I choose fiction for leisure throughout the day. While this ad hoc reading is far less consistent, it accounts for about half of my fiction reading.
Taken together, this comes out to ~900 pages a month, which only matters because it gives me a rough idea of when I will be reading a specific book. So if I’m excited to read a book, but it’s #10 on the reading list, then I know it’s ~3 months away and therefore some rearranging is in order.
Non-Fiction
This is where shit gets seriously nerdy.
How Many Books Per Topic?
When I first started reading again, I read non-fiction in one of two ways. I would either try to find the one consensus “best” book on a general subject, such as Good To Great for all things business, or read 5+ books on a topic I wanted to become expert in, such as UX design. This was good to start, but after about a year I found that I had hit a wall. My understanding of 1-book topics felt understandably flimsy, as I would only get one author’s perspective and take their word as gospel.
On the other hand, I experienced severely diminishing returns as I dove deeper into 5-book topics. Each book would have a ~60% overlap — after all, authors can’t assume you’ve read other books on the topic — and by the time I hit the fifth book on a topic I’d be lucky to get a nugget or two of new information. The truth, as it so often does, lay in between.
Reading In Vignettes
I now read books in 3–5 book clusters I call vignettes (vin-yets), which is a French-ass word for “a brief, evocative description”. Vignettes could be on anything I’m interested in — the last three I completed as of writing this article were on the creative process, the failings of modern media, and biomimicry in design. If assembled well, vignettes fuse multiple perspectives into a mental model.
A mental model is a simplified explanation of a topic that lets you understand how its pieces interact. Famous examples like survival of the fittest and supply and demand demonstrate their power — they turn a bunch of facts into a way of understanding the world and gleaning insight from it. This is what I’m aiming for with each vignette — it’s enough to start using the topic as a lens, create associations that make information stick, and see the connections with other vignettes.
If I want to go deeper on a topic, I am then equipped to ask intelligent questions and get more specific answers using scientific papers, essays, videos, articles, etc. I also then know enough to splinter the topic into narrower vignettes if I want to. For example, since I’m very into product design, I might read several books on user research, several books on graphic design, brand identity, information architecture, and so on.
Selecting Books For Vignettes
There are several kinds of books I include in my vignettes upon opportunity. I usually start with bibles — books that devotees of a field all agree are, to whit, “the good shit”. In user experience design this would be The Design of Everyday Things, in urbanism this might be The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and in persuasion/rhetoric that might be Made To Stick (I’d vouch for this one). Oftentimes, these are the books that get me excited to build a vignette around them in the first place!
From there, I look for books with contrarian viewpoints, books that apply the theory of the field in some practical way, and books that study a specific aspect of the field. I don’t feel the need to exhaustively cover all or even most aspects of a field to form a vignette. It’s ok for me to not know the details of water systems and the electrical grid when studying cities, but perhaps I’ll pick up a book on transit design to get concrete on a topic. I can always come back later if I find water systems compelling, and now I’ve got a mental model to fit them into!
To be clear, not every non-fiction book I read fits into a vignette, especially not before I read it! As with fiction, recommendations or books I’m gut-level excited about enter near the top of the list. I love biographies, specific history books, and popular science books like Range and Outliers — I read them for the love of the game, baby. However, it often happens that great books inspire me to build out vignettes around them, and ideas from great books tend to influence my mental models across several topics.
Consumption
In stark contrast to fiction, I absolutely love audiobooks for non-fiction! They make stuff like dishes and mopping way more fun, and back in the days of walking places/commutes they livened those up as well. Audiobooks are incredible because they create reading time where it didn’t exist before. They create time — just by listening during created time, I get about 30 hours of quality listening time a month. That’s wizardry.
I will usually have two audiobooks going at the same time, one that requires minimal or no note taking (like a biography) and one I want to take notes on. I listen to the former while my hands are otherwise occupied with things like dishes or running or physio exercises, and the latter on commutes, walks, or during meals.
I’ll also sometimes read non-fiction in print/on my Kindle. This sometimes happens when a print copy is bestowed upon me, but usually when I can’t or don’t want to find an audiobook. On the latter point, this is usually either due to pictures (e.g. for architecture or design books), or because the book is likely to be dense in a way I find difficult to follow and take notes on via audio. This can be tricky to spot, but ever since I listened to Debt: The First 5000 Years I have erred on the side of caution in this regard — any book that looks like it will be dense probably will be.
I schedule 1–2 reading sessions a week, usually one on a weekday and one on the weekend, each lasting 1–2 hours — this is long enough for me to get into it but not so long that I’m likely to get tired.
Scheduling and Sequencing
I try to be mindful of what books I’m reading and when, because I am very affected by the media I consume. I tend to connect whatever I’m reading to everything in my life and bring it up frequently in conversation. Because of this, I usually limit myself to one book at a time that deeply challenges my beliefs or potentially changes my behaviour. If a book looks like it will transform how I think about communication (Nonviolent Communication), I will not simultaneously consume a book that completely fucks up how I understand motivation (Punished By Rewards, in the best possible way).
If a book or vignette looks like it may soon be directly applicable to my life, it shoots to the top of my list — when I was working on a startup, books on growth and marketing took precedence over books on biology. Other than that, I plan my monthly reading 4–6 months in advance, splitting my reading across hard copies and audiobooks between 3–4 vignettes at a time.
Reading books within the same vignette in quick succession helps me make connections between them and build that mental model without forgetting what I’ve read. At the same time, working through multiple vignettes simultaneously guards against me seeing the world exclusively through one lens for months at a time — I’m a whole lot less fun when all I can talk about is habit formation or climate change.
Lastly, I read 10 pages every morning, which I reserve for product design books. I love product/UX design — I studied it in university, I currently do it professionally, and I want to be very good at it. This practice guarantees that I learn a little every day, that I start thinking about design before the bullshit of the day hits me, and that I give myself the whole day to mull over/make connections with what I just read.
Reading over long periods of time also greatly boosts recall, which is much more important for design than for any other topic in my life at the moment.
In Defense Of Taking Notes
As I’ve mentioned, I’m a big fan of taking notes as I read — I’ve definitely taken more notes on voluntary reading than on assigned reading/lectures in my combined 17 years of schooling. I started doing it even before the idea of vignettes came up when I realized that after 6 months, I would remember 1–2 ideas per book, and after a year could fully forget that I read a book at all. This felt like a colossal waste of time that could be easily remedied!
The justifications I’ve heard for this go along the lines of “if it’s important, you’ll remember it” or “even if you can’t recall it, it subconsciously affects the way you think/live”, both of which strike me as wishful thinking. The perceived importance or relevance of a book’s contents is affected far more by my life circumstances at the time of reading, and tends to increase dramatically as I have new experiences and read related books. Regarding the latter point, my subconscious thinks all kinds of dumb shit is very relevant and interesting, and while I will defend said dumb shit until the end of time, I do not trust my subconscious to apply the same level of fastidiousness and recall to tougher subject matter.
This is where not having “number of books read” as a metric really saves the day. Sure, taking notes can make reading a book up to 30% slower — I don’t care, because I don’t really care how many books I get through this year! I would much rather read 10 great non-fiction books, take notes, and really internalize them and integrate them into my life than read 80 books and remember a fun fact from each in a year’s time.
Note taking supports learning in several ways. Firstly, it adds a level of “desirable difficulty” — it makes reading more effortful by forcing you to pause, think, and articulate over time, which makes ideas stick far better. Think back to classes/tests you crammed versus ones you practiced and studied — which ones actually stick with you after a few years? As a card-carrying member of Team Cram, I’d still bet it’s the latter.
Secondly, it allows you to refresh your memory of the core concepts of the book without re-reading the whole thing. Repetition over time and making connections are two of the best, scientifically proven ways to store information in long term memory; neither is feasible without notes.
The final argument I’ve heard against taking notes (FINISH HIM) is the classic “why do I need to remember stuff when I can just look it up?” Beyond the obvious ways this makes conversation insufferable and that it rarely actually happens, I think this idea fundamentally misrepresents the way ideas are utilized in practice. Even if you remember the idea of rational vs narrative thinking from Thinking Fast And Slow, would it come to mind in a tangentially applicable scenario a year after reading the book? Would you remember the conclusions drawn about priming, or about the availability cascade? In the immortal words of Bernie of The Incredibles fame, I think NOT.
You don’t know what you didn’t think of, because it wasn’t committed to long term memory. It’s not important that you remember exact terminology or figures, unless you’re trying to impress someone in conversation. What’s far more important is that you remember core ideas, their logic, and their consequences, which are all greatly enhanced by taking notes.²
Pulling It All Together
My notes focus on new ideas, frameworks, fun examples, and connections to/conflicts with my existing beliefs and mental models. Some notes end up looking like a book summary — others look like a mood board of ideas. Both are fine, because books are different from one another!
For audiobooks, I take notes in Google Keep, because that’s the notes app I use for everything else — it has a solid labeling and colouring system, syncs beautifully between phone and computer, and has 1-click export to Google Docs for when I finish the book. For print books I take notes directly in Google Docs, and on Kindle I highlight as I read and then export my highlights once I’m done. I’m experimenting with Readwise.io for exporting, editing, and trimming Kindle highlights — it’s been awesome so far, but it’s early days.
I clean up the notes from one book a week and turn it into a summary. Sometimes this takes 20 minutes, sometimes it takes 2–3 hours — again, I see this as entirely worthwhile. These summaries are only for me to read (though I do sometimes share them), so they don’t have to be gorgeous. I love creating the summaries almost as much as I love having them — both let me spend more time with the book, and I usually feel like I get it much better by the end of the process.
Aspirations
Over the past few months, I’ve started to pull book summaries together into vignette summaries. These are documents that lay out my mental model for each vignette, collect the books and other resources that contribute to it, and highlight connections/conflicts with other vignettes. Over time, this should become like a personal internal wiki that lays out my operating model and view of the world as it exists.
Apart from thinking that this is fun and fulfilling and will increase my enjoyment of reading, this practice has already deepened my understanding, as articulation tends to do. While I like to think I change my mind on a regular basis as I learn and grow, I really like knowing what I’m changing my mind from. I also love reading about how other people see the world, and would be delighted to be able to share my own version of that!
I’ve set a goal of writing a vignette document every month for the next year. If I keep that pace, I should be done what I see as the base layer of my personal operating model within the next 1.5–2 years — this is not that long, especially if I keep enjoying it as much as I have so far. I’m sure I will find new vignettes to fill out for a long time to come, but even if I only write the 18–24 I have planned right now, my life will be better for it.
Some Closing Thoughts
I owe a lot to books — without reading I would have been bored as a kid, uncreative as a teen, and close-minded in my early twenties. To me, reading is a way to choose my perspective instead of having it chosen for me by my circumstances, upbringing, and unsavoury media ecosystem. I really believe that being intentional about reading has turned it into a massively positive force for growth, clarity, and joy.
If you’ve gotten to this point, feel like you want to start reading more intentionally, but feel overwhelmed and aren’t sure where to start, my humble suggestion would be to start by scheduling your reading. It could be 10–20 minutes a day in the morning/lunch/after work/evening, it could be a few longer sessions throughout the week, it could be listening while doing chores, or whatever else works for you in your life right now. Once you’re reading regularly, you will figure out how to read intentionally over time — you’ve got the rest of your life to do so.
In any case, thank you for reading through this! I hope you found it helpful, interesting, or at least bemusing. Feel free to reach out to talk about books, reading, or anything else any time — I make a firm promise to get back to you, probably, at some point.
Huge thanks to Erica Yarmol-Matusiak, Tomkreynin, David Boroto, and MohammedShabbar Manek for reading drafts of this!
Footnotes
¹Upon second thought, I might do that anyways (R.L. Stine blessed us all for a reason), then go write a thinkpiece on how it applies to cryptocurrencies or whatever.
²Wow, I really like arguing with this imaginary person — I always know exactly what to say! You should try it some time, huge ego boost.
