Notes On Reading
Written December 31, 2020
Two years ago, I began reading books in earnest. In that time, I’ve completed 310 books across a wider range of subjects, taking photos and reviewing each one on an instagram account (@elklist) so friends can follow along and suggest reads.
The process of reading has changed my life permanently and positively, inside and outside of the professional sphere. This year in particular, I’ve received a host of questions about it. Most are centered around the rate of books I’m reading and how I’m structuring my reading time, but some others have to do with factors like keeping attention and branching out to books across a wide range of subject matter.
These are the exact same questions I asked when I started this process two years ago — and I remember how surprised I was to find that the internet was quite unhelpful in answering them. The reason why is adverse self-selection: most people who write about these topics online are doing so because they want to form the impression that they possess some superhuman power and that that they are smarter than you. Some of them are also exaggerating or lying.
I’m writing this to do my best to answer these questions with the specificity and candor I would have wished I had two years ago. My sincere hope is that it is helpful and doesn’t suck.
And finally: a needed disclaimer: These are just my notes and not a prescription or lecture. I’m only a few years into a process I hope to continue for the rest of my life, and that means these answers will evolve, as they will evolve for you.
This is structured to be read in whatever order is most helpful — just check each heading to see the corresponding topic.
How It Started
Prehistory
I did not grow up reading. In fact, if you were to ask me one of the things I would like to go back and change, it would be that I would discover the joy of reading books consistently at a very young age. Unfortunately, I just didn’t. I fell in love with sports quite young, did well enough in school and followed that passion right up until college.
I’ll admit something a bit embarrassing: I don’t think I picked up and read a book, front to back, for the purposes of self-motivated learning, until after I left college. To make matters worse, I thought I was unique in this! Even in an environment like Yale (and this was present across some of the world’s top universities), I’ve met a substantial amount of people who did the same thing. Direct, privileged access to the boundless libraries of the most elite universities on the planet, and very little taking advantage of it.
My two cents on why this is: there is a significant difference between education and learning. Both are important, and both involve focused eyeballs on a page. But learning requires self actuation — being proficient at responding, with deadlines, to a curriculum is a different skill than deciding to allocate your time to learning things that don’t directly correlate to a quantitative outcome like one’s GPA or corporate ascension.
Credentialism only makes this worse; if you are succeeding in an elite environment by the standards of that environment, you are being consistently told — by others with the same incentives as you or by well-wishers looking in from the outside — to keep doing what you’re doing. Often, that means becoming extremely good at checking the necessary boxes to rise through narrowly defined verticals. Again, that is valuable, but it has almost nothing to do with your life in a more holistic sense.
Think about the debate around standardized testing today. Someone who achieves an excellent score on their SAT or ACT is demonstrating that they are exceptional at taking the SAT or ACT. It doesn’t mean (in my eyes) that they will achieve something meaningful outside of that narrowly defined vertical, like contributing to the betterment of a university or society. More importantly, it doesn’t make you a better human being: it doesn’t increase your curiosity, empathy, kindness, and aperture.
Deciding to Engage
A little over 2 years ago, I was on a long road trip with Thomas Nielsen, a dear friend who’s known me for ages. Essentially, I realized quite brutally on that car ride that I was imbalanced. Thomas is extremely well read and has been since he was homeschooled. He is well educated and learned (note the difference), and it was quite visible in how he interpreted the world around him.
The conversation got into reading, and I didn’t have much to contribute. He fascinated me with a description of “Great Books” programs at places like Columbia, St. Johns, and Deep Springs. (Yale has a lauded freshman program in the same vein as well).
This unfortunately waning methodology goes something like this: the entirety of one’s college experience is spent reading and vigorously deliberating upon the “classics” of literature, history, philosophy and the sciences. Shimer College, a great books college democratically self-governed with a curriculum void of anything but primary sources, a student body capable of quoting Plato’s Republic by soul and alumni ranging from University Presidents to a trailblazing aviatrix, was in 2014 voted “the worst college in America.” I guess it didn’t check the boxes.
I already knew a good deal about Deep Springs, namely because I spent my short two years at Yale getting intellectually demolished by its progeny, whether in a Heidegger or Wittgenstein graduate seminar or my chemistry 101 course. A unique two-year program, Deep Springs alumni consistently transfer on to Harvard, Yale, Stanford (and the like) on completion.
It was as if their alumni — hardened by an experience of self-sustained living on a cattle ranch in a gorgeous, barren desert landscape on the California/Nevada border, simultaneously conducting daily hard labor (yes) while they mainlined Kierkegaard, Arendt and Dostoevsky into their bloodstream — could walk on water. Something was different about those students; after only a few months I could pick them out virtually on sight. They were smarter than me both in intelligence quotient and how to wield it, like some sort of Obi-Wan to my Maul, except I stayed chopped in half.
My memory of the Deep Springs kids collided the direction my ego was heading in my conversation with Thomas. I wanted what they had. It had nothing to do with academic achievement — at this point I had dropped out of college — and it wasn’t really about professional benefit either. I wanted to stop looking out the window of the car and draw a blank while Thomas and others could wrap the world with their words.
Starting
I started by doing two things.
First, I downloaded the St. Johns and Deep Springs reading lists and put them into a spreadsheet.
Second, I emailed every Helena Member, asking them what books they have read that most made them into who they are. (This is now its own page on the Helena website so anyone can use it as a resource). I can’t put into words how powerful and unorthodox the book recommendations that resulted from this process were.
The first book I read was The Prince (because of course it was). The second was Flights of the Mind, an excellent Da Vinci biography. I spent so much time on the latter (it was 622 pages) that by the time I was done the paperback cover had been eroded off.
I read both through arduous one page sessions — not out of Buddhist restraint but because my attention span was incapable of elapsing more than a few paragraphs before I got distracted.
This is incredibly common. Remember that some of the smartest and highest paid people in the world focus entirely on making sure that you are “micro-scheduled,” looking one moment at a social media notification and the next at an advertisement. If you happen to be in my generation, you are native to this environment, and un-learning it is even harder.
If there is a trick to solve this problem without months to years of brute force and consistency, please let me know. My first period of reading was extremely challenging focus-wise, and I felt accomplished when I got to 5 or 6 pages without needing a break.
I also fell off the wagon a few times, putting whatever book I was reading down for a week or two. I don’t remember exactly what my excuse was, other than that that it was a bad one. I had the time (I’ll cover this in its own section) and I had a comfy chair.
Rate of Reading
Perhaps the most frequent question I receive about books is what rate I am reading them. This makes a lot of sense; it was the question I was most curious about when I started to read seriously.
As of now (end of 2020), on an average work week, I am finishing between 2 and 4 books. On a rare week where work is diminished or I find myself on holiday, that range widens to 3 to 7 books. That’s a slightly higher rate than this time last year, and a much higher rate than when I started.
I have to say, though, that I think this is a dangerous question. Those who use the number of books they read per year or per week as a driving metric face an incentive problem. They will be motivated to choose much shorter or much less dense material in order to finish a numerically larger number of books, rather than being motivated to finish the highest quality books.
Some great books are long, and some great books are short. You have to read both kinds. It will take you a few weeks or more of serious effort to read War and Peace or Infinite Jest — both of which are more than 1,000 pages. During that same time period, you could read 10–12 short books. But to say the obvious, doing so is not 10–12 times more valuable.
One way I have tried to solve for this is social pressure. By writing down every book that I finish, including a review of that book as well as its page length, then publicly sharing that information with friends and a wider network, I invite those to challenge me when they see a pattern. From time to time, I’ve gotten messages from friends noting that I haven’t taken on an ambitious book recently. My method might be a bit extreme, and certainly has holes in it. But it gives an example of how to engineer away negative incentives and create a culture of error-correction.
How Many Books Do You Read at a Time?
With some minor exceptions, I am usually reading up to 3 to 5 books simultaneously. When I finish one or two of those books, I won’t wait to finish the others before choosing a new batch. Instead, I’ll insert one or two new books into the mix.
I like this system for a few reasons. Like most, I am still training my attention span to operate over longer and longer periods. Within reason, the process of starting a new book to unleash a new dose of motivation and creativity while struggling to finish another book you have been working on for awhile has always been helpful to me. Then, the boost of accomplishment when you do finish that second book is transferred to progressing in the first, which in turn unlocks your ability to begin a brand new one. I like the flywheel effect that this creates.
The second reason I use this system is that I’ve experienced it consistently provide associative reasoning benefits. This week, I read Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation while reading Borges’ Labyrinths, Hannu Rajaniemi sci-fi thriller The Quantum Thief, Lawrence Freedman’s The Future of War and Jay Parini’s Borges and Me. One is technically a non-fiction social critique, one is a set of fictions in the form of short stories, one is a fast-paced futurism thriller, one is a non-fiction work of historiography, and the last is a memoir. Choose just one of those books, and you can begin to see elements of its message refract against the ideas of the other 4.
Baudrillard’s concept of simulation, in part influenced by the pioneering mind of Borges, is developed to its extreme in Rajaniemi’s future world of prisons entrapping hundreds of barely distinguishable physical permutations of one human’s soul, almost like a fictional adaption of the “Clone Story” chapter of Simulacra and Simulation. Freedman aptly judges that generations of theorists have consistently modeled their projections of how war will be fought in the future without fully considering changes in modern psychological models (themselves mediated by future technology). Baudrillard helpfully frames the systemic reasons for this cultural amnesia. The final book — Parini’s Borges and Me — is the most obvious overlap; it gives greater color on the man behind Labyrinths and his impact on others.
Yes, you can absolutely err in finding intellectual nails everywhere you swing your hammer (and perhaps I just did now). But that is much outweighed by the beneficial experience of consistently training your mind to see the patterns between overlapping concepts.
The Benefits of Reading:
Opening Statement
Consider for a moment the immense power that a book represents.
About 113 billion human beings have existed since the beginning of the human race. Imagine the most impactful and interesting things that have floated around the minds of each of these people.
Almost all of those brilliant thoughts were lost until around 2100 B.C. when The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known book, was committed to words.
Starting from that moment to the present, humanity has undertaken a truly epic collective project. The goal of this project has been to take the best of this immense store of thoughts and save them permanently.
In the 4120 years since then, some of the best of these thoughts stopped dying inside of the brains of the people that came up with them. They instead were placed into physical objects — the book.
First hand, live witnesses of the most important moments in history, memories of the lives of remarkable people, the internal experiences (memoirs) of these remarkable people, groundbreaking ideas that have resulted from billions upon billions of brains thinking for thousands of years, the best outbursts of creative energy, the best visions of the future, written accounts of how to do or build almost anything, the best explorations into how the world and universe work, how and why.
Even factoring in how terrible chapters of history have meant so many great thoughts have not made it into print — the silencing or under-representation of entire cultures and the deliberate or accidental destruction of knowledge — the books that have made it to today represent a staggering achievement.
You, right now, have the ability to insert into your brain some of the best ideas humans have ever come up with. This is an advantage billions of past humans beings have never had. It’s like an incredibly unfair life cheat-code.
Whether you are running a business, running a country or figuring out how to cook bolognese, thousands of years of humans have undergone a gargantuan R&D process you get to take advantage of. An unthinkably high number of mistakes, successes, strategies, attempts, all of this information is organized just for you in small physical objects. If you just want to be a happier and better person or you just like stories — hundreds of generations of people have curated experts guides and countless imaginary worlds for you to get lost in. Even harmful books — works of deliberate misinformation or hateful doctrines — are fascinating, helpful data points of how humans mislead and manipulate.
At least for me, thinking about it in this way makes the proposition of reading books not just obvious, but one of the most profound, powerful and accessible things to spend time doing. In one human lifetime, you place into your brain the sum of what took tens of thousands of individual lives to produce. It is a remarkable opportunity.
Mental Health
If you are not careful, a significant part of your day can be spent in environments that give rise to or worsen anxiety and other tough conditions. For so many people, work already contributes to this, making non-work time even more precious.
Prior to reading more seriously, I noticed that I was spending an alarming amount of my free time on addicting stimuli like social media, television, surfing the web aimlessly or reading short-form news without much direction. While most of the reason for this was environmental and more subconscious (these platforms are free and so easy to say yes to), I also rationalized to myself that I was using this time to “decompress” from the outside world and from work. Yet these activities did the opposite — it only heightened anxious thoughts and only worsened feelings of malaise.
For me, replacing as much of this time as possible with reading didn’t just cancel out some of the negative symptoms above. It added in quite a lot of positive outcomes.
The best way I can think to describe it is via a hopefully accessible analogy: think about the last time you had a deeply engaging, multi-hour conversation with someone you really enjoyed. Now imagine having a new version of that conversation on demand, every day. Those feelings of clear-headedness, curiosity, focus and empowerment really add up when you can access them consistently and at your own election.
Thinking Horizontally
The world is organized in verticals. Universities have “departments,” companies have “divisions” and governments have “directorates.” When we meet people professionally, we ask what “field” they are in. When someone seems to break this chain and do many things, we get confused, stick the term “multi-hyphenate” or “polymath” onto their forehead with a Post-It note, dust our hands off and call it a day. Of course, doing this is just creating another vertical to justify why someone don’t fit into the existing ones.
We have become so accustomed to this systemization that we forget it isn’t real. Verticals are social constructions, buckets to place people and ideas into to organize them for the rest of us.
Think horizontally, not vertically. Reading a wide range of diverse subjects makes you first realize that there are similarities and connections between verticals. Doing this even more makes you realize that these similarities are not exceptions to the “rules” of fields, but evidence that fields don’t exist. The further and further you can engage this cycle, the better and better you will be able to both make sense of the world and navigate it.
Reading Books Versus Reading the News
The primary method I use to understand current events is through reading books. At my best, I see the news as a stream of data about what people in the world are saying, but not a description of what is happening, and why it is happening.
Because of that and a few other factors, I don’t have moments where I sit, check, and read the news. I don’t own a television, I haven’t watched cable news programs in a few years, and I have deleted all social media applications that have curated news (with the potential exception of Instagram).
Here’s my reasoning:
Everyone makes a choice about how they seek to understand the world around them. How you make this choice is one of the most important dimensions that makes up who you are. This is not the area of your life to delegate to others; spending the time to form your own strategy and actually follow it is paramount.
Starting with the low hanging fruit, it is worth noting how many people rely solely on their immediate circle of family and friends to form and maintain their understanding of current events. If a news report is brought into the discussion, it is often filtered through the existing lens of what this inner circle already believes. This results in the “news” serving either as a validation of existing groupthink or as another piece of evidence why the media is biased or incorrect.
Then there are those who have identified this problem, and seek to solve it by curating a “news diet.” They begin by selecting a diversity of publications, sometimes combining magazines, newspapers and commentary. They vigorously compare reports, and some go a step deeper to fact-check sources. Even if all of this is done at the highest level of care, the result is a command over incomplete information. Worse, it can be a false sense of security.
The trick is to create a system that is both achievable and yields the highest probability that you will ingest the highest quality information. I believe that primarily reading books best accomplishes that.
Books profoundly out-compete news articles on a couple key metrics. One is depth.
A book is capable of providing hundreds of pages of context about a topic before diving into it. If you are reading a news article about a topic important to society, chances are that you can’t helpfully explore and form an opinion about that topic without a significant amount of background. Given the inherent length restrictions of news articles (and even long-form magazine articles can still fall short), that just can’t be provided by news media without significant oversimplification. And, that oversimplification is displayed in the very title and/or subtitle of the article, perpetuating the damage.
Books also have a better publication system. There are absolutely bad books, and there are absolutely bad authors. Nothing is nearly perfect. But the barrier to entry to publish a book includes a far more robust fact-checking system than an article can offer. Even the best researched of news pieces have a structural disadvantage: they are quite literately “new.” They must be released with frequency, and that stresses the process of considering and synthesizing all sides of an argument, the facts, and what to make of them.
Then there is the incentives element. A good book represents the life work, or part of the life work, of an individual person. Would you rather read about a topic from someone who has dedicated more than a year of painstaking effort to a single piece of writing and has their public image and career tied to the quality of their work, or from a well-meaning journalist juggling multiple articles, on deadline and with a fraction of the available space? There is a reason that the reward for a highly successful news article is often to simply lengthen it and sell it as a book.
One of the big counterarguments I hear when I talk to people about this is about the access to immediacy that news provides. If you aren’t constantly reading the news, won’t you miss critical current events as they happen that are essential to know as a member of society, and essential data points to curate an accurate understanding of the world?
No. I don’t think you do. News penetrates even when you try to ignore it. Even without purposefully spending time each day to read the news, the velocity and network effects by which articles spread is powerful so that you end up hearing most things just by having a phone and computer. I don’t believe that it is necessary to supplement that with dedicated moments in your day to check the news. It inevitably leads to ingesting incomplete data about topics far more complex than can be understood in a few hundred words, especially while multitasking.
The other counterargument is similar: that because books take a year or more to write, they by definition will not be able to provide the information needed to understand an unfolding event, movement or phenomena well.
This is where I feel most strongly. Understanding (not noticing, but understanding) an unfolding event requires that lag time. Simply by existing in society during 2020, I of course knew about COVID. But I felt at no disadvantage waiting for excellent books like Christakis’ Apollo’s Arrow or Zakaria’s Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, which arrived less than 12 months into the pandemic, to begin the process in earnest of making sense of COVID and how it will affect the future of society.
But even this misses the point fully. Important societal forces are motion pictures, not images. They cannot be understood in isolation. Imagine if you were to have spent the time between 2015 and 2020 consistently reading books about the history of pandemics, complex adaptive systems, the United States healthcare system, global healthcare systems over history, human biology, existential risk, exponential growth and the other converging topics that come together to form a contextual understanding of pandemics. To make it even more extreme, image you did this without picking up or reading a single newspaper article throughout each of those 5 years. I would argue that you would be in a comparably stronger position to even the most avid news-hounds when it came to interpreting and understand COVID. There is no shortcut to the consistent and considered intake of knowledge in long-form, over time. And that is what books can give you.
Focusing
Your relationship to your phone
Here is one of the simplest and most effective ways to read for more meaningful, longer periods of time: put your phone out of sight and earshot while you are reading.
Your phone will defeat your brain. It is the great enemy of focus, at least for me. As a single object, it is perhaps the most successful fly-trap for your attention that exists in your living space. It combines “base” stimuli like social media, text messages that can wait, new emails, gaming, and so much more, all wrapped in a centralized notification system that is visual, haptic (buzzing) and auditory.
On top of that, its true evil genius: it combines this unimportant but addictive “base” stimuli with what you view as important to your career and life: calls, emails, video from loved ones, business colleagues, co-working applications, etcetera.
Simply its presence next to you as you read puts you at a disadvantage. You finish 3 hard-won, long pages. As you turn the page, you instinctively glance to your side at your face down phone. It buzzed 30 seconds ago. Oh, it’s probably a spam email or a friend sending a joke that I can look at later. But, oh god, what if it isn’t? What if it is a work text? What if it is a work text so important that real damage will be done if I don’t wait 15 minutes, even though it is a Saturday? Surely I can spend half a second actually checking it, and I’ll get right back to the book. 30 minutes later, after you have checked and deleted the completely irrelevant notification, you find yourself stuck on YouTube, focused zapped.
Like the Death Star, your phone has one critical weakness — a vent leading to the core reactor: it (so far) can’t move. If you put it in another room, far enough away that you can’t hear any buzzing, any notification, or the physical device itself, something wonderful happens — you are now able to truly focus. Those microseconds of turning the page or looking around the room to work out an idea before training your eyes back on the book, previously moments of weakness preyed upon by your phone’s presence are now unbroken moments of thought and reflection.
When my phone is safely at bay, I also deal with distracted thoughts much easier. Something about surrounding yourself with only physical analog objects makes me think clearer. When the thought comes into my head 30 minutes into a reading session that I could have received an important email during this time, I easily acknowledge the validity of that possibility while realizing without panic that the world will be virtually unchanged while I continue to finish my session and then get to it with low anxiety and in my own terms.
Why Physical Books?
I don’t read from an e-reading device, such as a Kindle, nor do I read from my phone or computer. The three reasons are ego, focus, and retention.
Ego: Whenever I finish a book, I stack it on top of the last book I have read. After around 310+ instances of this, the result is a physical stack representing the time investment I’ve given to reading, sequentially, for multiple years. Having this be in my living room (especially instead of a TV) simply makes me feel better and more accomplished, compared to a system in which everything is expressed digitally into a light, compressed device. This is of course not the most sustainable solution, it doesn’t work when traveling, and it is more expensive and burdensome to build up and transport hundreds of objects. But transparently, this system creates the feedback loops that have helped me continue to progress.
Focus: A physical book in your hand has only one function. It can’t send you a notification, it can’t make noises, it can’t vibrate, and it can’t show new images or change color. The most simple and elegant solution to solving the focus problem is to not have the chance in the first place to become distracted or switch to a new activity. It is hard enough to use a computer or phone productively for work without being drawn in by another application, and it isn’t worth it for me to enter that same arena when reading.
Retention: I am a visual learner. Often, when I am trying to remember a specific idea, walking up to a stack of books and scanning each one will instantly remind me where that idea is housed. I can draw upon things like the cover design, shape and wear and tear of each book in order to cue the specific thought I was looking for.
Why Finish Every Book?
One practice of mine that people have found somewhat controversial is that I finish every book that I start. The reason for this is simple: I don’t trust my intuition.
Most people don’t finish a book because they get tired of it and want something new. This can be overcome with brute force at first, and with repetition over the longer term. If you read consistently, the feeling of fatigue or boredom slowly goes away.
Others don’t finish books for another reason; they make the judgement that the book is not good enough and therefore not worth their time. On other words, they view that the information ahead is not worth covering because they either know it already or believe if they did read it, it would be less helpful of an experience than reading a different book.
My personal view (again, controversial) is that making this judgement requires essentially predicting the future, then discarding it. To do this successfully, my intuition would have to be so attuned that I could first conclude:
1) That I am not quitting on a book because I am bored, fatigued or less interested in a subject, and therefore that:
2) My command of the incomplete portion of the book that I have read thus far is so strong that I can use it to conclude the rest of the book will not be valuable enough to finish.
Even if I am wrong about the above, I posit a further problem. Each time that I decide to cut short a book is a mental repetition letting me know it is okay to cut books short. At least for how I think (and I suspect this is true for many others), I am only adding baby oil to a slippery slope. I’d prefer to never set such a precedent in the first place, even if that means I will inevitably make it through some books that end up being of diminishing return.
