Some Notes on How to Read Important Books

Or: why you might be failing to read books, no matter how much you want to

For more thoughts on the conduct of the liberal arts, please see Some Opinions on How to Write Online.

Since announcing my Bowling Alone book club, I have predictably come face to face with a common phenomenon: many people want to read important books and engage deeply with them, but they can barely get through the books’ introductions. Their experience of reading books is more properly described as their experience attempting and failing to read books.

Friends and acquaintances often ask me how to remedy this situation—either because they’ve seen my working library, or they’ve witnessed my desk. I have no trouble reading all kinds of books.

So here is an incomplete list of things I tell people when they ask me something like “How can I get myself to read books?”

The prime directive: retain focus

Many people who have trouble with reading actually just have trouble staying focused on anything for very long. The text of this piece is just me coming up with different ways of staying “Focus on reading, do not focus on other things while you are trying to read!”

Understand and embrace the project of reading

Before I list any general principles, I’ll show you the schedule of my first Bowling Alone reading session, which I finished right before sitting down to write this essay:

Preface (11 pages):   20 minutes
Chapter 1 (14 pages): 36 minutes
Break:                7 minutes
Chapter 2 (17 pages): 45 minutes
Break:                16 minutes
Chapter 3 (17 pages): 40 minutes
              
          TOTAL TIME: 164 Minutes (2 hours, 44 minutes)

After about 2.75 hours, I got to page 64.¹ The total book is 444 pages, so I can expect to spend ~19 hours total reading it (assuming linear extrapolation). In my experience, the likely range is probably 18-25 hours, depending on a variety of factors.

Why lay this out?

Because most people do not think about reading a book with any more resolution than “read the book,” and they have no other plan than “go until you’re done.” This is a poor strategic posture for almost any activity.² A book will always take some amount of time to read, regardless of whether or not you track it. Within your life, you will either set aside that amount of time or not. Your odds of doing that go up dramatically if you know what the number is, especially for important books that will require some multiple of ten hours to finish.

Imagine picking up a 20-hour book and trying to read it in a week—and yet people do this all the time! It can be done if you do it explicitly and set aside dedicated blocks of time, but most people will get overwhelmed and frustrated when they’re only 50 pages in after 2+ hours of reading. Simply plan your reading, and simply do not refuse to plan it!

👉 Tip: You can use audiobook recording length for a rough estimate of reading time if you haven’t yet figured out your own reading speed.

Defend the focus required to read

While experienced readers can dip in and out of books productively instead of experiencing them through extended reading session, those who struggle with reading should probably not emulate this practice.

They likely struggle to sustain even one reading session of 20-40 minutes, let alone one that lasts hours, but should cultivate the focus necessary to do so. Reading sessions allow you to reach a flow state and read faster, more productively.

Finishing books requires hours, and if you can’t read for very long at a time, the process of finishing a book will likely end in frustrated failure. Increased completion time makes infrastructure more expensive, and increased reading duration makes book completion less likely.

So how do you maintain focus while reading, and how do you read for longer periods of time?

I’ll tell you the things I do during hours-long reading sessions, and you can take from them what you will.

(1) Kill your phone (or computer). You cannot be trusted with it. Even if you could (which you can’t), it’s not a good idea.

If you use your phone at any point during your reading, you have failed. Do not do it. It breaks your focus, and pulls your attention to other matters. You cannot win against it, and you shouldn’t try.

People often resist this advice—phones are so useful! You can look up things that are relevant! You can take notes! I don’t dispute this, and as you’ll see later in the piece, I do temper this advice for experienced, successful readers. But if you’re not that, I’ll ask you this: why are you trying to make reading harder? Why do you want to introduce an element into the process that you must overcome, control, and restrain? Why introduce that into a process you’ve been having trouble with? Take it out!

(2) Track time

I track how much time I spend reading “important” or “serious” books—those books that are projects vital to my research and intellectual development.³ As you can see in my Bowling Alone reading session schedule, I time each chapter and break.

Why?

First: it cements my sense of “completing something” after I’m done with each chapter. I get the treat and reward of noting the total time it took.

Second: since it quantifies reading time, I can compare chapters to see where I slowed down or sped up. This allows me to think more critically about my experience of the book, like where I might have slowed to take more notes or reread, etc.

Third: from a project management perspective, I can track total time spent with a book. I can see if I’m running behind or ahead of schedule, and compensate accordingly.

Finally: I do this with a digital wristwatch. It’s a few easy buttons that don’t take my focus away. I would not use my phone to track this.

(3) Take breaks—also timed

I usually take a break after each chapter to skim the notes and markups I made, and to just walk around and simmer. Sometimes I will write thoughts in a notebook. But I don’t check my phone on these breaks—the phone is death.

This might resemble the Pomodoro Technique to some, but it is fundamentally different in a few ways:

1. I do not set deliberate break lengths ahead of time. I take breaks that feel natural to my internal sense of thought. If I need to write a bit longer in a break, I do.

2. My timers count up, not down. This guides attention differently. You don’t wait “for the break/work to be over.” You retain control of the time interval, and end it when you feel done. The reason why I track everything on a digital wristwatch is because it’s easy to check without risk of distraction, and because I can observe my natural work patterns while also not worrying about them in the moment. I like to know that my natural break between chapters is definitely more than five minutes. I’ve learned this by watching myself over time.

(4) Intentionally choose your sonic environment

Music or no music? Café or library?

There are many ways to engineer your sonic landscape when you’re reading, and we all have different responses to sonic stimuli. Your goal should be minimizing things that can steal your focus.

I prefer silent places, and I usually wear my noise-cancelling headphone on top of the natural silence.

Sometimes I play music, but that is the exception. When I was reading Bowling Alone, I listened to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony quietly on loop. Although it was playing from Spotify on my phone, my phone was on airplane mode in my backpack, and I could control the music from my headphones if I needed. Under no circumstances was I going to get my phone out of that bag.

You might think you can have your phone “just for music,” but ask yourself: how well has that gone in the past? Your phone will get you. It is the enemy of reading. Do not trust it. “But it will be fine,” you say.

Uh huh. You’re just like every sailor who got close to the sirens and thought they could resist killing themselves and wrecking their ships. Nope. Tie yourself to the mast.

Ulysses and the Sirens (1891), aka you and your phone when you’re trying to read.

(5) Write

Reading a serious book is an active, responsive experience. You will think about what you’re reading, and you should allow those thoughts to flow in a productive way—it helps engage further with the text.

I do this by underlining and writing margin notes as I read. Later I will use these to help me produce finished book notes.

As I mentioned above, I also write during my breaks. It’s all part of entering an extended reading session, all part of processing and interacting with the book as I move through it with one uninterrupted stream of focus.

(6) Consider food and drink, and how they pull you away from the book

How many hands do you need for it? Do you have to look at it much?

Food and drink can be more distracting than you realize, if they must be paid attention to be consumed.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I’ve been so enraptured by a book that I somehow hold my book open and eat with both hands. But usually I don’t mix the two.

You are far better off taking time to eat expeditiously and exclusively, and then getting back to your book. Otherwise, switching your hands between book and food spends time and divides focus.

(7) Physical, paper books

People have different experiences here, and I’m not going to try to talk someone out of something that works for them.

But paper books probably work best for most people, if they’re trying to read and digest something important.

Not only do the books have no built-in, other purpose to distract you like a phone, but your spacial memory is more primed to take in information laid out in sequential pages, rather than the endless scroll of a phone or Kindle.

Further: while some pieces of tablet technology are progressing wonderfully, most do not rival physically writing notes in a book. Memory and thought consolidation is still the domain of paper.

Optimism of the will, honesty to the self

I’ve been to a ton of events where people get together to read, and I have watched many individuals read.

They sabotage themselves.

They use their phones, they eat involved food, they take too many breaks to talk to others, and they stop too soon, not realizing they’ve only been at it for like 20 minutes.

They are not reading. They are attempting to do many things at once, one of which is read. This goes predictably well—they fail from the starting line, at which they’ve laced their shoes together.

But when people later report their reading success or failure, their own habits are invisible to them (“I read but didn’t get very far.” No: you did not read, I saw you.) This is terrible, because they blame their correctly perceived failure to read on some innate deficiency, rather than execrable, correctable habit.

These things are straightforwardly fixable, although if you really want to read, you’ll likely have to do some work to break your literal addiction to your phone. I can help with this.

If you want a concrete piece of advice to start with, I’d say to time your reading with a timer that: (1) counts up, not down, and (2) is not your phone. You can get basic information to frame your tolerances, and inform your path forward. If you use a timer that counts down, you will be cutting off your baseline natural impulses, and you will not become familiar with them.

By doing this, you’ll see when your energy flags, when your attention dies, and how long you actually invest in the task. For perhaps most people, simply writing down total time spent reading is enough to reveal why they can’t finish a book. They just don’t read very much, and they get frustrated that they’re not done!

Finally: embrace the high adventure of reading! It is a composite skill, and it takes time to cultivate. But you can do it, and reap the compounding rewards of having done so.

1. The astute arithmetician will note that the page total from my schedule is only 59. That’s because books count interstitial and title pages between chapters and sections in their numbered page count, even if there is no text on them. While I only read 59 pages with text, I completed pages numbered 1-64.

2. Although: gutting it out is a great way to explore new domains, and I highly recommend it. With stick-to-it-iveness, mental toughness, and a positive attitude, you can learn a lot just by getting through something. But you should learn and get better after your initial round(s) of brute force.

3. There are many books that I read “just for fun,” including weighty literature. I don’t often time these. They’re important, but they are different kinds of projects.