Reading Habits

I like to read, and like a lot of people with the same affliction, I've sometimes found that I'm not quite where I want to be as regards reading. Maybe I'm not reading enough, maybe I'm not reading the kinds of things I want to be reading, or even if I am maybe there's still a mountain of things that I feel like I should have read but haven't got round to, and I wonder if I ever will. At one point I was legitimately confused at how it's possible that I seem to have read thousands and thousands of books when I only seemed read about ten books a year if that. Twitter's search function isn't what it was and I couldn't find the tweet, but perhaps some of you will relate.

The good news is that while I'm still not exactly where I'd like to be with respect to this stuff, I'm in a much better place than I used to be a few years ago. I've hit on a few habits that I find help me, and I'm going to talk about them here. I'm not recommending you try any of this stuff at home; different things help different people and we don't all have the same options in our lives. This post is about me.

Three books at once

Perhaps the biggest breakthrough was when I hit on the system of having three books on the go at the same time. It's great, and so much better than what I was doing before. I used not to have a system at all really; I'd start a book when I thought I could handle taking it on or couldn't wait, whatever else I was reading at the same time. I'd often put one book on hold to read another, and then put that on hold to read another, until I ended up with a matryoshka of unfinished books with bookmarks sticking out of them somewhere near the beginning. That's no way to live.

In the current system I'll read three books at once, but not just any three books. It's three distinct slots with different purposes, not an unstructured quota of three. Basically the idea is to have a light one, a heavy one, and an intermediate one.

The light one doesn't have to be especially light in either its content or its materiality; previous occupants of that slot include The Goldfinch and Crime and Punishment, although admittedly I read those on an e-reader rather than lugging them around. The key criteria are that it should be a book that I can still appreciate if I read it in short bursts, and it should be something that I can reliably get in the mood for when circumstances provide a short burst for me to read it in. The current occupant is Upstate by James Wood. I'm not as into it as I was into his The Book Against God, which I think I've read twice, but I'm still enjoying it and I'm glad to be finally checking it out after it's sat on my bookshelf so long. It's good; I just really liked his other one.

The heavy slot is for books which very much don't fit the two criteria for the light slot, but which I'd still like to read. The Critique of Pure Reason went in the heavy slot, for example. The current occupant of that role is the set theory textbook I mentioned a couple of weeks ago — I am now partway through chapter 3 but have been slacking off on the exercises — and the previous heavyweight was A Discourse Concerning The Love Of God by Damaris Masham. I've mentioned this before, but it's especially important to have at least one other book on the go when I'm reading a book by Kant, because otherwise when you think "ugh, that's enough Kant for the day" you also have to stop reading books for the day altogether, and things really don't need to be like that. Just because you're willingly reading a book on your own initiative doesn't mean it's not effortful or even a bit of a chore, and you don't want to put yourself in a position where reading in general is, for you at this time, a chore.

I've sometimes heard people who for professional or educational reasons had a lot of books to get through saying that they feel bad about reading anything not on their list of obligatory reading, because if they're reading at all they feel they should be working their way through the list. But of course they're not always up for reading something from the list, and so they just scroll on their phone or watch TV or go to the gym or whatever instead. This doesn't make sense. There can be reading on both sides of your work/life balance.

The intermediate slot is for other books. Books which are in no way a chore to read but which don't quite fit the criteria for the light book. The current intermediate book is Why Are We 'Artists'? 100 World Art Manifestos, edited by Jessica Lack. There's a certain amount of slippage between the intermediate slot and the slots on either side; when I finish Upstate I may put the art manifestos in the light slot and put a philosophy book in the intermediate slot.

Occasionally I'll be down to two books when I've finished or given up on the book in one slot and haven't decided what to replace it with, and sometimes after very careful consideration I'll introduce a fourth. The latter only really works when it's something I'm confident I can get through pretty quickly, because otherwise I'm back to the matryoshka. I tried it once with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit when I was reading it along with Gregory Sadler's YouTube lectures, and you won't be surprised to learn that I did not get especially far into it, although that was still a lot of lectures and I think that at the time I got a fair idea of what the Preface is about¹.

Recordkeeping

The other big breakthrough for me was that in January 2019 I started keeping a record of what I read. I don't include squibs like Daily Mash articles, but books, magazine articles, blogposts, encyclopedia articles, op-eds and poems go on there. I originally intended to include things I only read parts of but that's no longer such a big issue because now that I've got my system I tend to finish things more.

It's sometimes useful to be able to check whether I've read something or to find something I've read — I include URLs to things I read online in the entry — but it also just makes me feel better about my reading life to have a record of it. I don't show the list to other people, and to be honest I don't really understand why it makes me feel better. I guess it's partly that knowledge is power and so recordkeeping is empowering, and partly that if you're scared that you're not where you want to be with respect to your reading life, then some of that can be a fear of the unknown and keeping records makes it less unknown. If I spent a lot of time reading through the list and thinking about what a great guy I was to have read all those things then that would explain it, but that's not something I really do, so it isn't that. But whatever it is, it does seem to make me feel better about my reading, and so I'm going to keep doing it.

Read on the bus

I get the bus to and from work, and on the bus I usually read my light book. I also read it on my breaks at work. That's why it's important for the light book to be something that works when read in short bursts and which I'll reliably be in the mood for when those short bursts present themselves.

One benefit of this habit is that I don't have to make the effort to carve out time to read. I'm as lazy and weak-willed as the next person, and when I'm left to my own devices I'll often go on social media or play online chess or do some puzzles. But it's nice to have a book on the go which you dip into regularly, a little narrative running in the background, and having dedicated situations when I dip into it makes sure that this nice thing is an ever-present part of my life. Except when I'm off work.

Read at bedtime

I'm actually not doing this one at the moment. Currently at bedtime I just go on the internet for a bit, and sometimes watch some TV or a movie if there's time. But a month or two ago I was in the habit of reading at bedtime instead, and it was really good. I got to sleep more quickly, I was safe from the possibility of getting stressed out by the internet when I was supposed to be going to sleep, and I had extra time to read. What's not to like? I didn't stop for any particular reason. Perhaps I'll get back into it, although as I say, I'm as lazy and weak-willed as the next person. I got a new bedside lamp recently so maybe that'll tip the balance.

Read aloud

It's a little unusual to read a book on the bus these days, but probably my most eccentric reading habit is that when I'm reading by myself I often read aloud. As I recall I first started doing this with Thomas Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions, which according to my records I finished in July 2020. I suppose a lot of people probably developed some eccentricities around then what with the pandemic and the lockdowns, but I've kept this one up and I'm glad of it. I think I understand things better when I read them aloud, and it gives you a heads up when you're misparsing a sentence because you'll read it wrong and probably stumble over it.

Reading aloud also opens up new avenues for having a bit of fun with what you're reading. One thing I sometimes find happening is that I'll do different voices for blockquotes, perhaps modelled on the voice that was used for reading out viewers' letters on the old BBC show Points Of View, or at least my memory of it; doubtless if I went back and listened to it the voice they do would turn out to be nothing like the one I do. I also sometimes find myself reading the footnotes in my head even when I'm reading the main text aloud. I don't know why.

Some people will tell you that the ancients all used to read aloud except for St Ambrose, but I vaguely remember hearing that this is based on a misunderstanding of something St Augustine wrote. So I won't pretend that by reading aloud to myself I'm participating in a long and venerable tradition. I expect some people would also find that reading aloud slows them down a lot, but I read pretty slowly at the best of times, at least for someone who reads as much as I do — I usually reckon on about three minutes a page, adjusted up or down a bit depending on the usual sorts of thing — and so I don't have to slow down all that much for my voice to keep up.

Device compartmentalization

I don't have a smartphone but don't be fooled: I'm still probably at least as internet addicted as you are, and perhaps more so because I'm accessing the internet on a Chromebook with a proper keyboard and a much bigger screen and so it's much more enjoyable for me. So ideally I wouldn't do my reading on an internet-enabled device, with the siren song of social media within earshot. Sometimes this is hard to avoid of course, but I've managed to get round it to some extent with one weird trick that I call device compartmentalization.

Put simply, in addition to the Chromebook that I use for my social media and so on, I also have a PC laptop that I don't. I break the rule occasionally, for example when I slip on some ice and break my Chromebook, but for the most part I don't use social media on my PC. This, somehow, has the effect of meaning I'm generally not tempted to go on social media on my PC. So if I'm reading something and don't want to be distracted, I can read it on my PC. I read FH Bradley's Appearance and Reality that way, and let me tell you that if you can focus on the longer second part of that ('Reality') without getting distracted then you can focus on anything.

Print magazines

There's a flaw in the device compartmentalization method though, which is that it only works when I'm at home, as I don't carry my big chunky PC laptop around with me. And sadly when I'm out and about is exactly when I want to read quality longform magazine articles. What to do? Enter the last of my eccentricities to save the day: I subscribe to the print edition of a well-known American magazine. Perhaps you think this is an absurd thing to do in 2025, and that as a fully grown adult you would simply get a hold of yourself and read 15,000 words of Louis Menand on whatever he's become interested in this week without abandoning ship for your favourite microblogging site, but in the words of Cher, I really don't think you're strong enough. I'm certainly not. See you next week!

Notes

[1] It's about dialectics.