Alternate Subtitle: The Best Advice I Could Give You About Reading Lots of Books.


via a Tom Gauld Book1


Ever so often, after one of my reading updates on social media, some of my young friends ask me how I get so much reading done.

So, I decided to answer it here for posterity and then just point folk here.

  1. You are not me.
    a. I am a book worm.
    b. I am much older than you, with lots more practice.
  2. You most probably want to rush through a hard, technical book.
    a. I find them as hard as you.
    b. I read them at, as slow a pace as you.
    c. I interleave the hard stuff, with a lot of easy, “I-Love-This” fiction
  3. Speed Reading is Bullshit!
    Once you read a lot of books, you can pattern match and speed up or slow down, through whole blocks and paras and chapters and pages.
  4. Reading for studying’s sake is work and unavoidable and not quite related to reading for reading’s sake.
    a. These I pucker up and do anyway, just like taking bad medicine.

The only things that matter, when it comes to reading are …

  1. Be consistent. Read a little bit, daily.
    The trick to reading a lot, is to read a little every day.
  2. And the trick to reading a little every day is to, make it a habit.
  3. Be curious. Read whatever you want. Read whenever you want. Read wherever you want.
  4. Quit Books.
    You don’t have to finish it. You don’t have to slog through it.
    Set it down. Come back to it, tomorrow … or in a few decades.
    Or just throw it out and forget all about it.
  5. And if reading really becomes a sort of calling for you, then learn how to do it properly.2

That’s about it for now. If I remember something more, I’ll come back and tack it on here.


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  1. I forget which one! ↩︎

  2. totally optional. I learnt this really late in life and while it has enriched my reading experience, it had nothing to do with my love of reading. ↩︎