How to read more books

By Joseph @ 2025-03-01T17:30 (+18)

This isn't as polished/clean as I'd like, and it feels borderline to even share this on the EA Forum since it isn't directly related to EA (only in the vague sense of 'how to be more productive'). But I've been sitting on a draft for several months and I haven't been able to make any progress, so I'm just gonna put it out there.

Short Summary

Have a queue of books to read next and have them available so that as soon as you finish a book you can start the next one. Use audiobooks and bluetooth earbuds/headphones. Use public libraries. Make use of otherwise 'empty' time.

Almost every time someone learns about my reading habits they ask how I read so much. Indeed, Sometimes it is just from idle curiosity or from surprise that a person can actually read that many books. The question is also sometimes asked as a way of figuring out how to read more. Thus I am answering it here along the lines of “what can I do to read more?”

Keep a list of books you want to read

I like using Goodreads. I don’t recall exactly when I first heard about Goodreads (probably around 2012 or 2013), but after some computer troubles and loosing data I realized the value if having something non-local.^[1] Similar to crossing out days on a calendar as a motivational tool,^[2] I find it quite motivating to see the whole list of books that I’ve read, or to track my progress through a particularly long and challenging book. It is also helpful to look back and remember/review what you've read on the past. If someone asks me what I've read about a particular topic, I can something clear to reference.

It is also helpful to have your next book ready to go. I have a few paperback books that I haven’t yet read sitting around, and I have loads of ebooks and audiobooks saved locally that I haven’t yet read. I want to avoid a situation in which I finish reading book A, and then I have a gap before I can start to read book B. Maybe I would need to walk to the local library, or place it on hold and wait for it to be delivered. But I want to have my next book ready in as seamless a way as possible. Most of the time I already know which book I will read next. My recommendation is to always have your next book available, and to have minimal effort/time/friction between finishing book A and starting book B.^[3]

Don’t limit yourself to books on dead trees

Note that if you are interested in a more traditionalist approach that focuses solely on paper books, you might be interested in Matthew Walther’s writing on his ‘hundred pages a day’ approach. Even for people who aren’t sticklers for paper books, he has a lot of good suggestions.

• Audiobooks
  • Listen to them faster than 1.0 speed. What speed feels good will vary based on both the pace of the narrator and on the density/complexity of the topic. I usually listen between 1.4 and 1.8. Sometimes for a very complex topic I need to slow down to 1.0 or 1.2, and there are occasionally very slow speakers speaking about simple topics that I can speed up to 2.2.
  • Bluetooth. Before I bought Apple AirPods I thought that they were just an expensive and performative thing, to signal to other people how fashionable and wealthy you are. I was wrong. I love having AirPods (some functionally equivalent product would probably also be fine). Not needing to worry about a wire/cord getting hooked or pulled on by something and yanking the earbuds from my ears gives me many more options than I had before. The ability to easily listen with one ear while having my other ear open to the world is great. It makes doing various activities while listening to an audiobook much less hassle (see next bullet point).^[4] 
  • Make use of otherwise unused time. While I am brushing my teeth, chopping vegetables, washing dishes, carrying my laundry basket to the washing machine, walking to a café, waiting for the bus, filling up my shopping cart in the grocery store, commuting to work, lifting weights, jogging, cycling, or laying in bed for 20 minutes before I fall asleep… Pretty much any time that I am not doing something that involves my active attention (such as writing, reading, conversing, etc.) and my ears can be free, I’ll try to listen to something. Commuting is ideal for this. I imagine that it would be quite challenging to continue my current listening habits with a spouse and/or a small child, so this advice might have limited applicability for many people.
  • Note that I do think comprehension and recall both tend to suffer a bit compared to reading visually. Audiobooks are a great tool, but don’t fool yourself that they are better in every way.
    • It is easier to zone out and have your attention drift off, and suddenly you realize 45 seconds have passed and you aren’t sure what the narrator is talking about.
    • It is also harder to scan/skim. If the author explains a specific term that they use repeatedly, a visual book makes it much easier and quicker to go back a few pages and re-read the sentence in which the author defines that term.
    • I find it helpful to have a visual reference for the outline of the book, like this example with just the chapters, or this example with lots of “sub-chapter” headings as well, or this one with lots of notes and excepts. It can be harder to follow the thread of an argument without this kind of visual indicators, because there isn't a clear difference between the audio for one section of the book and the audio for a different section.
  • There are also some books which are simply not suited to being consumed as audiobooks. 
    • Some books simply don’t have audiobook versions.^[5]
    • Books that heavily rely on visual elements (such as How to Lie with Maps, The Way Things Work, or any book that relies on lots of figures and charts) wouldn’t be good candidates for audiobook versions. Visuals sometimes serve as very helpful scaffolding for understanding the context: imagine reading a book about the history of a country you don’t know much about without any maps to look at.
    • Unsurprisingly, books with lots of footnotes or are also troublesome: either the narrator reads the entirety of every single footnote (which can be quite bothersome) or they ignore the footnotes completely. Conversely, if you are reading visually you get to make the choice whether or not you are interested enough to read any particular footnote.
• Ebooks
  • After multiple trips in which I carried paperback books with me, I bought a Kindle in 2013. I loved having it, and I can hardly dream of how much weight I would have to carry in paper in order to equal the small library I have in my Kindle.^[6] I can now go on a backpacking trip with a library of a hundred different books.
  • I thought that I would hate reading a book on a computer monitor, and I still can’t say that I am thrilled with the experience. But for books that I want to take lots of notes on, or that I want to copy-and-paste quotes from, using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V with a full-sized keyboard on a large monitor is far better than holding a paperback book open to the correct page with one hand while awkwardly typing in the exact quote with the other hand.
• Use libraries. I love the Libby app and nowadays about 90% of the books I read are via Libby.

Environmental scanning, always on the lookout for interesting books

• When a podcast recommend a book that sounds interesting, and I add it to my list.
• When I see an interesting TED Talk (or some other lecture/presentation), sometimes I look to see if the author has written a book.
• Sometimes I get casual recommendations from friends.
• Sometimes I specifically seek out recommendations.
  • Someone I dated in 2018 was getting a PhD focused on the history of China-Mongolia relations, and I asked her for a reading list about Qing Dynasty and modern Chinese history. She emailed me a word document with about a hundred entries (some books, some academic papers), and I added 20 or 30 of them to my list.
  • When I first got curious about animal welfare, I asked someone from Faunalytics for a reading list.
• Sometimes I just Google around to seek out reading lists. When I realized that I didn't know much about the science behind diversity, I Googled around to find some well-rated books. Syllabi for university courses tend to be good for this, as they are somewhat pre-filtered for quality, and they tend to be less motivated by profit than random blog posts listing “five best books for [TOPIC].” That is why there are four or five books about Hong Hong on my to-read list: I was curious about Hong Kong, and realized that I knew basically nothing about it. Sometimes I would simply become curious about a topic, and browse lists of “best books on [TOPIC]” and add whichever ones seem interesting.

Realize the limits

• There are some topics that you can’t really develop much of a sense of by reading. Nobody ever got good at playing basketball by reading books about basketball. I think that reading is not very useful if you want to learn judo, or juggling, or speaking a foreign language, or if you want to learn to be a professional computer programmer. Some things are just easier to learn with a tutor/coach/guide, with practice, with physical interaction, by watching a video, or by taking a course. Books can often give you knowledge relevant and useful to a skill, but you still need to actually practice that skill.
• Sometimes there just aren’t many books written on a topic. If you want to read about some kind of current event you can’t read any books about it because they haven’t been written yet. If you wanted to read about a big world event two months after it happened, usually the best you can do are journalistic pieces. Some events are simply not big enough to ever get books published about them.
• Sometimes the available books aren’t very good.
• Sometimes the books are really hard or impractical to access.^[7]
• If you aren’t willing to pirate books and you don’t have access to a free and legal source of books (like a library or a good book exchange box) with a good selection, then it can be really expensive to buy and read a bunch of books. I used to use Bookmooch a lot to get free books,^[8] and I loved it.

1. ^{^}

   I also found that I enjoy the processing of tracking information; it gives me a kind of satisfaction to log my progress through a book, especially when I find it laborious to force myself to read something, such as a boring textbook that I can only manage a few pages at a time. I am currently working through a 915 page PDF that I find very dull, but the motivation of updating my reading progress from page 352 to 359 can make it a bit more bearable.

2. ^{^}

   In brief: “every day that you manage to spend at least some time on your most important creative work, you mark a big red X on your calendar. The goal is not to break the chain of Xs.”

3. ^{^}

   You might be able to recognize ideas of operations management here: having buffers, reducing downtime, and so on.

4. ^{^}

   For people that didn’t experience using a corded headset while out and about, it is hard to emphasize what an improvement it is to have these small, easily recharged, wireless earbuds. I can’t count the number of times over the years a cord has gotten caught on a bag’s buckle, on an arm, or on a bike handle and gotten pulled out of my ear.

5. ^{^}

   Sometimes you can manage to use automatic text-to-speech software works well, but it often is pretty clunky, and often has length-limitations. I have yet to see any that can handle the types of academic papers I want to read. As an example, imagine how much harder it would be to listen to this passage compared to reading it:

   There is also much to be gained by comparing the differential effects of job redesign on "task performance" (task proficiency) and "contextual performance" (helping others, etc.; Borman & Motowidlo, 1993), especially given evidence that the determinants of these types of performance differ (Motowidlo & Van Scotter, 1994). Relevant contextual indicators in relation to job redesign include, for example, task innovation (West & Anderson, 1996), "intrapreneurship" (Hisrich, 1990), organizational spontaneity (George & Brief, 1992), use of initiative (Frese, Fay, Hilburger, Leng, & Tag, 1997; Frese, Kring, Soose, & Zempel, 1996), flexibility, and adaptation to change.

6. ^{^}

   I still have that Kindle. I don’t know if I have any other tech that is more than a decade old. I thought about buying a new Kindle, but the old one still works fine so why should I spend $100 on something with basically the same functionality that is a little bit shinier/faster. I’m not so terribly into consumerism and materialism as to buy something new just for the sake of having something new.

7. ^{^}

   There is a book about Karma Sandrup, a Tibetan man who was jailed in 2010. But the book costs about 120 US dollars to get a copy on Amazon last time I checked, and I haven’t found any copies in libraries. It is simply a book that isn’t very popular, didn’t get many copies printed, and didn’t sell very well. 

8. ^{^}

   Okay, it's not totally free. You have to ship a book to someone in order to receive a book, so the cost is whatever it takes you to mail a book.