How to Read
Reading a lot of books is not the goal. Reading the right books, deeply enough that they change how you think, is.
Sowell’s warning is worth keeping close: “What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.”
Reading a lot of books is not the goal. Reading the right books, deeply enough that they actually change how you think, is.
Finding the right books
The best method for finding what to read next is to follow bibliographies. When a good book cites another book, that citation is a signal — the same way links between websites signal value. Poor books tend not to be cited by good ones. Follow the trail backwards and you will find better material than any bestseller list will give you.
Matsuo Basho said it differently: “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.”
On selection, Patrick Collison has a useful axiom: there is a set of books that are genuinely worth reading, and a subset of those that are also genuinely enjoyable to read. That intersection — worth reading and enjoyable — contains more books than you can finish in a lifetime. So read only from that intersection. When you run out, then consider books that are merely worth reading. You will not run out.
Don’t finish bad books
The instinct to finish what you start is not a virtue when applied to books. It is a sunk-cost fallacy in paper form.
If a book isn’t working — wrong time, wrong level, genuinely poor — put it down. The goal is not completion. The goal is understanding. A book you slog through resentfully leaves less than a book you abandon and replace with something that actually holds your attention, because attention is the mechanism by which reading becomes knowledge.
You cannot pay attention to something you don’t care about. And without attention, the information doesn’t consolidate — it passes through.
Slow beats fast
Speed reading is largely a distraction. The bottleneck in reading is not how fast your eyes move. It is comprehension.
Mortimer Adler: “Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.”
Difficult books read slowly do more to change how you think than easy books read quickly. The resistance is the point — struggling to understand something forces the brain to build new structure around it. Encountering an idea you already know and nodding along does not.
A book should be read as deeply as it is worth reading. For some books that means skimming. For others it means reading a page three times.
Match the book to the moment
Not all books suit all conditions. Dense, technical, or argumentatively complex books require sustained attention and prior context — trying to read them in five-minute windows between other tasks is mostly wasted effort. Narrative books, essay collections, and aphoristic writing (Meditations is the obvious example) suit fragmented time well.
Reading multiple books simultaneously helps with this. When attention or energy dips on one, switch to another rather than forcing it or stopping altogether. The break often makes returning easier, and the interleaving itself — holding multiple frameworks in mind at once — tends to produce unexpected connections.
Reading compounds
The Matthew Effect, described by Keith Stanovich: the more you read, the better you become at reading, which makes reading easier, which makes you read more. Vocabulary, background knowledge, and the ability to connect new ideas to existing ones all accumulate. The early investment is slow. The later returns accelerate.
This is the actual argument for starting now rather than waiting until you have more time. The reader you will be in five years depends heavily on the reading you do today — not because five years of reading finishes the work, but because the compounding needs time to run.
Leave books everywhere. Reach for them instead of your phone. Read the ones that grip you. Abandon the ones that don’t. Go slowly enough to understand what you’re reading.
That’s most of it.