How to Read Books: Four Tips

Few things are as uncomplicatedly good as a book. It may very well be the perfect piece of technology—essentially all benefit, virtually no downside. It is perhaps the perfect combination of pleasurable and intellectual pursuits, the purest meshing of both self-gratification and self-improvement, what Mortimer Adler described as “the process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of readable matter…elevates itself by the power of its own operations.” Reading is alchemy, chrysopoeia: the artificial production of gold, the seemingly limitless transmogrification of something of lower value into something of higher value.

Of course nobody really reads anymore. The practice has essentially fallen off a cliff. Pew data show that among 13-year-olds, the number who read for fun every day has more than halved since 1984, while the number who “never” read for fun has more than tripled. I think there are few more unreliable data quantifiers than embarrassing surveys—nobody wants to be honest and embarrass themselves—so my own policy is to take bad figures like these and double them. Look: Gallup says that U.S. adults read an average of a dozen books in 2021, and yet another more stringent survey from July revealed that over half of Americans “haven’t read a book in the past year.” Brutal.

I embarrass myself for being a slow reader who doesn’t always make the most time to crack open his books. I usually manage to make it through 12 to 15 books per year, most of them nonfiction, most of those history. I love a good history. Most of my new book acquisitions are from those little free library things; it’s a wonderful way to cast a wide net and find things you didn’t know you were interested in learning.

Larger though the number could be, people are sometimes impressed with the number of books I read in an average year. But it’s eminently within the average reader’s reach to read as many as I do, and probably more. Here are a few tips for those interested in doing so¹:

• Get rid of your smartphone. I know, I know: “Zack Morris the Elder, you’re recommending we get rid of our smartphones? Who would have ever seen this coming??” Yes yes, I’m a one-trick pony, by which I mean you should put your smartphone under a pony and let him squash it with his hoof. Throwing away your smartphone and getting a boring, featureless flip phone (or going even more OG and just sticking with a house phone) has all sorts of glorious benefits, but top among them is that you will be well disposed to read more when you do. The smartphone is designed to steal your attention at every waking moment of the day. It is literally designed for that. People spend hours on their smartphones a day. Imagine taking even 25% of the time you spend on your smartphone and using it to read. You could read dozens of books a year if you did that. Some people will try and meet you halfway and say things like, “If you’re going to read, put your smartphone in another room.” I go full bore. Throw your smartphone into the garbage where it so richly belongs. Your reading life will improve greatly.
  

• Don’t read “online books.” What do I mean by this? I don’t mean “don’t read books online,” (though I mean that too), but rather “don’t read online books,” i.e., books that are just extensions of the perpetual online milieu in which so many of us exist these days. You know what I mean: Books with words in the title like “woke,” “culture war,” “in crisis,” “how to take back,” “cancel culture,” “how to win,” any books written by cable news hosts, any book about something controversial that happened in the past seven months. If you’re throwing away the smartphone then you might as well throw away the books that feed into smartphone culture as well. These books are nearly 100% empty fluff, many of them obsessively in the weeds about stupid online fights and tweets and social media spats, most of them offering little enlightenment apart from, “Keep consuming the low-shelf Internet writing that I, the content creator, produce.” These books will add nothing to the elevation of your mind and will instead only detract from it.
  

• Read for pleasure. Don’t read with some ulterior motive in mind. I think many people of my generation at least like the idea of reading as an act of sort of intellectual weaponization, whereby you read a book, gain the knowledge therein, and somehow win some sort of indeterminate prize or contest by doing so. I think this impulse helps explain why so many young people are seemingly obsessed with buying books but never reading them, what the Japanese call tsundoku, “the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them.” Don’t do this. Find a book you want to read and read it because it’s lovely to read—because it literally makes your brain feel good as you read it, because you laugh while you read the funny parts and because your breath slows and sometimes stops when something tense or frightening is about to happen, because you can’t wait to get back to the book you’re reading, because you like to think about the book you’re reading when you’re not reading it, because you like to sometimes look from across the room at the book you’re reading as it sits on the coffee table—just look at it, just because it looks so darn appealing. This is why you read.
  

• Read what you like. Don’t read what you think other people think you should read. Don’t even read what you think you “should” read. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that you have to have read every Penguin Classic, or even any of them; there are some great books in there, and you probably should read some of them, but—ah! There I go again. Don’t listen to me. Read what you want to read. If you want to read classic literature, do it. If you want to read history, do it. If you want to read sports, do it. Mystery, fantasy, travel, food, cooking, essay, westerns, whatever—just read. By all means, listen to advice from people about good genres to pursue. Just don’t feel guilty if what you like to read isn’t what they think you need to read. The only piece of specific genre advice I might have is: Stay away from contemporary Young Adult. In decades past the literature echelons mostly went from what is now called “middle-grade” to more or less adult; these days the “young adult” label is meant to fill the gap for teenagers, though in practice many adults heavily consume this type of juvenile fiction as well. Most of it is not very good at all; nearly all of it, increasingly, is truly reprehensible woke garbage, just absolute progressive Internet ideology masquerading as literature, and trashy literature at that. This might be the only outwardly normal genre of book that I would say is worse than reading nothing at all.

I hope these tips help you out as they’ve helped me. And if you read anything interesting in the course of doing them, please share and let us know!

1. You will perhaps notice that absent from these tips is “make time for reading.” This seems obvious enough not to include. You’re not in kindergarten anymore, you don’t need me to be THAT specific.