How to read more books

My looking for new projects post was highly successful, which fortunately means that I’ve been busy lately, which unfortunately means that I’ve had much less free time¹, hence the lack of writing. I’m trying to claw some time back to write because I miss it, so here we are.

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It’s a recurring complaint on the parts of the internet that I frequent that people no longer have the capacity to read books. I’ve seen two complaints recently that particularly got my back up. They were, in summary:

• “I can’t read books because Capitalism sucks the joy out of everything non-productive, thus preventing me from enjoying reading.”

• “I can’t read books because my phone has rewired my brain to require constant stimulus from short-form content.”

I have long and involved criticisms of these claims, but here’s the short succinct one: No they haven’t. Stop making excuses.

The reason you can tell these are excuses is that they blame a small specific problem on a bigger and vaguer one. They get you off the hook for the problem by making it dependent on something you can’t possibly solve. Therefore you can’t solve this problem, therefore you don’t have an obligation to solve this problem, therefore you don’t have to feel bad.

The problem is, it’s a transparent lie, and you know at some level that it’s a transparent lie, so it doesn’t actually stop you from feeling bad, it just gets you more stuck in a state of feeling bad.

The book I’ve been reading recently is Untangling: How You Can Transform What’s Impossibly Stuck by Barbara McGavin and Ann Weiser Cornell². It’s OK. I neither strongly recommend nor disrecommend it - it’s a pretty good book about parts work and an OK book about Focusing and a typical self-help annoying style. It does have some decent ideas though.

This sort of internal conflict between the part making the excuse and the part that knows full well that it’s an excuse and feels bad about not doing the thing is what they refer to as a “tangle”. They describe a way of working with tangles that involves identifying the parts and helping heal them.

You can certainly do that if you want to, but “I can’t read because I first need to resolve all my emotional conflicts that stop me from reading” is another excuse formed by reducing a specific problem to a much larger problem.

Some spells for reading

Here’s a general purpose spell for you:

Yes you can

Suppose you’ve got some thing that you think you can’t do. Set a pomodoro and try doing the thing for the duration of that pomodoro. Observe what happens and where it goes wrong.

If it doesn’t go wrong, great. Turns out you can do the thing.

More likely, it does go wrong. You don’t tend to believe you can’t do things without any evidence.

Now you feel bad about the fact that you failed to do it and treat this as evidence that you were right about everything and the task is impossible treat the thing that happened as a specific problem that it’s on you to solve or dissolve.

For example, suppose you try to read and you find yourself scrolling Twitter on your phone instead. Turn your phone off and put it in another room. That’s solving the problem.

Suppose, now, that you try to read and you find yourself just incredibly painfully bored. Pick a better book. That’s dissolving the problem.³

When you’ve made it to the end of the pomodoro, take notes on how you achieved that. Codify it as a set of instructions for how to do the thing - i.e. a spell.⁴

Once you’ve done that, ask yourself: Would I like to do this again? Not necessarily right now (although right now is an option if you’d like to). If not, what would help make it more appealing? Tinker with it until it seems more appealing.

Now, when in future you find yourself thinking you can’t do the thing, remind yourself that you’ve got a spell for that. If that sounds appealing, do it. If not, well, try “Yes you can” again…

One of the things you may find is that your single very specific problem actually wasn’t specific enough, and it’s actually several overlapping problems, and different spells will emerge this way. For example, here are two very different spells that will help you read more:

Negative Pomodoro

A traditional pomodoro is where you set a timer and focus on a single task that you are required to work on for the duration of that timer. A negative pomodoro is the opposite of that: You set a timer and have a list of things you’re not allowed to do for the duration of that timer. Everything else is fair game. If at any point you find yourself violating the rules, congratulate yourself for noticing and stop doing the thing until the timer runs out.

Here is the specific version of negative pomodoro that I use that results in my reading more:

I pick a room. This is typically my study, which has a writing desk and a bunch of bookshelves in it. I’ve read maybe 50% of books on the shelves. I make sure there are no devices in the room.⁵

I set my 45 minute sand timer.

The rules for the duration of the timer are now:

1. I may not use devices - no checking the internet, etc.

2. I’m supposed to be in the designated room. I’m allowed to leave (e.g. for bathroom breaks), but if I do my goal is to return to this room in a timely manner.

3. I’m allowed to interact with other people in the house if they need me, but I shouldn’t deliberately seek it out or linger overlong on it.⁶

What usually happens is that I spend the time in a mix of reading, journalling, tidying,⁷ and resting with no particular goal⁸.

Sometimes I’ll have a particular book in mind that I want to read during this period, but more often what I’ll do is I’ll browse through my library of books, read a chapter or two from a book, and then put it back on the shelf. Often this will be books that I’ve already read and want to remind myself of some details of.

Sometimes this will be sufficiently interesting that I’ll just end up spending the whole time reading a single book. That’s great but isn’t the success criterion. The only success criterion is that I obey the rules of the pomodoro.

One of the best things about this is by deliberately inducing a lightly understimulated⁹ state without the normal tools I’d reach for, many things that I would normally consider a bit aversive become actively appealing. It reframes journalling, reading, even meditating, as things I get to do, not things I have to do.

In contrast, here’s a spell for reading a specific book:

Relax and read

Find yourself a comfy place and way to lie down and read. For me, this is a giant beanbag with next to the radiator, with a chair to prop my feet up on, but depending on your particular needs other positions may be better. The key feature is that it should be super comfy and, ideally, slightly hard to get up from.

Again, leave devices in another room. Bring a book that you genuinely want¹⁰ to read with you.

Now, lie down and read.

If you find your attention wandering, close your eyes. Keep them closed for as long as you like. When you’re ready to read some more, open them again and read.

When you get to the end of a chapter, or some other natural breakpoint, ask yourself if you want to keep reading or stop now. Both answers are fine. If you want to stop then you’ve read enough for now.

When you feel inclined to stop reading at any other point, close your eyes and have a bit of a rest. Then have a think about whether you genuinely want to stop now or if you can make it to the next breakpoint. Again, both answers are fine.

When you get to the end, ask yourself if you actually enjoyed the book, and whether it’s something you want to keep reading. If the answer is no, probably¹¹ you should pick another book next time.

The real problem

These two spells don’t cover every possible way to improve your reading, but they both work pretty well, and cover a large class of the problems.

And yet, full disclosure, I go through long periods of time where I’m failing to read. When I’m actually motivated to read, these spells help me read more. When I’m not motivated to read, I’m also not motivated to perform these spells.

The real problem is not, I think, that reading is particularly hard for you. The above spells are good, but they will only help you read more if you actually do them, and I think typically if you were capable of doing them reliably you’d probably already be reading more.

If you’re currently genuinely trying and failing to read, this might not be true, but my guess is that most people with this sort of complaint aren’t actually even trying. This is because of the tangle again. You’re up against some sort of conflict, probably some sort of internal resistance to the idea¹² that makes you keep avoiding reading.

This is, again, a thing you could solve by doing therapy to it, working with the felt sense of resistance, identify the part, give it your attention, etc. Perfectly reasonable things to do. I don’t recommend it as a problem solving strategy though. I think you just need normal boring behaviourism.

I like BJ Fogg’s book “Tiny Habits” about how to construct habits. Sometimes I even use it, which already puts it in the top 5% of books about habit formation.

His basic model is that a habit comprises of three things Prompt, Ability, and Motivation. Something prompts you to do the habit, you can do the habit, you want to do the habit: Bam, you’ve got a habit.

If you’re doing spell design well, you should already be on top of Ability and Motivation, so the real thing you need to fix is the Prompt.

I tried writing a spell for getting a good Prompt for a spell, but I realised that I perhaps don’t understand the constraints well enough to do a good job of that right now, so it kept coming up half-arsed. But for me, the prompts I’m currently working with for these spells are:

1. In the morning, while I drink my morning coffee and before I start work, I schedule a negative pomodoro.

2. When I don’t have a lot of energy and catch myself doing vaguely drifty internet activities, I step away from the computer and do some Relax and Read.

I’ve also thought about explicitly scheduling Relax and Read as an end of work activity to properly transition out of work mindset, but I’ve not actually tried that yet.

I don’t yet confidently know that these prompts are enough. They seem to be working OK for me so far, but no guarantees they’ll survive a depressive episode.¹³

The courage not to self-deceive

This is mostly a post about books, but really it’s a post about not making excuses.

I don’t like making excuses, but they’re really easy to generate and hard to notice.

No, sorry, that’s an excuse.¹⁴

Excuses are generally really obvious, so they’re actually easy to notice. The problem is that they’re only easy to notice if you’re trying, and the fact that you’re making excuses to yourself is a pretty strong sign that you don’t want to notice the excuse, because the excuse is a way of not feeling bad about yourself.

It does this partly by making the problem not your fault because you get to blame it on someone else, but I don’t think that part really works. You know that part is a lie, and it doesn’t stop you feeling bad.

But what it does do is stop you investigating further.

Maybe the reason you’re not reading is that you just aren’t that interested in reading any more. Maybe this self image you’ve built up of yourself as an intellectual, someone who is very invested in knowledge and thus very invested in reading, just isn’t true. Maybe, actually, your highest desire for the rest of your life is that you waste it all on tiktok and video games.

Personally, I don’t think that’s true. I think if, at some level, you want to read, or build, or exercise, then probably your best life does involve those in some way.

But sometimes it won’t. Sometimes you’ll discover that actually you hate the thing and you’ve always hated the thing and you only did it to impress people or because you were bored and this entire foundational feature of your identity crumbles under you and you’ll have to find something new to replace it that better suits you.

And as long as you’re not reading and have some excuse that stops you reading, you’ll probably never find this out. You only find out whether you really want something through repeated contact with the reality of it. If you can avoid that contact, you can avoid that reality.

Being wrong about yourself in this way is survivable, mostly. The version of yourself you thought you were turns out to have been dead all along, but you yourself will survive and move on, changed.

But that possibility sure seems scary, doesn’t it?

This means that the real thing that you need to stop making excuses and to change the behaviours that you’re making excuses for is courage. Courage to try things and see if they work, and courage to find out who exactly you are.

It will be hard, but I believe in you.