If you would like to know how to read more, the internet is happy to tell you. Read 20 pages every day. Set an amount of time for which you read. Learn to quit books that aren’t clicking for you. Learn to pick books that do click with you. There’s a lot of advice out there! Some of it is very good; this beautiful post from John Paul Brammer suggests letting curiosity lead you. “Curiosity is attention’s white-hot spearpoint,” he writes.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about one aspect of reading that doesn’t seem to come up as much. It’s not very punchy or clever or life-hacky. It’s actually the opposite: slow and habitual.
The key to reading more is to read more.
I know. I KNOW. Roll your eyes! I rolled my eyes at myself when I thought this! It sounds like I’m saying some version of “just do it.” But I hate “just do it.” Let me explain.
Every so often, I get invested in a project for which I need to read a large pile of books in a moderately small amount of time. Every time this happens, I at first eye the growing stack of books with a certain sense of alarm. Time is finite. The books feel infinite. How am I going to get through?
Then I start reading. And within a couple of days, maybe a week or two, I no longer feel the stress. I get in the reading habit and I stay there for as long as humanly possible. I read, and read, and read some more, and every book I finish makes the next book that much more appealing.
Reading is a practice. It’s a hobby, it’s a skill, it’s an obsession for some people, but it is also a practice. It’s a process that requires sustained attention over time, a willingness to pay attention to details, an ability (and the time and privilege) to set the world aside for as long as you’re reading, whether that is 5 minutes or 5 hours. And like any practice or skill, you get better at it the more you do it.
There is a huge difference in how I read when I’m finishing a book every so often versus a pile of books one on top of another. I am not saying it’s a race, or that you need to voraciously tear through every book in front of you before the end of the week. (I am also not saying you need to read more, full stop! But people sometimes want to!) What I am saying is that consistency makes a huge difference. Reading every day is walking down the same path in your brain, telling yourself, this is important. This matters. You wear that path into a groove. It becomes a thing you do, like brushing your teeth, or feeding your cats.
And consistent reading will reshape your attention, if you let it. When I am reading consistently, regularly, obsessively, I can focus. I can happily sit and read for hours. When I’m not, I can’t. My focus is apparently a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. When I’m not reading much, my brain becomes a slurry of games I want to play and things I want to do and chores un-done and tasks and bills and shoulds. It’s a mess in there. It’s like the worst social media feed. Housework! Errand! Work! Cat, what are you doing?!! Laundry? Nachos! Lather, rinse, repeat.
There are a million things you can read if you just want to learn about the power of habit, and I don’t want to belabor the point. Habits are hard to form and easy to break. And if you, like me, are a person who has always read—the classic reader of cereal boxes, of outside-your-genre novels that were the only thing to hand in a friend’s house, of anything and everything you could get your hands on—it can feel strange to consider that even we can fall out of the habit of reading. How is that possible? I read things all day long! Even I have argued that everything counts as reading!
But some reading is different from other reading. I want to read books, not Bluesky. (No offense, Bluesky.) I want to read and retain what I’ve read; I want to read and make connections. I want to let lines light up in my head as I remember other books that a new book might be in conversation with. I want one book to lead me to the next like an unbroken row of stones on which I can hop over a river. (The river is my social media feeds, maybe.) I want to nibble away at the TBR pile and find surprises I don’t remember buying. I want the obsessive reader’s impossible feeling: to be caught up.
Just kidding. That never happens. The books are infinite.
The more intentional I am about reading, the better I am at it. The less-obsessive reader in my household has also found this to be true; he decided to spend some of his evenings reading, this year, and has made his way through more books so far this year than in all of last year. This isn’t a chore. It’s a choice.
Unlike some habits, this one is fairly easy to pick back up again when I have fallen out of it. If I have not done [insert exhausting but necessary exercise here] in some time, it is hard as hell to get back on that horse. I don’t want to! I’m bad at it! I’m inflexible or wimpy or just don’t want to lie on the floor! Whereas if I haven’t read, I just have to wade through the brain slurry and pick a book. Any book. Let the slurry brain have what it chooses. Sometimes the slurry brain knows best. When I start reading, whatever it is I’ve chosen, things smooth out. My attention span, which may have been in pieces on the floor, reconstructs itself. The spinny hamster wheel in my brain slows. Reading, at its best, brings me back to myself.
At the moment, between reading tasks, I have been skipping among books for over a week, bouncing from first chapter (Emily Bitto’s The Strays) to first chapter (Andrea Hairston’s The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays) instead of just settling down with one book. It feels terrible. But it’s me. It’s not the books. I took a break from my sustained, focused practice of reading, and now I’m chaotic and unfocused, hitting reload on waste-of-time websites over and over again and getting obsessed with unnecessary internet games (I resisted the siren song of Spelling Bee for so long).
There is one thing to do about this: Pick a book. Sit down with it. And read.
When I was younger, I read a lot. Like, get up in the morning, read a book on the bus on the way to work, read on my lunch break, read on the bus on the way home, then settle in for a nice evening of reading in my recliner, ideally with the cat on my lap. Then came Netflix and computer games, and at some point I realized that even though I thought of myself as a reader, I wasn’t actually reading all that much any more. (Well, relative to my earlier self, at least.) So I started making a concerted effort to set aside at least one evening/week for reading.
These days I do almost all of my reading on Kindle, and a lot of it happens when I’m out & about — I actually find it much easier to focus when I’m, e.g., sitting in a bar with my Kindle and Guinness, or sitting in a theater waiting for a concert to begin, than when I’m at home surrounded by all of my other distraction machines.