How To Read More Books

trenchant.org · by adam mathes · archive · rss

December 30, 2024

In 2024, I read about a book a week.

To read more books:

  1. get some books
  2. read those books

It is that simple, if you want it to be.

As 2023 ended, I wanted time away from the Internet.

I decided that reading more books would be a better use of that time and rebuild abilities to concentrate and focus that seem to have waned. And maybe answer the question of why I wanted this time away from the Internet.

Answering the wrong question

Some questions you already know the answer to. Some questions you find answers, but you asked the wrong question.

After some months and books and clarity of thought – I didn’t want time away from the Internet.

The Internet is amazing, and I wouldn’t have the quality of life I have without it or its impacts on my life in nearly every facet.

But I find it challenging now, and I have other important things in my life competing for time.

There’s a lot of energy expended to create highly optimized material on the Internet, but generally that optimization isn’t for helping us grow or learn or be more content. The things it usually gets optimized for (like engagement) are often at odds with those.

What I wanted was time away from some Internet activities that are bad – defined as things that consume my time and provide negative value.

Next Question

Why spend time on things that are bad? What is it about the structure of modern communications and technology and the world that has led to this?

What is it about me? Or humans? Or the modern world? Lots of potential answers. Some of those are interesting ideas to think and read about.

But the question is wrong. It doesn’t really matter.

What matters is to stop wasting time with that. The important question is what to spend more time on.

Fewer Bad Things, More Good Things

At the start of the year, I wrote a list of things that are important and I wanted to find more time for, things that are fun but not important that I should limit time on, and things that are bad I want to eliminate. It was something like this:

Important - dedicate more time

Fun but not important - limit time

Not fun and not important - eliminate

Turns out some of that stuff took up more time than I thought. I feel better without it. And it freed up time to read more interesting book-length treatments of topics.

You know you can just block Twitter, right? You don’t ever have to go there again if you don’t want to. Or Reddit or any other social media site or the like.

Time emerges when you eliminate low-quality noise. That time adds up.

Books are great

It didn’t take long to feel viscerally again that reading is great. Books as a class of media are great, regardless of the individual quality of any one book.

Most of what I read was accessible with my library card. It’s easy to forget how radical and revolutionary and historically new the concept of access to high-quality texts is.

The public library system is a treasure. And most have pretty good digital options now if you don’t want to leave the house.

Due to aphantasia, I read and enjoy non-fiction more than fiction, so this year was all non-fiction for me.

If you want to know what I’m reading, you can follow along at adammathes.com/reading.

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