You Can Learn to Read Books Again
some tips to help
This is an edited and expanded version of something I posted in January 2023 for paid subscribers under the title “How I Got Part of My Brain Back”. It has lots of pictures, so if your email client doesn’t handle it well, go to the Substack website and look for “You Can Learn to Read Books Again” with a posting date of February 18, 2024.
Are You A Former Bookworm?
Something I consistently hear, from both real-friends and acquaintances and friends of the online-only variety, is that they used to read books all the time. Some combination of adult responsibilities and the attention-fragmenting ubiquity of smartphones seems to have stolen their attention span, and they can’t remember the last time they read a whole book.
There are apparently millions of former child-bookworms walking around who haven’t cracked a book in years.
I know how horrifying and embarrassing it is to admit this, even if just to the person in the mirror. It feels like a terrible failure—an admission that a previous version of oneself was smarter, more intellectually engaged, more able to concentrate, more of an adult.
I won’t pretend that I’m not still addicted to distraction on some level. I suspect most of us are, and I’m certainly still one to have Star Trek or other comfort viewing streaming on a separate monitor while I do tedious tasks that require no real thought, put away the laundry, or clean my apartment.
But it’s so much better than it used to be; I consistently read at least two or three books a month now, often as many as five, and have for over a year.
Here’s what worked for me, to fix it.
Tip Zero: Definitions
Before I say what helped me with this, I should define what I mean by “reading.” I mean one of two situations: either a device showing a Kindle app—and only a Kindle app—with, at most, emergency notifications allowed and everything else turned off, or holding a physical book in my hands, and giving it my full attention. What is full attention? Primarily, a series of nots — not listening to music, having a conversation, looking at my phone, streaming a video on the extra monitor, or otherwise doing anything else at all (except walking on a treadmill or riding an exercise bike, both of which I allow myself).
Tip One: Start Small
This meme has so much truth in it, I’m almost tempted to get it tattooed on my body to remember its power:
In his wonderful book, Atomic Habits, James Clear tells the story of a man who went to the gym every day for a long time, but allowed himself to stay for only five minutes. Whether he felt like going or not, he went; whether he felt like staying longer or not, he stayed for five minutes.
The man was creating a habit. He was casting votes for a future version of himself that never skipped workouts. He started by setting the bar so low that it was never an enormous challenge to clear it.
This required so much humility, hunger, patience, and self-knowledge that I desperately hope to meet the man one day, and thank him.
His story has been profoundly helpful to me.
Applying the lesson taught in Atomic Habits, I started very slowly. I read for ten minutes once a day and that was all. It started off very difficult, a chore I procrastinated until it was the last thing left to mark off my to-do list for the day.
This resistance surprised me, since I spent most of my childhood desperately loving books. What the hell was I so afraid of? But I was clearly afraid of something, since I consistently procrastinated it to the last ten minutes of my day.
Gradually, this shifted. I stopped procrastinating it, getting to it over my lunch most days. Then I started enjoying it a bit more and made it part of my mornings.
When I started to deeply enjoy the ten minutes (even if part of me was glad when the timer sounded), I increased it to twenty minutes.
I followed this pattern for a couple of months, until I was up to forty minutes a day, and found that I was naturally waking up a bit earlier, eager to get to my book.
Then something happened.
Perhaps the old grooves in my brain from when I was a kid re-activated themselves. Perhaps it was simply a gift from the universe. Perhaps something else entirely.
Whatever it was, a switch flipped in my brain and I was able to read and enjoy books in much the same manner I did as a kid. No more need for a timer, no more having to try. Long periods of absorption, characters following me to bed and appearing in my dreams, one book reminding me of another and sending me to read the next one.
I am so grateful for this; I feel like I won some sort of visit from a spirit. The Ghost of Pleasures Past returned and gave me back something I thought I had lost forever.
It was a long couple of months and I felt stupid during quite a lot of it, but I’m so grateful that I persisted.
Tip Two: Figure Out What Format Works For You
You know your life best. If you think you can trick your resisting brain into letting you read books best from your phone, especially at first, then do that. The Kindle app allows you to read Kindle books from your phone, iPad or other tablet, or desktop, even if you don’t own a Kindle. Here are some pictures to illustrate. (I do not own a Kindle device and never have). The Kindle app is on a separate space, a screen where it’s the only app open and accessible—something that most computers are able to do these days. Here’s a link explaining how to do it on a Mac.
Why I Prefer Paper Books
We are organic beings, and it’s simply comforting and soothing to hold a paper book in your hands. Having said that, I often get Kindle copies of books I regard as comfort reading or simply “fun” reading, so that I can dip in for brief periods, like standing in line, or read in dark mode on my phone in the middle of a sleepless night.
Tip Two And A Half: Get Some Fun Accessories To Help
Book Darts let you mark a line on a page, and a book page holder provides an easy method to hold a book comfortably in one hand.
Tip Three: Choose Fun Stuff, Especially To Start
Trashy biographies (Prince Harry’s is really interesting) or long, engrossing mysteries are a way to stack the deck in your favor. If you normally read celebrity gossip online, then an autobiography from a frequent subject of such is a great way to get yourself back into reading.
Likewise, if you’re used to reading the internet all day but not books, there are some great ways to exploit that to help yourself read books again. J.K. Rowling’s novel, The Ink-Black Heart (published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith), is about a private detective agency hired to find a Twitter troll who may or may not be a murderer. It’s full of tweets, retweets, quote tweets, direct messages, Discord-type chat logs, and other such online ephemera as the detectives engross themselves in this world in order to understand it and find the troll.
It’s 1,018 pages, and I read every bit of it with total attention, doing nothing else at all except, sometimes, walking on a treadmill. And it was great fun. I reviewed it here.
Choose something you already enjoy to help you get back in the habit. There are myriad Star Trek novels available, including autobiographies of James T. Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard, Kathryn Janeway, Spock, and Benjamin Sisko, all of which are excellent.
Tip Four: Find Someone to Talk To About Your Books
My therapist is very tolerant of my showing up with a book and reading a passage or two (or five) to him, as long as I can tie it to my therapeutic goals in some way. Luckily, he accepts “this gives me an intuition that there’s a lesson in it for me to help me understand myself but I don’t quite consciously grasp it yet” as an acceptable tie.
Tip Five: Control Distractions as Fully as Possible
When I started to read in the mornings, I got into the habit of turning my computer off at night, not merely putting it to sleep. The small obstacle of needing to turn it on and put in my password to get back to the world of the internet (at least, the world with multiple monitors and browser tabs; obviously phones are just as big of a problem) was very helpful.
Tip Six: Use Reading to Procrastinate Other Things
This may be the truest statement I know: “Anyone can do anything, provided it’s not what they’re supposed to be doing at that moment.”
What is something you should be doing but you don’t really want to do?
Procrastinate it by reading instead.
Tip Seven: Use the Ramp Method
This is another version of Tip One, but it bears repeating. A little bit of reading isn’t a little bit better than no reading—it’s significantly better. Start small and gradually build up, like a ramp. Go as slow as you need to. It’s worth it.
About My Substack: I’m a data scientist who would rather be a math teacher but, being unwilling to brainwash kids into Woke nonsense, am presently unqualified to teach in the US. So I bring my “math is fun and anyone can learn it” approach to mathematics here to Substack in my series, “How to Not Suck at Math,” (first five entries not paywalled, links at the top of part 5, here). Paid subscribers also have access to a creative writing series in which I post a variety of things, including fiction, descriptions, and other “writing experiments,” along with personal stories that don’t relate to Larger Points I Want To Make About The World.
My other posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews, including of the Wokest novel I’ve ever read and a memoir by Rob Henderson. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
I have never been able to read books on an electronic device. It just doesn’t seem the same as holding a real book in your hands. Obviously for reasons such as room requirements for storage, etc, electronic media might be preferable but…
The biggest thing for me was changing the kind of books I read. When I was younger I read almost exclusively SciFi and fantasy. I don't know it if those genres have gotten worse or they just don't interest me but I can barely get through any SciFi and pretty much no fantasy books now. History is usually what I have no problem with. And since I'm a middle aged man, it's mostly WW2 history. (I don't think I've ever been more stereotypical).