On Cultivating a Reading Habit
Last updated: May 6, 2024
Categories: reading
Many of you might be familiar with this story: when I was a kid, I loved reading. I burned through a book a day. I read Wuthering Heights at age 13. (I don’t pretend that I comprehended it.) I was one of the most avid readers in my class. And then, in my late teens and early adulthood, I fell victim to the short attention span of the Internet, the demands of college and my job, and the general chaos and busyness of a century flooded with more information than any of our brains can handle. I stopped being able to focus on a book for more than a few minutes at a time. I found myself reaching for my phone, craving the stimulation and immediate gratification of scrolling through my social media feeds. The call of my screen was always louder.
This has happened to many of us. Even though I knew this was a familiar story, it was emotionally difficult for me. Being a reader had, and continues to be, a core part of my identity. I had gone from reading multiple books a week to barely managing a book a month, and only with immense effort. Besides, I was just too busy and too exhausted by every other part of my life to devote myself to reading like I once had.
In 2022, I graduated from college and began working full-time. I now had a 9-5, which meant I had a specific time I stopped working and started having my own time, something I didn’t have when I was a student. When you’re a student, you are a student 24/7. Every minute I spent reading was time I could have spent studying, or applying for internships, or doing my extracurriculars, or so on and so forth. I was now letting myself have hobbies that weren’t work-related or school-related again. (I acknowledge this wasn’t a healthy perspective on being a student, but alas, that was how I survived undergrad.) So this seemed like the ideal time to resurrect my reading habit.
At first, it was a bit torturous. Imagine you never do more exercise than walking around your college campus, and you find yourself training for a marathon. Knowing myself and how my brain works, I set a quantitative goal and tracked lots of data. To motivate myself, I needed concrete tangible proof that I was making progress. I downloaded Bookly, a reading tracking app, to log all my reading sessions.
At first, I could barely read for more than 5-10 minutes at a time. But I didn’t beat myself up over it. I would read for what time I could manage stop when it became too difficult, and then return at a later time to rinse and repeat. If you can manage several 5-10 minute sessions a day, that’s still a lot of progress.
And it did become easier over time to read for longer stretches. After a while, when I became more secure in my ability to keep reading and had seen all the books I’d finished, I stopped relying on Bookly for reassurance I was in fact devoting more time and effort to reading.
In 2022, I finished 83 books (25,909 pages). In 2023, I finished 93 (26,835 pages). In 2024, I made the conscious choice to read less, for a number of reasons:
- I was not leaving myself enough time for other hobbies, and I do want to do other things besides read.
- I didn’t want to get too hung up on quantitative measures. Better 12 books I’ve devoted a lot of critical thinking and analysis to than 93 I’ve only thought about a surface level, right? I wanted to get more out of each individual book I was reading, and spend less time optimizing for speed and quantity.
1) is not something I’m currently worrying about in itself. Decreasing time spent reading does not inherently make for time spent doing other things, as my neglected sewing machine can tell you. 2) I’ve been thinking a little more about. Andy Matuschak mentions the most effective people he knows don’t take notes. I’ve tried to be more thoughtful about reading by taking notes. Many times. It is torturous, the habit does not stick, and I never find myself referring back to them. And yet, I would hardly say I don’t get much out of reading. I think very critically about every book I read quite a lot, even if I don’t remember it to the level of detail a diligent note-taker would. One of the most useful things about reading a lot is the ability to connect texts to other texts. Simply reading a book in a vacuum is not something I find very useful. Reading lots of books, however, has allowed me to synthesize and weave a lot of mental connections in the bigger picture they form in my brain.
Part of this dilemma is—how much do I need to get out of each individual book I read, really? Some books I just don’t think I get much out of. I also don’t necessarily think I need to optimize for this. As Tamsyn Muir puts it:
This ties in with an idea that I think nowadays that good art is moral and bad art is immoral: i.e. if a story is bad it actually has to be because the lessons are bad, and if a story is good it must somehow be beautiful on the moral scale. We go looking for why the art we love is moral even if the art we love is a donut. I think this is the pressure of capitalism on time – that everything has to double or triple up in benefit compared to the time we take on it: if we’re prepared to waste eight hours on a book we had better be able to tot up at the end how that book was also feeding us in some way. That’s brand time we just used.
Can’t we just enjoy stories? Which has led me to spend a lot of time pondering the question: Why do I read?
I just answered it for myself, of course, which is “because I enjoy it.” This is true, but perhaps a little simplistic for me. I don’t enjoy reading a heartwarming, “cozy” Becky Chambers novel the same way I enjoy reading about the gruesome horrors of late 20th-century Argentina in Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, and I don’t enjoy either of them the same way I enjoy reading nonfiction books about design and technology. It would raise some eyebrows to say I enjoyed reading, for example, Beloved or Lolita, although I think that depends on your definition of “enjoy.” But even if a book isn’t “enjoyable,” there’s still plenty of reasons I’d read it.
In the tech sphere, where people typically read nonfiction books on tech and productivity and business, it seems like people read to learn information. The overwhelming majority of what I read is fiction—although I do want to read more nonfiction in the future!—so I can’t say this is why I read, although it is one of many reasons. A couple other reasons:
- To cultivate empathy. Elaine Castillo’s essay “Reading Teaches Us Empathy, and Other Fictions” actually has some great arguments on exactly why we should not read to cultivate empathy. Nonetheless, some of my reading has been useful for this (and as a user experience designer, empathy is a particularly important quality). This is particularly important when you’re a child and haven’t seen much of the world.
- To learn more about the world both inside and outside of my immediate bubble.
- To activate the imagination.
- To inspire my own creative practice as a writer, designer, and artist.
- To be a more interesting person. Reading a lot gives you a lot to talk about with other people.
- To work through my own thoughts and feelings. Who among us, for example, has not read a book about a situation/circumstance similar to one they’re currently going through in hopes this will help them better understand themselves? This is certainly part of my interest in Asian diasporic literature.