
I started reading John Stuart Mill's *Autobiography* this week, and it's terrific. Mill had a unique childhood filled with self-education and, you guessed it–reading! He writes:

> He [his father] not only drew my attention to the insight they afforded into Athenian institutions, and the principles of legislation and government which they often illustrated, but pointed out the skill and art of the orator—how everything important to his purpose was said at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his audience into the state most fitted to receive it; how he made steal into their minds, gradually and by insinuation, thoughts which, if expressed in a more direct manner, would have roused their opposition. **Most of these reflections were beyond my capacity of full comprehension at the time; but they left seed behind, which germinated in due season** (Emphasis mine).

That's a profound idea. Just because you read something beyond your "capacity of full comprehension" doesn't mean you aren't learning or getting something out of it. Seeds are being deposited, which, in due time, will sprout.

Those seeds won't germinate, though, if they aren't watered, rooted in good soil, and given the proper amount of sunlight. I may be over-extending the analogy here (I don't think I am), but without Mill's continued learning, the seeds he and his father planted at a young age would’ve never germinated. What he learned later in life allowed him to put greater context into what he read when he was younger. Without reading challenging works at a young age, his education may not have been as fruitful and advanced as it was when he was older. Without continuing to read challenging works when he got older, he may have never understood what he read when he was younger. It’s a feedback loop. As you read more, you begin to understand how little you know. As you continue to read more, those blindspots get back-filled, and knowledge begins to compound. You may be studying something for ten years, but nothing clicks until you finally read something that brings it all together in the eleventh. That’s the magic (and the difficulty) with compounding–all the big results are always at the end.

So, keep reading things above your “grade level.” It might not all make sense today, but it will if you keep reading and learning. When that happens, people will wonder how you got so smart. When they ask that, you know your compounding has started paying off. (But don’t let this fool you into thinking you’ve arrived. There’s still a lot you probably don’t know!)


“You may not understand everything you read now, but you will one day.”

Reading plants seeds

After starting [Foundation](https://twitter.com/dltnio/status/1665743018257793024?s=20) on Apple TV (I’m late, I know), I became interested in Isaac Asimov. I had a vague idea that he was an influential writer, but for what and why, I was ignorant.

Turns out, he’s fascinating.

When I want to learn about something or someone, like any great scholar, I [use Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov).

Here’s his analysis of the insanity that is being a full-time writer:

> [T]he only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes.
> 

In [an interview in 1975](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUz_KkibYAs), after being asked about the sheer absurdity of the fact that Asimov is afraid of airplanes even though he writes about going to the ends of the earth, he drops an incredible line:

> I don't like to travel, it keeps me away from my typewriter.
> 

Earlier in the same interview, he says:

> What it amounts to [being able to write so much], is that I’m not happy except when I’m writing. It’s almost the only way I can think of to spend my time pleasantly, and so I’m naturally drawn to the typewriter at all times. The day is lost in which I don’t type.
> 

His writing style is focused on simplicity, much to the dismay of science-fiction critics:

> I have an informal style, which means I tend to use short words and simple sentence structure, to say nothing of occasional colloquialisms. This grates on people who like things that are poetic, weighty, complex, and, above all, obscure. On the other hand, the informal style pleases people who enjoy the sensation of reading an essay without being aware that they are reading and of feeling that ideas are flowing from the writer's brain into their own without mental friction.
> 

Naturally, people wanted to know how one man was capable of writing over 200 books throughout his lifetime. In 1980, [David Letterman asked](https://youtu.be/365kJOsFd3w), “What kind of schedule do you put in to write that many books?”

> I get up in the morning, sit down and write, when I finish writing, go back to bed.
> 

Asimov not only understood the power of writing; he preached on the benefits of reading too. On March 16, 1971, he sent this letter congratulating the recipients on a new library:

![5692290321_36e10b9b35_o.webp](Isaac%20Asimov%20on%20writing%20and%20reading%20ba64171fc84d4195b08122826b364155/5692290321_36e10b9b35_o.webp)

“I don't like to travel, it keeps me away from my typewriter.”

Isaac Asimov on writing and reading

I don’t think there are any secrets to reading more other than just sitting down to read. 

Though that’s true, it’s not very actionable, and advice that isn’t actionable sucks.

So here are some things that have helped me read (and enjoy reading) a lot of books.

## If you have plenty of time to read but can’t focus, the book you’re reading is probably bad

I’ve heard this from a lot of people: “I want to read more, but I just can’t focus.” If that’s you, know you’re not alone. While I can’t diagnose the issue for sure, something that *might* be causing the problem is that you just don’t like the book. Some books are boring, dry, and not very fun to read. If that’s the case, yeah, it’s going to be hard to focus.

If you’ve ever sat through a movie, you know it’s *******possible******* for you to sit down and do something for an uninterrupted amount of time as long as you’re interested. Therefore, **you most likely don’t have a focus problem, you have a book selection problem.**

Ditch the boring book and pick up a new one! And another new one…and another new one…and another new one…until you find one that makes 60 minutes feel like ten.

## Quit more books

The biggest lie people believe about reading is that they can’t quit books. Hear it from me: you can! It’s perfectly okay to get a few chapters into a book and think, “Meh, this isn’t for me.” I do this all the time.

Life is too short to read boring books.

This is hard to do with books that signal status. It’s not hard to quit, but it’s hard to look at others and think, “Man they finished that book and liked it? I thought it was so boring! Maybe they’re smarter than me…” I know that’s hard to get over, but you have to try.

I tried reading ****************The Power Broker**************** because of how many people raved about it and I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t give it up completely, just put it back on the shelf for later. That’s hard to admit, but true. I probably quit around then books last year.

## If you have plenty of focus but can’t find the time, you’re probably wasting it somewhere

Something something we all have the same 24 hours in a day something something.

While that saying has become abused by people who #hustle every day, it’s still true.

How many hours a week do you spend watching TV? How many hours do you lose scrolling social media? How many hours dissipate into the ether because you don’t know what to do next?

If you want to spend an hour a day reading, you most likely have to ****quit**** doing something else for an hour. That’s just the way life is. (Or you can wake up earlier/stay up later. That’s okay too.)

### …but what if I’m not wasting time?

If you don’t feel like you’re wasting any time, good! What you need to do then is utilize the “spare change” more effectively.

Like finding [nickels and dimes in your couch](https://austinkleon.com/2013/12/29/something-small-every-day/), you need to find 10 or 15 minutes throughout the day to make progress on your reading goal. Austin Kleon puts it well, “People often ask me, ‘How do you find the time for the work?’ And I answer, ‘I look for it.’ You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies.”

Some people who want to read for an hour a day think they need an uninterrupted hour. While I recommend that (so you can get lost in the book easier), it’s not necessary, especially at first.

Read for the extra 10 minutes before a meeting or for 15 minutes on your lunch break. A good rule to follow is ***********anytime you don’t know what you should do next, read.*********** You might only get through a couple of pages, but that’s how all books are read: page by page.

## Read multiple books at the same time

Another good rule to follow is to always read three or four books at a time. This works because it makes reading for three hours in a row much more enjoyable. Instead of reading one book for three hours, you can read three books for an hour.

This also works because you’re never in the same “reading mood.” Sometimes you want something light and fun just to pass the time. Other times you want to read something long and important. Still others, you just want to read a good novel. So having a book to match each of these moods will help you read more.

If you’re only reading one book at a time and the reading mood you’re in doesn’t match the type of book you have, you won’t read at all.

Most people recommend reading a fiction book, a light non-fiction book, a heavy non-fiction book, and a biography or memoir all at the same time. I think that’s a good outline to follow until you realize what you truly love to read. I used to follow that, but now I just have a couple different biographies I’m reading at once, an instructional or how-to book, and a novel I read before bed or when I’m waiting in line somewhere. Currently I’m reading ******************The Wright Brothers, Genius, In Search of J.D. Salinger, Bird by Bird,****************** and **********************The Catcher in the Rye**********************.

## Make it an experience

Finally, make reading an **********experience**********. Having a book you can’t wait to finish helps (see number one), but it’s not the only thing you can control. What type of music you listen to, where you sit in your house (or at a coffee shop), and what beverage you have to consume are all things that can encourage you to read more.

If you love to have a beer or glass of wine every night to unwind, make a rule for yourself that you can only do so while reading a book. That way you pair something you love (having a beer) with something you want-to-love (reading).

## Sit down and read

While these tips have been helpful for me, remember, there is ********************no secret to reading******************** other than sitting down to read. You probably don’t need to watch a YouTube video teaching you how to read better (you can just start reading) or pay for an online course to learn how to read more (you can just start reading more).

Start with a physical magazine article (I like *************The Atlantic)************* or a poem if you have trouble committing to something as long as a book. There are also dozens of speeches and articles that contain unique insights and are less cumbersome to get through.

I hope these help. Happy reading.

PS If you’re looking for recommendations, I just finished *****************Novelist as a Vocation***************** by Haruki Murakami and loved it. (You can read my notes here.) ****Splendid and the Vile**** is good too. I have more [recommendations here](https://www.dltn.io/notes). You can visit [my company’s site for more](https://fs.blog/category/books/book-recommendations/) too.

How to read more (if you have trouble reading)

The world changed in 1436.

Thanks to the brilliance of a German engineer, the long-held belief that knowledge was reserved for the upper echelon of society was shattered thanks to the printing press. Knowledge now belonged to the common man. Entertainment was available to the miner's wife, the corn farmer, and just about everyone else.

The world changed in the 1920s.

Combining magnets and wires in an unusual way, people discovered they could send voices and music across the plains. Radio shows became something people looked forward to. The sound of banjoes and twang reverberated through the South, saxophones, and trumpets in the North. The news was available almost instantaneously. Radio was born.

The world changed again in the 1950s.

Sound was now accompanied by moving pictures on a little box. The news was delivered even faster. People started to fall in love with actors.

Again the world changed during the 1990s with the adoption of the internet and yet again in the 2000s with social media.

It's changing still today with artificial intelligence and virtual reality. But with all these changes, did things actually get better? Did we become smarter? Are we able to solve problems more intelligently? Probably. But what have we lost in all of this? 

Under the conditions of 24/7 news cycles, dopamine-inducing videos, and an infinite amount of information available at the end of your fingertips, reading a complex book and engaging with it intelligently is now an act of defiance. People are amazed when they hear that I buy two or three books per week but seem to think it's normal to binge entire seasons of Grey's Anatomy in a single day.

The technical revolution has inhibited us from maintaining deep literacy.

Deep literacy, as defined by Adam Garfinkle is '[engaging with] an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning.' Henry Kissinger, writing about the attributes of deep literacy in *Leadership,* puts it best when he writes:

> To the politically concerned, deep literacy supplies the quality Max Weber called 'proportion,' or 'the ability to allow realities to impinge on you while maintaining an inner calm and composure. Intense reading can help leaders cultivate the mental distance from external stimuli and personalities that sustains a sense of proportion. When combined with reflection and the training of memory, it also provides a storehouse of detailed and granular knowledge from which leaders can reason analogically...**Books record the deeds of leaders who once dared greatly, as well as those who dared too much, as a warning.**

When you read about the tragedies experienced during the World Wars, your daily problems are put into perspective. Having a delay at the subway doesn't seem to be the end of the world when in the 1900s there were people your age being shipped off to sea to fight for freedom or starving and freezing in concentration camps. Taking a vaccine or having to take a sick day doesn't seem to be quite the inconvenience when you know hundreds of thousands of people--sometimes even whole towns--were killed off due to the epidemic of different cases of the flu.

When you read philosophy written in AD 150 that seems to resonate just as accurate now as it did then, you understand your problems aren't as unique as you might think. People have been struggling to get out of a warm bed for 2000 years (and probably even longer than that). Humans have always struggled with maintaining their composure under stress, regulating their emotions when they want to strike revenge, or dealing with heartbreak from jealousy or death. When you read, your eyes are opened to the truth that there really is *nothing* new under the sun.

Or at least, that's why I read.

I read because nowhere else can you learn the inner workings of the human psyche quite like reading a great novel. I read because nowhere else are the thoughts of the UK Prime Minister during World War 2 recalled than in his six-volume set of memoirs.

**I read because it connects me with someone who once lived before teaching me how to live now.**

Why do you read?

Why I Read

Tyler Cowen has easily risen to to the top of my "thinkers I like" list. There's probably no one else I know of today that I look at and think, "I want to be exactly like them when I grow up" other than Tyler Cowen. His curisoity and breadth of knowledge is amazing.

Part of that knowledge stems from reading. And reading a lot. Here's some advice:

- > People don’t read enough, and I think as a society we’re under-investing in reading. People feel compelled to finish books they’ve started – that’s just a tax on your reading. Why would you do that to yourself? Imagine a world where any restaurant you tried you had to keep on going there for days or weeks, you’d hardly ever go out to eat.

- > So I advocate reading books in cluster – the author can be the clustering factor, it can be the topic, it can be the historical period – but you really get into a person’s mind if you re-read everything they’ve done within the span of a few weeks or months, and then watch them on YouTube, and just try to think about and write out notes, “What am I going to ask them?” One of the very best ways to read is to have your own podcasy.

- > So the way you read well is just by reading a lot, and by reading a lot your whole life. And then when you go to read actual books you’re like “I know that, I know that, I know that,” and you keep on going, and you read much more quickly. And that’s really the way to read a lot. There are these compounding returns to being obsessed with reading, and starting young, and never stopping.

Read more [reading advice from Tyler Cowen here.](https://www.driverlesscrocodile.com/books-and-recommendations/tyler-cowen-on-reading-fast-reading-well-and-reading-widely/#:~:text=The%20important%20thing%20is%20to,that%20no%2Done%20reads%20quickly.)

Reading advice from Tyler Cowen

Key Insights
------------

### Books allow you to enter an invisible world

"When you first open a book, you enter a liminal space. You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book, nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward). To some extent this polydimensionality describes the feeling of reading in general--one is in many places at once."

### Not all books can be read the same way

"If books were like roads, some would be made for driving quickly--details are scant, and what details are there appear drab--but the velocity and torque of the narrative is exhilarating. Some books, if seen as roads, would be made for walking--the trajectory of the road mattering far less that the vistas these roads might afford."

This description of books really hit home for me. I think it helps me solidify the fact that not every books can be read the same way, and that's okay! Some books need time to read and absorb the information. Others, you can zip right through without having to think twice about it.

### The Eye-Voice Span

The distance between where ones eyes are looking on a page and where , on the page, one's inner voice is reading.

### Reading is not a series of sequential "nows"

"Past, present, and future are interwoven in each conscious moment--and in the performative reading moment as well. Each fluid interval comprises an admixture of: the memory of things read (past), the experience of consciousness "now" (present), and the anticipation of things to be read (future).

This is evident in how we picture fictional characters. Some books open with the description of characters, like *Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood*. But most of the time, we learn a little about a character at a time and add that to a "picasso-esque" image in our minds of what we think the character looks like, updating it with each bit of information.

### All good books are mysteries

"At heart, all good books are mysteries. Authors withhold information. This information may be revealed over time. This is one reason we bother to turn a book's pages. A book my be a literal mystery, like *Murder on the Orient Express*, or a metaphysical mystery, like *Moby Dick*, or a mystery of purely architectonic kind--a chronoptic mystery, like *The Odyssey*.

### A description can be a rank or purpose (in a book and in life)

If you're reading a mystery novel and a character is introduced with a mustache, as a reader, you draw assumptions about that characters role in the book. Descriptions, therefore, can be a rank and a purpose.

"[Descriptions] tell the readers whether they are dealing with a pawn, a rook or a bishop."

This happens in life too. We draw assumptions about co-workers, strangers, and friends based on their appearance until we get to know them for who they actually are. People who are obsessed with playing "the game of life" will treat bishops and rooks much different than they do pawns, to their [the person who treats people differently based on their assumed "status"] detriment of course.

### A great author is able to 'bear witness' of reality well

"When we remark that a novel is 'finely observed,' we are praising the writer's ability to bear witness. This bearing witness is composed of two acts: the author's initial observation in the real world, and then the translation of that observation into prose. The more 'finely observed' the text, the better we readers recognize the thing or event in question."

### Readers perform their books

"We perform a book--we perform a reading of a book. We perform a book, and we attend the performance. As readers, we are both the conductor of the orchestra, as well as the audience."

### On Imagination

"Imagination is a turning-away from the mind-independent world. Imagination, you could say, is like an "inward eye."

### Words work like keys, unlocking something special in the reader

"Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words 'contain' meaning, but, more important, words potentiate (increase the power or likelihood of) meaning..."

Written by a creative director, this book takes you through the ups and downs of, as the title suggests, what you see when you read. It's an interesting book with some neat ideas, but I felt it never came together. Maybe that's the point of the book, but I felt Mendelsund was trying to communicate how important it is we be aware of where the pictures in our minds come from when we read, but he never said that so directly.