You Should Read More—and Better—Books

My guide to acquiring a habit of reading great books

Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash

My friend and colleague Riley Fletcher recently wrote about his experience reading My Struggle, a six-part quasi-autobiography by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. Knausgaard is widely considered one of the best living writers, and My Struggle has received high praise from critics across the globe. Riley explained that his experience with My Struggle “just about destroyed my reading habit” because “by the time I finished, I didn’t really want to read anything else.”

I sympathize with this . . . uh . . . struggle. When I come across a book that really captures me, such as Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, the book I read and reviewed most recently for The Dispatch, I often find that the next few books I read don’t quite live up to what I was expecting. Indeed, having a book stick with you for some time after you’ve read it is a mark of its greatness. However, among the things I am known for is my voracious appetite for reading. I am not one of those freaks who reads 100 books per year (that’s almost two books per week, people!), but I am consistently reading something, even if the book in question isn’t my favorite. I read a wide variety of books, from literary classics to contemporary nonfiction, but I have recently tried to shift my consumption to more demanding—and, usually, rewarding—works.

So in this newsletter, I wanted to present a few strategies to reading more—and reading better. My hope is that because of this post my friend Riley will find it within himself to re-engage in his previously consistent reading habit, but also that casual book readers may be inspired to up their game a bit.

1. Make reading part of your daily routine

If you want to be a reader of books, you need to do it consistently. That is easy enough to say but much harder to actually do. You will not actually read consistently unless the act of reading is part of what you do every day.

I have always been a reader, but previously I read more sporadically than consistently. I would read a bit before bed and then would spend hours at a time on weekends reading, and when I finished a book I would often not pick up another one for a week or more. It wasn’t until my junior year of college that I made reading a serious part of my routine. I haven’t stopped since.

I have found that the best time to read is during breakfast. Depending on how much time you have before you begin working, you can easily read for half an hour per day while enjoying your breakfast and coffee. If you get up early enough, you can read for even longer. You can even find enough time to read during breakfast after you’ve worked out. My morning routine features a 45-minute commute, at least 30 minutes of exercising, and about 15 minutes of showering and getting dressed. Even with that hour and a half of non-reading time, I still find an hour or more each day to read while I’m eating breakfast. (If you find yourself objecting on the grounds that you don’t have enough time, think again. You almost certainly just need to change your priorities.)

The best part of making reading part of your routine is that it starts to feel like you can’t go without it. When I find myself without enough time to read during breakfast, I get irritable. It doesn’t ruin my day, but I do get disappointed every time I think about it. The same is true when I miss a workout. If reading is part of what you do every day, it becomes part of who you are.

2. Don’t just read before bed

The most obvious part of your day to find a chunk of reading time is before you go to sleep. Instead of watching that extra episode of Love Is Blind, turn in early and read until you get too tired to continue. But don’t expect this new routine to be enough. Especially if you are reading something that’s dense or philosophical or character-driven, you will find yourself nodding off within five to 10 minutes. Then you will struggle to keep your eyes open, and the dreams into which you are trying to escape will burst through your subconscious and affect what you are reading. This is a recipe for making slow and unsatisfying progress through your book. If you only read, on average, 10 minutes per night, then you will only get through three to five pages per night. If your book is 200 pages, it will take you 40 days, at the very least, to get through that one book. If all the books you read are 200 pages, then you will read between nine and 10 books per year.

If you find this to be a satisfying pace, or if you are consistently capable of reading for half an hour or more before bed, then forget everything I said in my previous paragraph. But I suspect that most people who just try to read before bed will find themselves in a similar scenario to the one I just described. It’s a great idea to read before bed, but it is not sufficient to become a consistent reader.

3. Put away your phone

Smartphones are the most time-wasting technology ever invented, with the possible exception of the television. Americans spend at least seven hours on their screens every day. Of course, there are productive things you can do on your smartphone, such as reading and answering emails or reading the news. But we all know that most of the time we spend on our smartphones is idle, whether it’s browsing recipes or scrolling on TikTok. If you’re spending more than 10 minutes at a time on your phone, especially if you’re using social media during those times, consider instead reading a book.

Most people, even the very productive or busy ones, find themselves with idle time throughout their day. They usually fill that time by staring at their screens, if only to do something mindless before confronting the next task that requires cognitive effort. I see this every day on the bus and Metro: scores of people packed like sardines on public transportation with faces bent toward their smartphones and blank looks on their faces. As the journalist Sam Kriss recently described on his Substack,

After a while without my phone, I started to really notice how much everyone else was staring at theirs. On public transport in particular. Every adult is sitting there, pushing around coloured squares and popping coloured bubbles. They are playing with toys for babies. Now look at their faces. These people are not being entertained. They’re not having fun. They are turning their brains off while they wait.

Instead of turning your brain off while you wait for whatever comes next, try reading a book. If the book is good enough, in all likelihood the time will go by faster. And you will be able to feel accomplished for doing something productive rather than spending another half-hour zoning out and fueling up on dopamine hits.

4. Read classic books

Now that I have made you feel bad for not reading enough, let me make you feel bad about not reading the right types of books. Personally, I think that reading something is better than reading nothing (there are different schools of thought on this subject), but ultimately I think you should read better books than the ones you are currently reading.

To some extent, “better” is in the eye of the beholder. But I think most people would agree that, say, War and Peace is better than anything written by James Patterson or Colleen Hoover. As a rule of thumb, classic books—for simplicity’s sake, anything that has made its way into a Penguin Classics or a Barnes & Noble Classics edition—is going to be a good book. Classic books have stood the test of time because they have enraptured readers for decades, centuries, or (in some cases) millennia. And these books are often the ones that people who know a lot about books talk about often.

There are, of course, more modern books that are critically acclaimed. But I have found that the average quality of such books is much lower than that of the classics. (I wrote a separate Substack about my disappointment in contemporary fiction.) Therefore, I prefer to read books that have been around for longer.

But where to begin?

5. Start with the books you were supposed to read in high school

Nobody, not even people who read consistently, likes the books they read in high school. (I liked them, but I don’t know many others who did.) I think this is because people don’t like to read things they are forced to read. It’s a shame that this is the case, because the books you were supposed to read in high school are generally pretty good. In 10th grade, for instance, we read Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, both by John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath is widely considered one of the best American novels ever written. (Of Mice and Men is also quite good, but it does not make the same “best ever” lists.) This principle holds for a lot, if not most, of the books that are commonly on high-school reading lists—A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell; the list is nearly endless. Such books are nearly always more interesting when you read them after high school, and they are like a gateway drug to reading more sophisticated fiction.

6. Keep your mind open about what makes for a good book

When we talk about “good” books, we often mean that their plots are propulsive, that they keep us reading and interested, that they are “page-turners.” These adjectives apply to books that are heavily plot-driven. Masters of plot, like Stephen King and John Grisham, make money hand over fist by writing books that quicken the pulse of readers, capturing their attention by ending chapters on cliff-hangers and unraveling mysteries first slowly, then all at once. So if you are a reader of such “low-brow” fiction, you are conditioned to expect the books you read to sustain your attention like a Mission Impossible movie does.

Oftentimes, though, the really great books are not driven primarily by plot. There are some important exceptions, and it may be best for the timid but curious reader to begin by reading books that are renowned for their plot. But some of the best books ever written are regarded so highly because of the way their authors write the characters. For instance, the book that has been at the top of my list since I read it is Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Not a ton actually happens throughout the novel. Here is the Britannica summary (with spoilers) of the plot:

The narrative centres on the adulterous affair between Anna, wife of Aleksey Karenin, and Count Vronsky, a young bachelor. Karenin’s discovery of the liaison arouses only his concern for his own public image. Anna promises discretion for the sake of her husband and young son but eventually becomes pregnant by Vronsky. After the child is born, Anna and the child accompany Vronsky first to Italy and then to his Russian estate. She begins making furtive trips to see her older child and grows increasingly bitter toward Vronsky, eventually regarding him as unfaithful. In desperation she goes to the train station, purchases a ticket, and then impulsively throws herself in front of the incoming train. A parallel love story, involving the difficult courtship and fulfilling marriage of Kitty and Levin, provides a rich counterpoint to the tragedy and is thought to reflect Tolstoy’s own marital experience.

Of course, there is intrigue and scandal throughout the book, but if you were to read the back cover of the book you wouldn’t necessarily rush to the register to purchase it. The real value of Anna Karenina is the interactions between the characters and the way Tolstoy describes their internal thoughts. There were many instances throughout Anna Karenina where I read a section of dialogue or a description of a character’s inner thoughts and exclaimed to myself, That’s exactly what would have gone through my head in that situation! The ability of authors to relate to their readers across centuries and cultures—to reveal the universality of the human experience, despite massive differences in time and space—is what makes classic literature so great.

7. If you like a particular author, read all the books they have written, or at least the ones considered their best

Because most of the best books are not plot-driven, many of them get left on the bookstore shelves due to the uninteresting-seeming plot summaries on the back cover or inside flap. I have historically fallen victim to this habit as much as anyone else. Recently, however, I have found that a better strategy is to pick up books by authors whom I like, back cover be damned. Not all the books by a particular author will be their best, but often the author is sufficiently talented to make many of his or her books worth reading.

Cormac McCarthy is a good example of an author whose books may not seem all that interesting but are almost universally quite good. Suttree, for instance, is about a man who lives and hangs out with the dregs of society in Knoxville, Tennessee. There is nothing particularly compelling about this overview, but the experience of reading Suttree is one that I will never forget.

Because not all books by renowned authors are equally good, it can be best to start with the ones that are viewed as a particular author’s best works. If you want to get into Shakespeare, you should probably start with Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello, whereas the lesser-known plays are probably left unread. (Full disclosure: Of those four plays, I have only read Othello, but I hear that the other three are quite good.) But as a general principal, you should read books by good authors, especially if you feel a unique connection to his or her writing.

8. For nonfiction books, wait a few years before reading new ones

If you listen to a lot of podcasts, you hear authors of new nonfiction books advertising their work quite often. You often hear the same authors on several different podcasts. The more you hear them, the more convinced you are that you need to buy their book. This impulse is a sign that the author’s marketing strategy is working.

The thing is, most books just aren’t that good. That isn’t too surprising: If 100,000 nonfiction books are published each year, there’s a good chance that most of them won’t actually survive beyond their first printing. There is a certain tragedy in all this wasted effort, especially considering the role that chance and name recognition play in promoting books that aren’t all that good. But life is unfair, and we have to cope with its realities even if we’d rather not.

Assuming you want to read good books rather than bad ones, you should avoid most nonfiction books—even if the author of a particular book makes a compelling case to a podcaster or a New York Times reviewer praises it. Many new nonfiction books are timely, meaning they are tied to a specific news event or a particular “vibe” that the author has picked up on. By definition, the timeliness of these books mean they are not timeless. The timeliness of new books is therefore often a mark against the book, even if it helps launch the book onto a bestseller list.

When I began listening to podcasts in college, I also started a list of books that I wanted to read. Most of the books I added to the list were brought to my attention by a podcaster or a guest on a podcast that I listened to, meaning that most books on my list were timely and not timeless. Eventually, I discovered that many of the books I had once added to my list in a burst of passion after listening to the author were not actually that good—or, at the very least, that I was no longer interested in reading such books. Once I realized the error of my ways, I became much more circumspect about which books I should add to my list. Moreover, I realized that there is a crucial cooling-off period to which I should adhere before adding a book to my list. Most new nonfiction books are not that good; therefore, it is best to avoid them unless they have, like classic literature, stood the test of time.

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If you don’t find reading books to be a particularly valuable use of your time, then you can safely ignore all of the foregoing. My experience is that most people wish they read more books. They often wistfully express a desire to read more but then dismiss acquiring a reading habit because they don’t have time for it. I don’t actually think it is the case that people don’t have time to read. Except for some extreme examples—people with several jobs, single parents, Fortune 500 CEOs—everyone can find an extra hour in their day to read more. Usually this means evaluating one’s priorities and doing less of one activity in order to make room for reading. Doing so may require some additional willpower, but it’s not rocket science.

As I wrote above, I think that reading something is better than reading nothing. But once you do start to read, I highly recommend picking up books that are critically acclaimed and have stood the test of time. These books are usually harder to read and often much slower-paced than your average Tom Clancy number, but they are ultimately more rewarding.

I hope this humble and incomplete guide will help you start to read more—and better—books.