How to Read More Books by Replacing Screen Time with Stories

I have an almost-four year old child and not a lot of downtime. I used to listen to podcasts when I was doing dishes, cleaning the house, walking the dog, etc. I've mostly abandoned podcasts in favor of audiobooks. It didn't feel like they were benefiting me in any meaningful way—almost like they were just empty calories for my ears.

I finally made it all the way through The Power Broker recently, which I've wanted to read for years, and am now on Jennifer Pahlka's really insightful Recoding America, which features heavily in the chapter "Govern" in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance. The three are actually quite interesting to read back to back.

Audiobooks are definitely slower to get through than just reading, but I find that I can stick with them in a way that books just haven't allowed me to do in years.

I read 189 books last year, mostly due an accidental discovery.

I have a lot of trouble reading in noisy places, since I get distracted easily. My habit would be to put on some very minimal / low-information ambient music like Stars of the Lid and it worked well.

Then one day I randomly decided to put the audiobook on while reading and it was a revelation. After adjusting the audio rate to match my reading speed (usually between 2-3x depending on narrator / subject) it allowed me to totally lock in. Both "inputs" seem to reinforce each other. I researched and apparently people call this "immersive reading".

I find I can (just) listen to (easy) non-fiction like biographies, memoirs etc since they don't usually require much deep thought. But for fiction or harder/denser non fiction I read and listen at the same time.

Get a long book, a timeless classic, and read one chapter a night.

I grew up reading all the time. About 20 years ago, I found myself reading less and less. I decided to read "The Count of Monte Cristo" again. I decided I would read one chapter a night, before going to bed, regardless of how late it was, how busy, etc, By the time I finished, reading before going to bed was a habit. I read 30-60 minutes every night before going to bed. (Read plenty of other times, too; but, no matter how the day has been, I read ever night.)

I have gained so much by reading comments on Hacker News, articles, lurking in groups and forums, watching YouTube videos. Reading books is important because they have knowledge that is not accessible in another format. It is an efficient way to condense information and pass it around. At least it used to be, when paper was more scarce. Now books get fluffed up for padding. A lot of people should be writing articles instead of books. Those who are reading a large volume of books are most certainly reading a large volume of garbage. I have gained more from reading comments on here than I would have otherwise by reading junk self-help books, romance novels, and other kinds of YA. You should be reading the right books. The classics, the culturally relevant, the historically significant, the hallmarks of a domain or expertise, etc. The medium of publishing used to be a marker of quality, a filter, a selection mechanism. But as publishing became more accessible, the amount of investment required also plummeted. And just as it allowed many creatives and geniuses access to the medium, it also introduced a large volume of cheap material that can be easily dismissed as irrelevant noise, as you should.

> First of all, you don’t have to make time to read. What you need to do is read every single time you are not doing something else.

Mmh I’m not sure about that. I prefer to read for 1-2 hours rather than read 2 minutes here and 5 minutes there, especially for books that require some concentration to read, like dense stories and/or books not in my native language.

> I also tend to read multiple books at the same time. Sometimes it happens that I get so into a book that I put the rest on pause because the story is grabbing all my attention, but in general I like to have a few books that I read in parallel. Having only a single option can become boring. I generally mix fiction and non-fiction to have a broader choice.

This is actually one of the best ways to reinforce knowledge, if that's what you're reading for. Especially if you are reading about different, but related, topics. The idea is that you do a little bit of forgetting between reading sessions of a book and then have to force some recall of where you were at when you pick up the book a few days later, which reinforces the memory of what you've read.

WRT reading multiple books on different but related topics, you're giving yourself more material to build a working mental model of something, so if you're trying to teach yourself calculus, you'll probably learn it much better when you're reading it along with, say, a book on the history of rocketry, and/or a book on astronomy. The topics reinforce and integrate nicely with one another because of the big overlap with the mental models used -- learning something in rocketry or astronomy gives you a place to tie in something you learn from calculus, for instance. They're also different enough to give your mind a break so you have to practice some recall of what you've already gone over when you pick up your calculus book again.

Also […]

I have a checklist to go _back_ to reading 30-odd books a year, and right now the top 5 items are:

1. Stop messing about with AI

2. Stop doomscrolling/interacting on social networks (HN is within my 15m allocation)

3. Stop watching _any_ Youtube video that doesn't teach me anything

4. Gloss over my 200 RSS feeds, don't be a completionist

5. Put on classical music, not indie or radio

It almost works. Almost.