How to Read More
Reading is one of the best things you can do to enrich your life.
Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own. They may be beautiful, terrible, awe-inspiring, exhilarating, pathetic, comic, or merely piquant. Literature gives the entrée to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom realize the enormous extension of our being that we owe to authors. […] In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in a Greek poem, I see with a thousand eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself: and am never more myself than when I do.
~C. S. Lewis
Growing up with books
I devoured books as a kid. Some of my favorite memories come from the weekly visits my family made to our small town library. I would always leave that cozy sanctuary with a stack of adventures. I would read them on the bus, at school, after school, before going to bed, and late into the night.
When my family went on vacation one of the things I most looked forward to was the extra down time I’d have to become engrossed in a story. There’s nothing like taking in a book by a crackling campfire, or with the soothing white noise of crashing waves in the background. Even never-ending car rides and delirium-inducing tent stays found a soft spot in my heart; they afforded bonus blocks of time to crane my neck with a perfectly positioned flashlight on my latest find from the library.
My love for reading comes from my Mom. She made it a point to read to us regularly, and often we’d have audiobooks playing on the way to swim lessons and karate classes. We shared so many special moments together through reading. Although my Mom hates public speaking, she is a wonderful narrator. She has a perfect feel for how to capture the ambiance and emotional stakes of a story without over-acting. It also helped that I love my Mom and cherished these opportunities to spend time with her.
As an aside:
Attention Parents! If you want your kids to read, read to them! Kids need to be initiated into reading; they need someone to model to them how to consume and enjoy writing. In this era of ubiquitous, instantaneously available and insidiously addictive screen entertainment, your investment is needed more than ever. You will give them a huge advantage for their future career and self-improvement, set them up for a lifetime of enjoyment, and you’ll get to spend tons of quality time together making precious memories in the process. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Now where were we? Oh yes…
Once I could read chapter books, novels became a staple. I went through a rabid fantasy phase, with authors like Tolkien, Rowling, Brian Jacques, and Eoin Colfer enjoying the heaviest rotation. As I got older I entered a thriller phase. In particular, I read everything I could get my hands on by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, as well as local author and family friend Tom Grace. Both of these phases were supplemented with generous helpings of Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, and The Far Side.
Falling off the reading cliff
Sadly, my reading plummeted during high school. The pressured intensity of academics and extracurricular activities engulfed the spare time and mental bandwidth I used to liberally devote to reading. I also came of age during the rise of YouTube and social media. Video games had already frayed my attention span; it didn’t stand a chance against the mid 2000s internet. Needless to say, my heart goes out to children and teenagers today growing up in the age of TikTok.
Once a core feature of my life; the main way I spent my spare time, and a defining element of my personality, my non-school related reading went down to next to nothing in a matter of years. For a period of nearly ten years I averaged less than two books a year. More often than not, when I tried to get back into a fiction book it felt like a crushingly boring chore.
Clawing my way to base camp
My first year as a seminarian was a defibrillator jolt to my reading habit. When someone joins the Companions of the Cross, they spend a formation year devoted to spiritual growth and personal development. For me this involved quitting social media cold turkey, and spending just half an hour a week online. Although we followed a demanding regimen of prayer, travel, lectures, and household duties, the absence of electronic media created a stunning - deafening silence that I was eager to fill. I read ten books in nine months in addition to the substantial assigned readings we were given. Sometimes it was escapism from a challenging year, but it was also an exhilarating time of self-rediscovery. I liken it to the feeling of finally getting back in shape after a sedentary period.
My reading habit was back from the dead, but it quickly leveled off as electronics made their way back into my life and as I started my studies. My reading kept staying sporadic year after year. In my fourth year of seminary I saw my first year as an outlier. I assumed I’d go the rest of my life reading just a couple of books a year.
Liftoff:
But fast forward to today: I have read nearly three dozen books in three years, including War and Peace. What’s more, I’ve hardly noticed the extra time. Had I tried to read this much five years ago, I would have killed myself with exhausted strain and boredom. But now books click by seamlessly. How did things finally take off after a decade and a half of sputtering? I can think of five factors:
1. Grab a friend
As with any task or habit, having a friend alongside you vastly increases the chances you’ll actually do it. Ninety percent of my increased reading comes down to the support and accountability my friend and newly ordained priest Fr. Michael Horianopoulos has provided me. For nearly three years we have been reading books together. Each week we try to read a section of a book and meet to discuss it. Knowing that Fr. Michael is depending on me to have the book read is a huge motivating factor.
These meetings have also greatly enriched our friendship. Not only have they allowed us to have many delightful shared experiences, they’ve also given us ample opportunities to stay in touch and let each other know how things are going in our lives. Sometimes all a friendship needs to flourish is a context.
Reading a book with someone is like having the same dream with them and being able to talk about it afterwards. I’d even go so far as to say that if you’re reading a book alone, you’re missing out on one of the best parts of reading. While reading is primarily a solitary activity, it can also be one of the best communal activities imaginable.
2. Let yourself be bored
Nothing destroyed my appetite and capacity for reading more than constant stimulation from social media and electronic entertainment. Boredom is the gasoline of creativity and curiosity. It is the electricity powering our capacity to actively engage rather than passively consume. A great place to start is to delete apps from your phone. Even just not having instant access to them will open up a little space.
I can’t recommend this enough. What is YouTube adding to your life? How does Instagram make you happier? What do you get from Netflix? Sure you get something, perhaps even a lot. But how does that stack up to what you would get if you had the mental stamina to commune with the greatest minds to ever live, and experience writings that shaped the world around us? If you make this evaluation I think you’ll find that a readjustment of time spent is called for.
3. Learn how to read faster
Part of what made reading feel like a chore to me was that it took so long. I noticed that some people could read in a sitting what it would take me hours on end to finish. What I didn’t realize was that reading is a skill that can be improved with practice and with improved technique.
In my second year of seminary I checked out a book on speed reading to try and see if there was any way I could learn to keep up with my class readings. As it turns out, that book had more than its fair share of snake oil and new-age nonsense. As a general rule, I suggest you take what you hear about speed reading with a grain of salt.
But in that dung heap of hype and shoddy science I found two life changing diamonds:
First, the book helped me realize that I was shooting myself in the foot by reading words aloud in my head. This is called subvocalization. I found with practice that when I silenced that superfluous voice track, it would free up mental energy for taking in what I was reading. I was able to simply ‘see’ the words and take them in. This made reading dramatically faster and less mentally taxing.
The second thing I learned was that reading would often become a drag because my eyes would get stuck on words. Moving from word to word often became a jagged and draining slog. One technique the speed reading book taught me which has helped immensely is called tracing. I’ve found that gently moving my finger or a pen beneath the words as I read them takes a lot of the pressure off of my eyes to track the words and hold my place. Also, by moving my finger or the pen across the words a little faster than I am currently reading, I can pull my eyes across the text and keep them from getting hung up on individual words.
4. Listen to books
Even when I had substantially increased my reading speed, one of the biggest hurdles to reading was the time investment. I found it difficult to find the time to read on top of all of my other responsibilities. If reading is too hard, listen!
For those for whom time really is an issue for reading, audiobooks are an incredible life hack. Many of you probably listen to podcasts. I love podcasts too, but there’s a lot of fluff out there. Same with music. Why not take some of that listening time and use it to take in a classic book? Listening allows you to take in books while exercising, driving, doing chores etc. You could easily add ten books a year to your total just by throwing an audiobook on every once in a while.
I am an avid enjoyer of Audible, but one of the most life changing discoveries I’ve made is that you can turn any Kindle book into an Audiobook using the assistive reader function. If money and/or financially supporting Amazon is a sticking point, you can get thousands of audiobooks for free through your public library using apps like Libby and Hoopla, and thousands of free books in the public domain on sites like Project Gutenberg.
5. Adjust your expectations
So much of enjoying something involves knowing how to enjoy it. So much of knowing how to enjoy something involves having the right expectations. For most of her life, author Kaya Oakes has found baseball “boring, repetitive, pointless.” In a fun memoir she describes how she caught the sports bug this year:
At some point last year, sick as I was, I told my spouse, “let’s just go.” Tickets are cheap, it’s a short drive from our house, and if we got bored, we could always leave early. But halfway through the game I was grinning and didn’t stop. Baseball, as my dad knew all along, is fun. It’s a slow game of strategy, not the relentless pounding of basketball or hockey or the violent onslaught of football. With baseball, at some point, you just surrender to the zen of the game.
If you expect the Lord of the Rings books to be like the movies, reading them will be a shockingly boring and disappointing experience. Books will never be anywhere near as stimulating and engaging as television. They demand patience, curiosity, and surrender. The Lord of the Rings movies are like a WWE event, the books are like going to a baseball game. The Dune books are like a ballet, the movies are like a dubstep concert. Both mediums can be enjoyed, they just call for different expectations and engagement.
Happy reading!