Read More With Minimal Discipline

Like a bookstore clerk.

Dorothy Malone and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, 1946

You want to read more. You’ve tried to read more. At least, you’ve read posts online about trying to read more. The advice is good: schedule a block of reading time, set yourself a reading challenge (a book a week!), track your reading. But you haven’t done it—or, you’ve tried & the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.¹

So you find that books undergo a predictable transformation. Before they’re yours, books are intriguing, desirable, the bookstore is a cornucopia, you want to take home more than you should buy, more than you can carry. But once you take them home, very quickly they develop a patina of failure: shouldn’t you have read me by now? Then you can’t look at them without feeling like a kid skipping homework, so you don’t. And you can’t read what you can’t look at, so you don’t.

But you’re not in school! You have no homework assignments!²

For a while I had a little bookstore job…the smell of the lignin in all that old paper, like hiding in the very old cedar-lined closet at your great aunt’s house, or like one of the old wooden playgrounds that parks once had, breaking down into vanillin & almondy benzaldehyde…but also it was hard to be very schoolbrained about books working there.

Books to bargain for or reject, books from estate sales or retiring professors, books to shelve or sell or donate, but no assigned reading. No classroom discussion points, but you could talk someone into a sale. The crotchety old owner, almost pathologically well-read, who would ask me what I was reading and then bring me related books I’d never heard of from his own home library—I think that’s how I read George Duby, & much of A History of Private Life.³

My reading life became incredibly haphazard. I abandoned more books than I ever had before. Sometimes a customer would ask me about the book I was halfway through reading & I’d sell it to them, trusting another copy would show up in a week, & that I would have found another book in the meantime. I could take books home, but you don’t end up with a big homeworky pile when you can just bring them back to work if they don’t hit. And I finished more books than I ever had before.

The job also had every problem you imagine when you’re shaking yourself out of your used bookstore daydream—do the kids call that dark academia?— and probably more problems than that. So, even though you would be an incredibly cute bookstore clerk, and have the best sweaters, and customers would tell their friends how you changed their lives with your book recommendations (always tastefully obscure yet instantly, charmingly absorbing)—you can skip the shitty gig & read like that anyway.

Discipline has trade-offs

When you want to achieve something, the obvious first tool you reach for is discipline—whether you have an actually-available surplus of trained habitual discipline and/or natural willpower….or not.

But discipline is a limited resource, or maybe it’s not, I heard that the ego depletion studies failed to replicate. So judge for yourself, I guess, whether or not it is true of you that you have a daily discipline bar, such that you want to use the least amount of discipline possible for each task, so that you can accomplish more overall. It’s basically true for me. There are ways of making the discipline bar bigger to start with, but still, you want to spend that discipline wisely.

Discipline is definitely vulnerable to goodharting: your target as expressed is unavoidably going to be a proxy for your actual goal. Like, if you set a target of reading fifty books a year, you’ll be tempted to read shorter books, easier books. You’ll be less willing to stop reading books you’ve invested some time in, sunk cost fallacy (and giving up is very very good, we’ll discuss later). You might find yourself rereading less because “rereading doesn’t count” (and also because rereading tends to be more partial and flip-aroundy & harder to list as an accomplishment). But you didn’t set that goal because there’s something fundamentally good about reading fifty books a year. You set it because reading books creates a deeper experience than just reading tweets all the time, helps you learn, etc etc, whyever you read books. And the goal got in the way of that.

Also, this is a little harder to express, but there’s often a tradeoff between the work of discipline and the actual work itself. Like it’s very easy to end up spending time and effort recording, optimizing, etc etc instead of doing.

You read a lot already

You’re reading this right now. You’re here reading this because you either found me on substack or on twitter. You’re addicted to your phone—but, much more than for most people, your phone addiction consists largely of reading text.

You’re right that you’re not reading enough books, and you’re right to want to. But you’re actually pretty well positioned to read more.

Read for free

I probably haven’t emphasized enough, so far, that one reason I read so much as a bookstore girl is that the books were free. Well. The books were free.

But free books abound! Some of them are at the library. Use your library shamelessly.

If you haven’t got a library card yet, find the library branch you’re most likely to actually visit (one near your home, work….grocery store….somewhere you regularly go) & go get your card.

If this library isn’t convenient & comfy, then realistically, you’re not gonna be hanging out there regularly. But the library card will let you get free ebooks on Libby, which I love, and which your library almost definitely has. Your library system may also have hoopla, boundless, and its own library system app. You need at least get libby and your library system app.

A lot of the biggest library systems in the country have eliminated late fees. Take advantage of this.

And a lot of free books are on your phone. Which you’re addicted to reading text on, as we’ve established.

Make your phone addiction work for you

I know, I know. Actual books are beautiful. They smell good. You absorb less from reading screens than from reading paper. But if you’re already not reading, and you’re already on your phone, getting bored of twitter & swiping to an ebook is frictionless & easily becomes habitual.

Become part of the republic of letters

Also: there is a literary community on your phone. Whenever you see something that would make a good screenshot, post it! Whenever you have a tweet-shaped thought about what you’re reading, tweet it! Maybe like write it down somewhere to post later, if posting would interrupt your reading flow badly. But if your reading is already fragmented by social media—better for it to be fragmented by you posting about your reading on social media. Having people who have something to say about the books you’re reading, who want to hear what you have to say about the books your reading, will make reading more rewarding. (Also your tweets, screenshots, posts about reading are form of note-taking. They’re not the best form of notetaking. But writing makes you think even if it’s a tweet or a substack note or whatever.)

Most books are bad

Most things in general are bad.

This is probably the biggest thing I viscerally learned at the bookstore. Before working there I had a certain kind of humility towards books. I really treated authors like authorities. If there was a problem between me and a book, the problem was me, not the book—unless it was egregiously bad.

But when you are deciding which books to buy and which not to buy, and watching which books sell and which don’t, that kind of preciousness slips away.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” means “judge it by its content” means that pretty often like five to fifty pages in, you will find out the book is bad.

Give up (and start again)

Especially when you’re just starting to read more, as soon as you start to notice that you’re not going back to the book you’re reading—as soon as that itchy or aversive feeling starts telling you it’s not gonna happen—just read something else. If you’re already not reading, then “giving up on a book as soon as you feel like it & starting a new book” doesn’t compete with “completing books,” it competes with “not reading books at all.”

Consider trying a harder/heavier book than the one you just gave up on. Especially at first you will be surprised how often it’s actually more engaging to sink your teeth into something meaty than to binge on candy.

“I should finish every book I start” does not necessarily result in actually finishing the books, but what does happen is that you start fewer books: partially because you’re “still reading that other one” (which you’re literally not reading) and also partially because if starting a new book is going to feel like taking on a major obligation, you’ll be less willing to do it. You can only finish what you start, so give up fast to start more to finish more. Also….

Not all books are for “finishing”

Sometimes a book is one unit of reading. Maybe it’s a novel or whatever. But some books are made up of smaller units of reading: collections of short stories, essays or poems. The units of reading might be connected but in another sense the book is just book-shaped or book-length because that’s more convenient to the publisher. In a collection, you can just flip around and read what’s interesting to you, and not read any more when you’ve read all the pieces that are interesting to you, and you’ve still finished reading the units of writing. If your phone addiction has shredded your attention span, this is a way to start finishing things.

Flip around

You don’t have to read reference texts straight through.⁴ Maybe this is too obvious to need saying. But something like The Story of Civilization, a big eleven volume set, you can just dip into it when you’re curious about something, check the table of contents, check the index. Or when you give up on a book—you picked it up because it interested you, check the bibliography & you might find something better.

Influx!!!

If you’re giving up on books you need books to replace them. But if you’re talking about books people will talk to you about books & you’ll hear about books.

Use the library app to put basically any book you are momentarily interested in on hold. The librarians will literally physically find the book for you, even if it's not at your branch they will bring it to your branch, they will put it on a shelf, they will notify you that your book is there, sometimes people dont know this. You can get in & out fast & not spend too much time with the old guy asking every girl, “I want to buy shoes like that for my niece, can I take a picture of your feet?” The library will usually hold your books for two weeks, so if you can visit every couple of weeks-ish, it’s worth it. If you miss some of your holds, whatever.

&…go to the secondhand bookstore

They’re cheap. They’re aesthetic. The regulars are quirky and the owners are sharp-witted. They probably have a cat.

But this advice comes last, because, if you’re on the wrong side of the counter, the books will not be free.

When You’re Beyond This Advice

To everything there is a season. Advice is always advice for someone at a certain stage. Earlier I said “use the minimum possible discipline necessary for your goals;” hopefully through doing this, you will figure out the limits of what you can do with the minimum of discipline that I’m describing. At that point you might also have a better idea of your interests and desires. You might have discerned the difference between giving up on a book because it wasn’t worth reading, and giving up on a good book because it is currently beyond your ability to complete—at least with this minimal discipline.

This is the time that you start using more discipline. All of the other reading advice out there is about this, go read that now. But I will offer up a few pointers of my own.

If you’re going to be more disciplined about reading, please only apply that discipline to books you really have reason to think are great books! Don’t be like, “Okay, now I’m gonna finish every book I start.” That’s basically always terrible advice. It can be worth it to force yourself to finish books if you really have reason to think they are great. The canon is a good differentiator.

Do you want to schedule blocks of daily reading time—maybe for harder books, that you cant read in twitter-scrolling-session-sized chunks? Good idea. Here’s a way to decide how long of a reading block to go for (at least initially). Go into your settings and see how much time you’re spending on Libby (or other book apps). You might find it’s higher than you think. That number, or a little less or more, is a reasonable amount of time for you to block out for focused reading, at least for a start. You know you can read about that much in a day.

For me, when I know a book is worth the work of reading it but I also know that reading it will be work, nothing has worked better for me than structured reading groups. I read Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene this way last year. Setting up the groups & running them was a fair bit of bonus work on top of the work of actually doing the difficult reading, but it also enabled some of the most joyful reading of my life—and sharing this difficult-yet-totally-voluntary experience of traveling through a strange setting in search of truth with people, some of whom started as relative strangers, really bonded us…..like knights travelling together through fairyland. Oh my god, and the Freud reading group I was in. Having other people to discuss hard-to-understand stuff with really helps.

Now go read a book.

1. This isn’t because the advice is bad or never works. It’s because here you are, you in particular, reading a substack post about how to read more with minimal discipline. Either discipline hasn’t worked for you (yet) or you’re an intimidatingly disciplined reader who’s just here because you like me.

2. Unless you are/do. In which case I’m sorry. But my constituency here is ultimately the dilettantes and the amateurs.

3. And also customers who wanted the “talking to a cute bookstore clerk” experience. But they weren’t big buyers. I feel like there’s an unexploited market niche for a business that is structurally a hostess club but dressed up like a bookstore, where the girls wear cardigans & you buy them a cup of overpriced tea to hang out and flatter your literary taste. If you want to talk to them alone you pay $30 for two Black & Milds & hang out in a courtyard.....DM me serious investors ONLY

4. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.