How to Read Better

a lot of people want to read hard books that's to say that they want to be able to dive into say Classics or they want to be able to read philosophy or just serious non-fiction or maybe some literature that's more on the literary side of things maybe a little less than the genre side of things all of this is to say that there are a lot of people who want to become better readers so I want to give you a couple of tips that I have found useful in my journey to become a better reader

this is a journey that has taken me a number of years it has involved going to school it has involved graduating finishing graduate school entering the workforce finding a new Rhythm starting a family all of that stuff right uh and and while I've done all of that I think I've also been able to uh really become much happier with not just how much I read but how I read and that and that really is a critical point we want to focus on becoming good readers not becoming faster readers I am definitely someone who is all

about quality rather than quantity when it comes to reading if you told me that you read five books Heck if you told me that you only read one book all year but you read it deeply and it was a it was a one that you actually had to work at I would be thrilled I would think that you had done something amazing and in fact I would find that more impressive than saying that you were able to read 100 books this year especially if you didn't get much out of the majority of those books that

you read I know I for one have intentionally slowed down my reading I'm reading a little bit less this year um and I feel good about that decision but it's easy to say that we want to become better readers but it's a little bit harder to put that into practice especially if you just don't know where to start so let's talk about that today so my first point is that reading is a lot like exercise I say this for a couple of reasons many people want to be in better shape but they find going to

the gym very hard to do in the same way I think that many people want to have read a lot of good books and they want to have understood them well but they find actually picking up the book and doing the work to be kind of boring maybe a little painful and just in general they struggle to find motivation now if reading is like working out that lends itself to another analogy which is to say that whatever faculties you are using when you read these faculties of the mind or the soul or just even of

the eyes they need to be developed if you haven't been reading a lot lately and you pick up some Homer or some Dante or some Aristotle or even uh shorter works like various poems by Emily Dickinson you shouldn't expect those Works to just reveal themselves to you you shouldn't expect it to be easy if you've ever taken a break from exercise and then try to get back into it I think you probably know what it's like it kind of hurts there's definitely some pain involved so those reading muscles right these faculties that we use when

we're reading they need to be developed and trained and that means partly we need to sort of build up the intensity and also the duration but this also means that you need to go slowly at first if you decide that you want to read more or read more deeply it doesn't mean that you need to block off all of your Saturday to read if you especially if you haven't been reading a lot lately block off 30 minutes a couple of times a week and really devote yourself and you'll find that eventually you can just read

longer your attention won't drift and you'll just find yourself able to really understand what you've read I'm basically saying if you want to become a better reader you need to practice at it but I want to give you a few more practical tips that might not be so obvious first of all I am going to suggest that you should try to read books more than once this is especially true if you are reading non-fiction as someone with a PhD in philosophy I can tell you this I have never been able to intelligently discuss a work

whether that was book or an article after just reading it once oftentimes when we approach a work we don't see what the author intends especially early on and so since we can't see what the author intends what the the message is going to be or what the thesis is that's being argued for since we can't see that we can't quite understand how all of the early pieces this Foundation that's being laid how they're all going to kind of come together and then support or actually fail to support this conclusion or this message what I want

to say is evaluating a book or an argument in a book is often very holistic and so we need to be able to understand the whole in order to understand the parts even while those parts help us to understand the whole and I have found that the best way to do this is to read a book twice first time you read it I call it sort of The Fast and dirty method you're going to read it fairly quickly and you're going to try to see what the point is what is the author trying to get

you to believe or to understand after you think you've established that and you've grasped it you can then go back and do your slow read now this doesn't have to be something that you do immediately in fact you might want to take a little bit of time between your fast read and your slow read but really going over for that second pass is tremendously helpful because now that you understand the point of the work you're able to see how all of those little pieces come together now this might be harder for us to do with

fiction typically we don't like to reread novels you know within a year or two of reading them but I do think especially and and so maybe this point is a little bit more geared towards non-fiction um I remember when I was trying to read Hegel for the first time um I had a professor who was a Hegel scholar and when I asked him how I should approach Hegel as someone who had never read him he said read all of Hegel and of course uh if you know anything about Hegel I think you'll know that this

is this is scary advice to receive especially if you're fresh out of your undergrad days and you're just cracking into German idealism but I do think he had the right idea um I tried to read a lot of Hegel very quickly Hegel is notoriously difficult to read I don't think I Could reconstruct a single one of hegel's arguments but I was able to grasp a larger picture of Hegel and sort of the the sort of shape and structure of his thought and then when I went to write a paper at the end of that semester

on a more specific issue I did a slightly better job than I would have if I hadn't tried to sort of binge read Hegel that said my Hegel paper was not very good possibly the worst paper I wrote in graduate school um I don't have a copy of it anymore and I'm fairly glad about that my second piece of advice is that you are going to want to take notes but you're not going to want to take notes while you read there are a lot of people who get really hung up about taking notes as

they read and so if they're reading a work of philosophy or let's say a work of history they're going to write down every point they think is important and they're always taking notes they're always marking up those books a lot of these notes frankly are garbage they aren't actually helpful for your own thoughts they're not immediately helpful for understanding what the author was intending or trying to understand the author and you're going to produce such a volume of notes that's sorting and sifting through them is is really quite difficult I prefer when I'm taking notes

on a book to lightly annotate so I use a pencil I just use a little check mark next to passages that I think are relevant and maybe I'll write less than a sentence in the margin every so often sometimes if I'm feeling kind of fancy I use these book tabs they're brightly colored and I place them next to quotes that I think are going to be relevant at most I write about a paragraph at the end of a chapter where I try to summarize what the argument was and where we are in the dialectic that

really should take 10 minutes at most per chapter by the end you're left with at most a page and a half of notes maybe two pages you're left with some light annotations but what have you done you have set yourself up for your second read you have now set yourself up to to go and read it slowly again and then decide what actually gets to be a note your notes are actually kind of a limited resource because you need to be able to understand them all and place them together to form their own kind of

cohesive unit so as you are reading the second time you can look through these passages that you've marked and you can decide which ones actually deserve to be turned into notes that's where you can add some of your own commentary I might do a video one day which is about my own note-taking method I do kind of have one it's a bit of a system but I think Ryan holiday and I have basically the same method lightly annotate turn them into physical note cards and then sort them I do think that labor that of of

going through uh your physical annotations is quite useful it's for this reason that I don't use apps or software I just really prefer to keep it kind of simple and analog right so now that you've decided that you're going to read a book twice that you're going to take notes but you're going to do it in this kind of intentional way you're not going to be too messy about your notes the third thing is you need to pick the right Books A lot of people just decide they want to read more and there is real

value in Reading widely but what often can happen is that when you look back at all the books that you've read you realize that there's no narrative to your journey you just kind of picked books that you thought sounded interesting now on the one hand you should sometimes just read a book because it sounds interesting I think this is great but for most of the time you should be picking your books for a good reason now figuring out those reasons is a little bit easier if you're say a student engaging in a long research program

and most of you watching this video aren't engaged in that kind of research program you just want to read more so you're not picking based on how to further your research program so let me give you a couple of sample reasons or questions you might ask yourself one are you just interested in a particular topic so for some of us that's going to be very general say you really like politics and maybe you want to understand what the great minds have thought about politics well in that case you should probably read some John Locke and

some Adam Smith and some marks and maybe some later Marxist and you should read John Rawls if you want to understand a theories of liberal democracy you might want to read Martha Nussbaum for another uh great philosopher writing about these things also with kind of an ancient eye as she also is a Greek scholar you might want to read some Confucius or other works of Chinese political philosophy you might want to read Thomas Hobbes right that is a fairly diverse collection of texts but all of them will help you better achieve your goal which is

to kind of understand the Deep problems of politics maybe you don't have one of those driving interest however and you're just really interested in like one particular author often when we talk about the great books we make this mistake of thinking that we should only talk about the best books by that particular author now one of my favorite authors um is fyodo Dostoevsky and I've only read a few of his works the works that I have read are are so astounding to me that I just know he's near the top but as I'm thinking about

what I want to read maybe going into 2023 something I'm considering is why don't I just read as much Dost diavsky as I can you know as I can handle in a year and you know I'll read uh three or four more novels there's a lot of value in that because you'll understand the highs of an author's Corpus but you'll also understand the lows because not every book by them is going to be astounding uh frankly Dostoevsky wrote uh Crime and Punishment which is my favorite book and if he wrote any other books um they

just won't be as good as crime and punishment in my mind and and I can't go into it expecting that but I know that dust ASCII is capable of greatness and I want to see what else he can do so you might pick an author or you might pick like a really specific sub-genre perhaps you're really into afrofuturism and you want to understand how uh that genre has kind of developed over time so those are a few different ways to pick how you're going to read either to further your research program or to just help

you understand that big topic that you keep coming back to in your own thoughts or to explore the life and work of a particular author all of these I would say are good reasons and this is not an exhaustive list my main point and the one I really hope you take away from this video is that you should be thinking about what you want to read maybe crafting yourself a little plan because what you read isn't just a matter of what books you buy and spend your time with you're actually deciding what kind of person

you want to be as with anything where we are actually engaging in moral or self formation we just have to think through it this really isn't something that we can ever leave to chance I finally one last point and this is purely practical almost nothing philosophical about it it's just something that really helped me get in the habit of carrying your book with you or carrying your Kindle with you if you read an e-reader or always having access to your audiobook if that's your preferred way to consume a book you will find time to read

throughout your day maybe you work at a desk job and you take a longer lunch and you might be able to read for 15 minutes that 15 minutes is better spent with a good book than it is on your phone or when you're about to go to sleep try to read for just a couple of minutes before you turn off the lights keeping your books with you is really going to help you find that extra time to read and it's going to turn reading into a second nature it's truly going to become habitual and once

it becomes habitual you're going to find that you do it more often and then you just become a better and better reader again we're trying to practice becoming readers and we want to make it easy for ourselves to practice so pick a good book and pick it for a good reason keep keep it with you as often as you can keep a pencil in your pocket so you can take a few notes and be prepared to revisit these great works alright that's all I have for you now so I'll talk to you next time