Tag: Books

How To Read More

On April 2, 2026

I see a lot of discussions about how to read more. Most of them are of the flavor of “I know broccoli and liver are good for me, but I hate how they taste, how do I eat more?”

This leads to people who are proud they read a book a month, or maybe a week, numbers that make actual readers, who often read a book a day, laugh. By the time I was ten, I was reading about fifteen books a week. (I know because I know what the library lending limits were.) I didn’t do it because it was good for me, I did it for fun.

Even in non fiction, find something you’ll enjoy reading. Love knights and chivalry? Plenty of books. Food or cooking? Same. Seashells? Music? Math? Hunting? Anime? Weird esoteric shit like the different breeds of sheep or the history of whale hunting? Whatever it is, there are books on it. Probably many books, even for niche interests.

Then there’s fiction. I read fiction because I enjoy a break from being Ian and/or living in this particular world. That’s why I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but I read all genres, even some romance novels. The Regency romance novels of Georgette Heyer are often both funny and touching and you’ll learn a lot about Regency England without even realizing it, for example. (Try “The Corinthian” or “Friday’s Child” and stay away from her historical novels.)

The people who do a lot of anything either love doing it, or they’re doing it for money. (The ideal is both, but paid book reviewers are largely a thing of the past.)

If you want to be a better writer, read books by authors whose style you admire. Read the first time for fun, then re-read analytically, then write pastiches. Read a scene, put the book down and see if you can write the same scene the same way without looking.

Once you’ve done that with a few authors, try to write the a scene more than once, in each style. You can do the same with non fiction. It’s really hard to write like Machiavelli, for example. It sounds simple when you read it, but… no.

More instrumental advice. From 2018 to Covid, I wanted to get back into reading more as I’d gotten out of the habit. So I went to a coffee shop in a bookstore and didn’t take any screens except an e-reader. I’d sit and read for hours.

If you’re screen addicted, you may need to enforce some “no screen” time or set your phone so it only alerts you if key people call like your wife and ask them not to call unless it’s an emergency. Once Covid started up I read less, but I had the habit/enjoyment back.

Well, I never really lost the enjoyment. I still enjoyed it, but the dopamine twitch reflex of social media and so on had become an issue, not as fun overall, but it’s more immediate.

Reading books has a different “brain feel” than reading short form let alone social media. You just need to get a taste for it. It’s sort of stretchy — you get entire full stories or entire world models in ways articles can’t give you, let alone some social post or video.

That, I find, sparks a lot more ideas for me, and I LOVE the feeling of new ideas. Barbara Hambly once called it the the “cold clear ecstasy of intellectual discovery” and while I won’t say it’s the best feeling, it’s unique. Books really help get that.

If you want to read more: reduce your screen addiction and read books you’ll enjoy. Don’t treat it like forcing down liver and broccoli. Have fun.

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Books vs. the Internet

By Ian Welsh

On July 28, 2018

69 Comments

One of the major changes in my life this last year has been that I’m reading a lot of books.

When I was young, I read a lot. For much of my childhood and most of my teen years I was reading about two books a day. During holidays I often read three a day or even four. Even into my twenties and early thirties, I maintained a book a day or so. I was one of those people who always carried a pocket book. Heck, I’d walk down the sidewalk, reading, the analog version of people staring at their smartphones.

Then along came the internet. A fair bit of my attention went to forums, but that didn’t slow down my book reading too much. Until I became a blogger, and somehow the internet ate my life.

A lot of that was good, especially from 03-08, but one casualty was book reading. I went down to one or two a week. I was intensely involved in political and economic issues, and paradoxically that made me hate reading books about economics and politics. I had trained myself, as a writer, to look for what people were (to my mind) wrong about, get angry about it (because it had real world consequences that were ugly), and then use that anger to write a post.

This made reading full books by people I disagreed with (almost all mainstream economists and political theorists of the time) really unpleasant.

This conditioning took a lot of time to overcome. But about a year ago I started really reading again, and today I’m up to about a book and a half a day. Buying a Kindle (yeah, Amazon, I know, but my experience with Kobo sucked) made this easy, and in general e-books are cheaper.

So I’ve been reading and reading, and I confirmed what I’d known, but put aside, that internet reading is not a substitute for reading books.

The vast majority of internet reading is too short. Even longer form articles and essays, which are becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of the internet anyway, just don’t match up to a decent book.

You don’t get enough information or argument or description. Even a five thousand word essay, which almost no one publishes on the internet anymore, and no one reads, does not allow the proper development of either the argument or the supporting facts as well as a good book. (Granted a lot of books are overgrown magazine articles, but that’s why I qualified with “good.”)

One gets pieces, on the internet, facts out of context, or arguments without all the facts. When learning about a new subject, one rarely gets all the context one needs: No essay is comprehensive enough.

Just recently, I spent a lot of time reading about the Chinese economy, and Chinese trade. I’ve kept a general eye on China for years, but I still didn’t know basic facts, like, for example, that China has the most decentralized government spending of any federal government in the world. (This is a fundamental and important fact, and explains much of why China succeeded.)

There is an idea, prevalent today, that one doesn’t really need to know things, because one can easily look them up.

This is not true if you want to understand anything, however. Your mind cannot work without facts and theories you don’t know. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know, and what you know you don’t know, you can then go study. If there’s important information you don’t know you don’t know, you can’t even take your ignorance into account.

Information outside your head can’t be used to improve your world and understanding, to make new connections, to understand more.

And disconnected facts and theories, not embedded within a fuller network of facts and theories; decontextualized, can be deeply misleading. They may make sense, but if you knew more you’d know they aren’t correct or don’t mean what you think they do. Equally you may think a theory or set of facts are bullshit, where if you knew more you’d understand whatever truth, or usefulness, they carry.

We thought the internet would be a huge boon, and in some ways it has been. But as with the research that shows that the more one uses social media the more unhappy and anxious one is, the fact of having so much information at our fingertips, while lovely, has also led to too much of it floating, almost context free, un-embedded in the networks of theory and meaning and additional facts necessary to make sense of it.

So, in general, while I think the internet has a lot to offer, I have to say that for those who want to understand the world, it should be used as little more than a reference library and news ticker; social media should mostly be avoided, with a careful calculus of whether the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, and one should spend most of one’s reading time with books, not online writing. (Er, of course, my blog is an exception. *cough*)

Books: Still better for actual understanding. And better for your happiness and your ability to concentrate as well.

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