It was a good year of reading, for me. I read some big books. I got more insight out of the books I read. Furthermore, I read things I don’t normally read, like philosophy and books about octopuses that help some troubled folks find their way in life.
A few things worked well for me, so here I am sharing them.
Bring a (computer) assistant
I used ChatGPT and Claude to ask questions about tricky passages in non-fiction and philosophy books. This kept me “in the text” more. I was less distracted by wondering what some term meant or the context of a historical reference. LLMs are great for asking questions about or summarizing passages, expanding upon interesting ideas, and getting historical context.
The “world knowledge” trained into these contemporary LLMs is sufficient to answer most questions without the need to provide extra context. I haven’t found the need to fiddle with trying to load the text of books I’m reading into an LLM to get it to answer coherently.
As ever, trust but verify anything a computer masquerading as a human tells you.
Read actively
Laid back on the couch, propped up on a comfy pillow, bathed in natural light (not-too-bright, not-too-gloomy), and just the right temperature. This sounds like the portrait of an ideal reading situation.
But, I’ve found that reading challenging books, and getting more out of them, requires a more upright and active posture. Holding the book open on at a desk with one hand with a pen or highlighter at the ready in another is the ideal for challenging books. Hands-on, it’s important.
Highlighting, summarizing, annotating, and commenting on interesting passages keeps my mind in the game for longer. I’m more likely to return to the ideas and get something out of them. I often combine this with my 🤖assistant to summarize dense passages, ask questions about something I think I’m missing, or to expand on words/ideas I don’t already know.
Always Be Choosing (Good Books)
It does no good to read better if I’m reading things that I don’t enjoy or learn from.
I regularly parallelize my reading across a few genres, at least fiction and non-fiction. At times, comics, philosophy, or technical books. At other times, I’ve tried to cluster a few books in the same topical area and enjoyed it. Fiction is the least parallelizable genre, in my experience. It’s tricky to keep multiple fictional storylines/characters in my head, in the same way that holding the button mappings for multiple games in my head is tricky.
I have enjoyed doing Commonplace Philosophy read-alongs. I’m getting a lot of out of the Arendt read-along (a very challenging text, for me), the Aristotle Ethics one was insightful, and I’m really looking forward to the one on The Dispossessed. So, “philosophical sci-fi” will probably figure highly in my 2025 reading choices.
Clustering around a topic, another idea I picked up from Tyler Cowen, is fun when I find a few books stacked up around a topic. That said, given I choose to read tome-like non-fiction in particular, having three non-fiction books in progress at one time is not often workable.
The flip-side of selecting good material is changing my mind. I’m still learning to stop when the material isn’t meeting my expectations. Not only should I throw more books, I should consider aggressively skimming/summarizing-via-assistant/copilot when books turn out to be too thin or simply not the right thing.
You (still) can’t beat a dumb-old Kindle
Reading on a Kindle is more pleasant than an iPad.
Despite better functionality on iPad for active reading, it’s way easier to read on a Kindle device. It’s partly down to size and partly down to lack of functionality, as ever.
You can’t underestimate the benefit of reading speed and the difficulty of distracting yourself when reading on a Kindle. 🤷♂️
That said, the Kindle app on tablets does have a few things going for it, and I hope someday these things will come to a reasonably distraction-free Kindle device, someday:
- “Read it to me”, not audiobooks, just plain old text-to-speech voices, makes some kinds of reading easier to sustain because there’s a voice to focus on and keep up with.
- Adding notes and connecting dots to highlights becomes a “secondary session” activity when reading on Kindle alone. Ideally, that kind of entry is easier on a Kindle device. I didn’t realize there was magic in the iOS keyboard implementation until I tried to type quickly on a simplistic Kindle. Whatever Apple has implemented there, Amazon should pick up on it.
A wishlist for 2025
My kingdom for short, dense non-fiction instead of short non-fiction that is merely a longer magazine article restated several times.
Comic-style “primers” on deep topics like Sartre and chaos theory are my favorite way to start on big ideas. I hope more complicated topics and wicked problems will get this treatment in 2025, and that I’ll discover said primers.
I’d definitely kick the tires on an interesting, slightly better integrated way to read long-form, i.e., books with an LLM-powered assistant at-hand. The bar is low here; I’m copying and pasting between apps to make this work right now.
Maybe Amazon, Remarkable, Boox, or even Apple will make the reader/hardware situation more exciting in 2025!
