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Every year since 2016 I’ve made a list of the books I read that year. That list has taken various formats. Since I started writing this blog consistently, I did it for 2022 and 2023. Unfortunately, both of those years were sort of disappointments when it comes to the volume of reading I got done. Well, after a massive post-COVID slump in my reading habits, I finally broke the curse. This year I matched my all-time-high of reading 41 books from back in 2018. Felt pretty good.
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When I wrote about my reading habits last year, I said I would “lick my wounds and reflect on how to make more room for reading.” Well, I certainly managed to make more room. As I look back on what made that possible there are two things that I think helped.
Source: YouTube
Last year in chastising myself for only having read 11 books, the fewest in one year since before college I think, I talked about a specific [quote](https://ryanholiday.net/heres-some-stuff-worth-carrying-with-you-everywhere/#:~:text=A book — You should always,most common email I get.) from Ryan Holiday about finding more spaces in my life that could be filled with reading:
“You should always have a book with you. Always. People often assume something about me: that I’m a speed reader. It’s the most common email I get. They see all the books I recommend every month in my reading newsletter and assume I must have some secret. They want to know my trick for reading so fast. The truth is, even though I read hundreds of books each year, I actually read quite slow. In fact, I read deliberately slow. But what I also do is read all the time. I am always carrying a book with me. Every time I get a second, I crack it open. I don’t install games on my phone—that’s time for reading. When I’m eating, on a plane, in a waiting room, or sitting in traffic in an Uber—I read. There’s no trick, no secret, no shortcut. I like B.H. Liddell Hart’s old line that sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home. If you put the time in, you get the results.”
That is, effectively, what I did this year. I deleted Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, and TikTok from my phone and blocked them. The first few weeks I could feel myself jonesing for that sweet, sweet dopamine hit. But I persisted. Instead, my Kindle app became my #1 app. It’s what I turn to every time I open my phone. For example, in one particular day my Kindle app was 70%+ of my iPhone usage that day:
But it wasn’t just the time spent on my phone reading. I also created reading opportunities in other spaces in my life.
For example, my wife and I have a routine that I love where we make sure we spend at least a little bit of time together every night. Granted, it got interrupted by our new baby, but we’ll get back into the swing eventually. The routine was every night we put the kids down around 8 PM and then from 8-9 or so we would watch TV. We’ve watched Mr. Robot, Fargo, Succession, The Bear, Veep, Nobody Wants This, and on and on. That’s our time together. Tangentially, my wife and I often listen to audiobooks together on road trips and we had started listening to Lonesome Dove on one drive. So I proposed to my wife that, instead of an hour of TV together every night, what if we did 30 minutes of listening to our audiobook together and then watched TV. That’s where we read Lonesome Dove, Demon Copperhead, and Streets of Laredo.
At night, our bedtime routine with the kids is baths from 7-7:30 or so, which leaves us 30 minutes to read scriptures and say prayers. But we don’t always use that whole time, so my wife has started reading with the kids. That’s where we read The BFG and A Wrinkle in Time. We just switched so that now our 8-year old is reading Harry Potter to us at night.
Finally, my gym routine switched so I’m spending an extra hour early in the mornings on the treadmill so that I can read my Kindle while walking and then an hour in a workout class while listening to audiobooks. That’s where I read The Idea Factory, Brave New World, The Man From The Future, Patriot Games, and Without Remorse.
One other thing I did wasn’t something I deliberately intended to increase my reading habit, but boy did it. For Contrary Research, we spent a year researching and writing a book about Anduril as a company. More on that to come! As part of going deep on the defense industry, I wanted to read some of the quintessential books. So I read Skunk Works and The Kill Chain. Then I wanted to revisit some fiction I’d read about possible future outcomes in a global conflict between China, Russia, and the US, so I re-read 2034 and then I read the sequel, 2054. Finally, I wanted to go deeper into the rich history of technology and defense during and after World War II, so I read The Idea Factory and The Man From The Future. Finally, I wanted to round out my exposure to some of the key conflict areas, like nuclear weapons and semiconductors, so I read Nuclear War: a Scenario and Chip War.
Again, this wasn’t deliberate. I needed to go deep on defense and I wanted to do the work to read the books. It just so happened that that exercise led me to reading 8 books on the subject. Later, I read an essay by Packy McCormick that touched me deeply, called Read More Books. In it, he perfectly captured the experience I had going deep on defense. He explains the approach this way: