How I Read Books

Unlike social media, there's no team of engineers to make books addictive

Published on February 1, 2026

As a young kid, I used to be a voracious reader. We'd go to the library every two weeks or so, I'd check out so many books that we'd have to put them on multiple library cards, and then get through 50-70 books in a matter of days. Granted, these were mostly smaller chapter books (and a healthy dose of manga), but it was a constant part of my day.

But then, something changed. As I got older, computers and phones took up those little bits of boredom that used to be filled with books, and life's increasing commitments made for less idle downtime where I could read. Reading on the bus was replaced with driving, lazy Sundays became endurance training days, and the little bits of downtime in between were replaced with time scrolling on my phone.

As of the past few years, however, I feel like I've been able to reclaim reading as a habit. A lot of voices online talk about "bringing back reading", and espouse the virtues of being well-read. But what many don't discuss is how to read, especially as an adult in this day and age.

Phones, and more specifically social media platforms, fit into our lives so well because they're engineered to. There's teams upon teams of engineers at Meta, ByteDance, and Youtube tweaking algorithms to make it easy for social media to be a habit. Nobody's engineering books to fit into our lives, so it's up to us to figure it out instead. This is not meant to be a manual on how to build a reading habit, I simply want to share what's working for me, in the hopes that it inspires you to critically think about how books can fit into your life.

I'm splitting this up sort of by genre, since different types of book fit into my routine in different ways. For each type, I'll discuss when I read them, and how I actually read and digest the information.

"Serious" Books

For books that I really want to take lessons away from (think self-help books or dense nonfiction), I've found it important for myself to own the book and to read messy. Nonfiction is essentially a 4-step process: The author does research, then translates that into words that represent their understanding. Then, we read those words, crunch on them, and translate them into an understanding in our mind. That "crunching" can sometime be a big barrier when reading dense and difficult books, and become a barrier that makes it less appealing to keep reading. Some might consider this sacrilege, but to me making annotations, underlines, and highlights is a way to reduce that difficulty and make a book more digestible. It also makes the book feel like more of a mental investment, encouraging me to continue reading and finish the book. Robin Rendle has a great short essay on this, it's worth a quick read.

I've had to carve out dedicated time to read these types of books consistently, since reading, annotating, and understanding takes focus and effort. I try to sit down with a book at least once a week on Sundays, even if it's just for a little bit. I've also found these books a great way to kill time on flights when I'm trying to stave off sleep.

Fiction & "Fun" Nonfiction

For books that don't really need annotation, and that I'm reading more for the narrative, I've found that the best way to get myself to read is to simply put the book on my phone. I have to credit my girlfriend with this idea. I'm not the biggest fan of reading on my phone, compared to on an e-reader or a physical book. But on a trip to Copenhagen with her, I noticed that during little bits of time here and there, such as short subway trips or waiting for dinner, she'd pull out her phone and start reading. By the end of the trip, she had gotten through most of a book.

After thinking about it, it's a remarkably simple idea: if I'd be on my phone anyways, why not be reading a book, even if it's not as good as reading on other mediums? Always having a book on my phone means that there's always something to read when the occasion strikes. Since then, I try to always have typically a lighthearted nonfiction book on my phone that I'm reading, and will often pull it out during those little idle moments, or when I'm our for a solo dinner while traveling.

Textbooks

I never really touched textbooks until my second semester of university, where I quickly found that in certain classes, when they said we needed to be reading the textbook, they meant it. I find textbooks difficult to parse. The text is often dense, the important information is buried in paragraphs of less relevant background and caveats, and the order/grouping of content that is intuitive to the authors isn't necessarily intuitive to my mind.

The way I've been able to solve for all of this is by distilling out what matters to me. When I read a textbook, I'll also have a notebook with me, and seek to turn that notebook into a summarized version of that textbook. Crucially, I'm not making notes or annotations, but rather trying to create a book that could teach me the concepts I need to know independently of the original textbook. In the same vein that Wikipedia makes information more accessible by distilling original sources and existing literature into balanced, readable articles, I try to distill down the original textbook into just the details, formulae, diagrams, and terms I need to know, displayed, grouped, and ordered in the way that makes the most sense to me specifically.

End Notes

As I mentioned earlier, these are just examples of how I fit books into my life, based on my own anecdotal experience. Do you have an interesting or counterintuitive way you've been able to fit reading into your life? If so, please let me know!