Building a Reading Practice | Research

Reading more is not primarily about willpower. It’s about systems—small daily habits, environmental design, and the strategic elimination of friction. The people who read seventy books a year don’t have more discipline than you. They have better systems.

Stephen King: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

The Daily Habit

Start Small

The minimum viable reading habit: one page. Not twenty pages, not a chapter—one page. The goal is consistency, not volume. You can always read more, but you must read something.

James Clear reads twenty pages every morning before anything else. That’s roughly thirty minutes. Thirty-six books a year, compounding over decades. But Clear started smaller. Anyone can.

Gretchen Rubin’s challenge: read for twenty-five minutes daily. Audiobooks count. The format matters less than the regularity.

Same Time, Same Place

Habits form through context. Read at the same time, in the same place, triggered by the same cue. Morning coffee. Lunch break. Before bed. The cue becomes automatic, and the behavior follows.

Psychologist Phillippa Gardner: “Action association is at the heart of a habit. If you keep doing it, you keep reinforcing that association. And as that association is reinforced, control over the behaviour passes from effortful reflective processing to a much more automatic system.”

Four ten-minute sessions—breakfast, lunch, commute, bed—compound into forty minutes daily without requiring a single block of protected time.

Always Carry a Book

The most consistent advice from prolific readers: never leave home without something to read. Waiting rooms, checkout lines, delayed trains—dead time becomes reading time.

Sarah Jessica Parker: “I take full advantage of them and I never leave home without a book.”

The e-reader eliminated the last excuse. Your library fits in your pocket.

Environmental Design

Your environment shapes your behavior more than your intentions. Design it for reading.

Make books visible. Keep your current read on the table, the nightstand, wherever your eyes will land. When you’re bored, the book is there.

Remove friction. Charge the e-reader. Keep a light by the bed. Have the next book ready before finishing the current one.

Add friction to alternatives. One reader swapped her social media app’s position with her e-reader app. Her thumb reached for distraction and found books instead.

Build a queue. Darius Foroux: maintain a stack of books you’re excited to read. When one ends, the next is waiting. The pile itself becomes motivation.

The Anti-Library

Umberto Eco owned thirty thousand books. When visitors asked how many he’d read, he missed the point. The unread books were the point.

Nassim Taleb, who popularized the concept: “A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”

The anti-library is your collection of unread books—a physical reminder of how much you don’t know. It humbles. It provokes. It offers possibilities.

The Japanese call it tsundoku: acquiring books and letting them pile up unread. Not a character flaw. A relationship to knowledge.

The goal isn’t to eliminate the pile. The goal is to curate it well. Your anti-library should represent the person you’re becoming, the questions you’re pursuing, the gaps in your understanding.

What to Read

Read What You Like

The first rule: read what you enjoy. Far too many people let bestseller lists, prize committees, and social pressure dictate their reading. They suffer through books they “should” read while the books they’d love gather dust.

Naval Ravikant: “Read whatever the hell you want to read in the beginning.” The focus is building the habit. Once you love reading, you can read anything. Until then, read what pulls you.

Give yourself permission to quit. Life is too short for books that bore you. The two-hundred-page mark is not a commitment.

Avoid FOMO

Every Booker Prize announcement sends readers scrambling. The excitement fades as quickly as it built. Most of those books go unfinished.

Reading to keep up is reading for the wrong reasons. The books that matter to you may not be the books everyone else is reading. That’s fine. Better than fine—that’s the point of having your own mind.

Go Deep and Wide

The T-shaped approach: broad knowledge across many domains, deep expertise in a few.

For depth: pick five to ten books on a single topic. Let them build on each other. Read the same territory from different angles. Mastery comes from return, not from sprinting through surveys.

For breadth: read outside your comfort zone. Fiction if you read nonfiction. Science if you read literature. The unexpected connections happen at the edges.

Follow Footnotes

Good books point to other good books. Follow the citations. Read what the authors you admire are reading. Build your reading list from the recommendations of writers you trust, not algorithms.

The Reading List

A reading list is not a binding contract. It’s a mood board—a snapshot of your intentions, subject to revision.

Keep it short. Twenty books for the year is plenty. A list of two hundred is a source of guilt, not guidance.

Leave room. The best reading recommendations arrive unexpectedly. If your list is too rigid, you’ll miss them.

Review and revise. A book that excited you in January may not call to you in July. Swap freely. The list serves you, not the reverse.

Systems from Prolific Readers

Bill Gates: Reads a book a week. Takes notes in margins. Sets aside extended vacation reading time.

Warren Buffett: Claims to spend 80% of his day reading. “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.”

Haruki Murakami: “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

Stephen King: Carries a book everywhere. Reads four to six hours daily alongside writing. Treats reading and writing as inseparable activities.

Susan Choi: Schedules reading in her calendar like any other commitment. “I decide in advance, this afternoon between three and five, I’m just going to read. I calendar it.”

The Writer’s Reading

Writers read differently than civilians. They read for craft as well as content, for technique as well as story. But they also simply read more—because reading and writing feed each other.

King: “You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so.”

The advice is unanimous: read good writing to learn what works. Read bad writing to learn what doesn’t. Read in your genre to understand its conventions. Read outside your genre to escape them.

Common Obstacles

“I don’t have time.” You have the same twenty-four hours as everyone else. The question is priority. Twenty minutes daily is 120 hours yearly—enough for thirty books. The time exists. The choice is whether to use it.

“I can’t focus.” Start with shorter works: essays, short stories, novellas. Build stamina. Remove the phone from the room. Attention is a muscle—it strengthens with use.

“I don’t know what to read.” Ask readers you admire. Follow the footnotes of books you’ve loved. Browse the shelves of independent bookstores. The problem is not scarcity—it’s overwhelm. Pick one book and start.

“I forget everything I read.” You’re not meant to remember everything. Reading changes you even when you can’t recall the specifics. For important books, take notes. For pleasure reading, let go.

A Practice

Set a minimum. Ten pages, fifteen minutes, one chapter—whatever feels absurdly achievable. Do it daily, no exceptions.
Choose a trigger. Morning coffee. Evening commute. Before sleep. Attach reading to an existing habit.
Design your environment. Books visible, devices away, friction removed.
Build an anti-library. Curate a collection of books you’re excited to read. Let the pile grow.
Give yourself permission. To quit books you don’t like. To read “unserious” books. To ignore what everyone else is reading.
Protect the habit. The streak matters more than any individual reading session. A bad day is still a day where you read something.