Reading Books

in the age of soundbites

I used to enjoy reading books when I was in my teens and early twenties. I loved JD Salinger and SE Hinton when I was a delinquent, and in my early twenties I read a bunch of existentialist literature. I often say I had an existential crisis in my early twenties that I’ve never gotten over. Not a day goes by that I don’t contemplate my own mortality and what, if any, meaning there is to human existence.

People were often impressed with how “well read” I was in my twenties despite having quit school young. I think they were really just impressed that I was literate at all; I wasn’t really particularly well-read. I was literally asked if I was literate by a grad student I met at a coffee shop when I explained that I had dropped out before high school. My mom likes to say I taught myself how to read when I was two.

I discovered the Internet in 1994 and effectively stopped reading books altogether. It even got to a point where I would respond (half-jokingly) “I can’t read” when someone would recommend a book, but I never stopped being embarrassed that I had become someone who doesn’t read books. I tried several times over the years to start reading digital books (via Kindle) but I just didn’t seem able to focus.

It isn’t that I wasn’t reading at all. I have been very active on online discussion forums over the past 20+ years — I have over 30,000 posts on one. But of course even the most prolix writers on forums rarely write more than a couple pages in a post. I found that I had a hard time even making it through a long-form article much less a book.

When I started becoming politicized in 2020 I decided to start collecting books again for the first time in decades. I have been fortunate enough to have a fair amount of disposable income over the past decade so I started buying every book anyone recommended on a podcast. Most of these suggestions have come from The Majority Report or from people I follow on social media who I learned about from TMR.

I even read a few of these books, but before long it became obvious that I was buying books at a rate well beyond my ability to read them, especially when I was still only reading when I felt inspired. I did read some amazing books though, such as The Jakarta Method, by Vincent Bevins, and Washington Bullets, by Vijay Prashad. Still, I can count the number of books I read on two hands during 2020 and 2021 and my collection had grown to well over 100 books.

I was dabbling in the “mindful productivity” community during 2020 and 2021, not really interested in ‘productivity’ per se, but I liked a lot of what I heard about note-taking (highly recommend How To Take Smart Notes, by Sonke Ahrens) and building good habits (via James Clear’s Atomic Habits)¹.

Armed with these techniques I started a new morning routine that includes, among other things, 30 minutes (timed) of reading a book from my non-fiction collection. I do sometimes (but rarely) read for more than 30 minutes or at other times in the day, but the vast majority of days I only read for 30 minutes. If I skip it for some reason in the morning I almost always complete it sometime before I go to sleep. I’ve only missed a few days and as a result I have read 90 books since I started this practice in May, 2022.

In the early months I was taking notes on index cards as I read the books, but at some point I decided to fight my instincts and use a highlighter. After I finish the book I transcribe the notes (or highlights) into a digital note-taking tool (I’ve been using Roam Research for this). The one downside of my practice is that I often end up with a pile of books I’ve read that require transcription — procrastination is the devil.

Since October 7th the books I have read are:

• The Hundred Years' War On Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi

• If We Burn, by Vincent Bevins

• Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius

• On Palestine, by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe

• The Squad, by Ryan Grim

• The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff

• How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley

• The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois

• All The Shah's Men, by Stephen Kinzer

• The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt

• My Name Is Rachel Corrie

• The Question of Palestine, by Edward Said

• The Age of Magical Overthinking, by Amanda Montell

• Deluge: Gaza and Israel, from Crisis to Cataclysm, edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner

• Letters to Palestine, edited by Vijay Prashad

• War Talk, by Arundhati Roy

• Propaganda, by Edward Bernays

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Friere

…and some of the books² I have purchased but have not yet read are:

• Gaza, an Inquest into Martyrdom, by Norman Finkelstein

• Together, by Ece Temelkuran

• Ten Myths About Israel, by Ilan Pappe

• Let Me Stand Alone, by Rachel Corrie

• Weaponizing Anti-Semitism, by Asa Winstanley

• Orientalism, by Edward Said

• Footnotes In Gaza, by Joe Sacco

• 1949: The First Israelis, by Tom Segev

• The General’s Son, by Miko Peled

• Except for Palestine, by Mark Lamont Hill

• The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe

• A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin

• Return to the Source, Amilcar Cabral

1. I also learned about the concept of “Morning Pages” from The Artist’s Way - which is essentially the habit of brain-dumping 750 words in a journal every morning as a way of clearing your mind and stimulating creativity. I’ve been doing that for a couple years now and I have found it really useful for both of those things.

2. My full collection of books is available here.