teaching myself how to read

my 6 reading goals as an attempt to be smarter

I know how to read, obviously. I have always been, I guess, a reader. My mom says she knew I’d be a word person by the time I was three years old. But now, I read online, and I overshare my reading, and that has buried the plot. I do not consider myself a particularly smart person, but I am a curious one, and I am curious about the ways I could become smarter or at least more well-rounded.

The end of one year and the beginning of the next lead to much reflection, some of it productive, some of it tiresome. I’m reflecting a lot on my general consumption, which includes reading, and more specifically, how I’m not very good at it. I read, but I’m not sure I’m reading well.

I’ve had many conversations with my fellow online friends about this sentiment; the internet has perhaps made us dumber, despite the infinite amounts of knowledge it gives us unfettered access to, and it feels like it’s on us, not the thing itself. I can hardly remember how to think critically, let alone speak or write, about a book I’ve read. I am not even sure what my taste in books is anymore after years of being told what’s good by people smarter than me, which means I listen to them, adopt their views, and parrot their lines, rather than forming an opinion of my own.

Reading is also inherently political, and it remains important that we engage with the world around us through our reading. I am concerned by the rise of anti-intellectualism, with aesthetics overshadowing substance, and I worry that social media is flattening us all into our identity markers and rendering us incapable of nuance or multitudes.

Reading can be indulgent. We can take our time with words. It is a hobby, after all. Reading can be purely for entertainment (see: the various romances I read last year), but why not always try to read better? As much as reading can be a hobby for entertainment, it can be a hobby that requires us to seek out texts we find difficult and learn from them.

So, I’m attempting to teach myself how to read again, and maybe you’re interested in that too. Here are the steps I’m taking, maybe, and, if you’ve found yourself in this navel-gazing boat as well, quickly taking on water, join me!

read less

A few years ago, when I used to read significantly more, I got a lot of questions about how I made that happen. I am not a naturally fast reader, and it was also the height of the pandemic, so the reality was that I simply had nothing better to do than plow through four easily digestible romances in a weekend. As much as I love reading, even physically holding a book, I do not value my reading time over any of the other ways to meaningfully spend time that are available to me.

When the Atlantic article “Americans Need to Party More” came out earlier this month, I immediately thought of all the TikToks and Instagram posts I’d seen of girls lamenting their social obligations because they could be at home reading instead. One, a bachelorette party attendee sitting silently in the corner of a bar, a miserable expression on a perfectly made-up face, the caption a wish for their book.

Forgive me for being callous, but will your book boyfriend hold your hand through grief and celebrate your joys? Will your stack of books comfort you when you long for community and connection? Does your Goodreads goal protect you from an uncertain future on this planet? We are lonely, we are disconnected from reality and each other, and we’ve lost our sense of self. Books can be a salve, but they shouldn’t be a hindrance.

Saying yes instead of no to my friends, putting on a movie with my partner, doing absolutely nothing when my brain needs it — if having a life leads to reading less, so fucking be it! If creating my own narrative means less of fictional ones, I can’t regret it.

Reading better has nothing to do with reading more, and at least online, everyone is trying to read less. This isn’t to say everyone should read less or that people who read a lot are doing anything wrong or antisocial; many people are just good, fast readers who allocate their time well.

On reading versus living

That said, when I do want to dedicate time to reading: Check your screen time. Was any of that unnecessary? If even 30 minutes of it was mindless scrolling that didn’t contribute to your other responsibilities (work, kids, caretaking, socializing) or your leisure time, perhaps that 30 minutes could have gone toward something that made you feel good. I know scrolling doesn’t.

We should all be putting our phones the fuck down anyway. It really is that damn phone, as

anuhea

so aptly put. We spend an inconceivable amount of our waking hours with our eyes glued to technology designed for addiction, consuming emptiness that drains us of our selves.

it really is that damn phone.

What you do with your screen-free time is between you and god, and there’s no reason to feel guilty about not replacing screen time with a book specifically, but we make time for what we want. Is lining the pockets of tech billionaires all we‘re capable of wanting?

I understand the urge to read more, and replacing mindless scrolling with a book or making time for reading you’re passionate about is worthwhile. But I also urge you to look at reading as a practice and an art instead of an activity that contributes to your productivity.

un-gamify your reading

Gamified reading can be beneficial; it’s persuaded many people, particularly young people, to read when they otherwise would not have. But the internet is not real life. Hitting your Goodreads goal doesn’t matter once you exit the app. I think we all feel productive when we finish a book, and hopefully, we feel good about ourselves, but living for productivity is a slippery slope.

The gamification of reading also leads to a lot of posturing and performing, akin to memorizing lectures in school without taking the time to understand the concepts at their core. We cannot treat reading diversely, for example, as something we can win. It defeats the point of reading for growth to make it about numbers.

Star-rating systems feed into the game of it all. If you tell me you have never been curious about a book only to discover that its average rating on Goodreads is low or that a book influencer you admire rated it as mid, and suddenly your interest declined, I’ll call you a liar! Maybe it’s not that serious, but reducing this expansive text that encompasses a person’s entire world into one tiny star rating — it’s not all that helpful, is it¹?

Not only are ratings on a 1-5 star system subjective — one person’s 3 stars could be a condemnation, another praise — but they don’t tell you anything about why you should read the book in the first place. I want to hear what spoke to you, what made you laugh or cry. I want to know if the prose felt beautiful to you, if the premise fell flat, or if the plot had you hooked from the first chapter. A star rating is quick and easy, allowing us to categorize books as yes or no rather than examining their worth within the context of the greater world of literature. Handy when you’re gamifying, reductive when you’re looking to think more critically.

Nothing about my feelings, let alone the book’s value, changes when I don’t rate a book, so this year (so far), I’m trying to just not do it at all.²

set better goals

Instead of giving ourselves goals that feed into the gamification and productivity mindset, we can set goals more specific to what’s most important to us. And we don’t have to make it an arbitrary number of books!

Do you want to read more translated fiction? More nonfiction? Books from places you’d like to travel to? A certain genre? You get to be as specific and detailed as possible with your reading goals. And while you also cannot reach a goal if you don’t ever set one, this doesn’t need to be done publicly or tracked obsessively. I’m trying to use goal-tracking as a way to hold myself accountable toward my goal of being a better reader, not just checking off boxes.

You’ve been inundated with strangers’ 2025 reading goals on this platform and others, I know, but here are mine, for now:

• more translated lit, always

• at least half of the [redacted] books I own but have not read

• more nonfiction

• if I happen to travel to other countries this year, I’d like to read at least one book from that country

• more science fiction — a genre that has piqued my interest lately but I have generally avoided for reasons unbeknownst to me

• at least two classics

• an essay collection or two

• more discerning about romance — I’m not giving up on this genre, but I increasingly hate romances that I read and then wish I had filled that time with something better

• enough of the sad, privileged white ladies

• a few books from each location:

  • the “global south”

  • the southern hemisphere, which I somehow entirely neglected in 2024

  • South America, specifically

  • Asian countries that are not Japan or South Korea

  • Palestine

  • Scandinavia

learn to talk about books — both critically and in praise of

You do not need to be an English major to talk about books intelligently. Engaging with a text is a muscle we can build up and that requires regular exercise lest it atrophy. No one needs to be penning beautiful essays or writing incisive, professional-level book reviews to teach themselves how to discuss what they read.

It is easy for me to criticize books I’ve disliked, and even to find faults in books I loved. I am an editor, and I was a copy editor for nearly a decade; I was trained to nitpick, but from a bird’s eye perspective to “advocate for the reader.” I’ve never read a romance that I haven’t fact-checked and poked holes in the plot of; I’ve never read any genre where a typo or grammatical error hasn’t distracted me.

But listing criticisms is not reading critically. It isn’t engaging with a text at all, really, and doesn’t invite further thought from within or further conversation with others. Sometimes I can trick myself into thinking that having a sharp eye makes me a good reader. I’m reminded I’m wrong when I try to speak or write about a book I love. I struggle to find meaningful words in praise of books, and I end up leaning on trite descriptors that are as generic as those of book blurbs.

I used to write book reviews regularly, and I now find the task taxing if not impossible. Whether they were good reviews or not is beside the point; just writing or talking about a book requires you to engage with it in a different way than “I liked it” or “I hated it.” Finding the language to describe what you mean is rewarding, whether you share it with others or keep it to yourself.

The ways in which I am trying to form more cohesive thoughts about the books I read:

• take notes: By the time I get to the end of a book, I’m not likely to remember every feeling or thought. I force myself to put down my book and open my Notes app when I feel my thoughts edging out my immersion in the text itself.

• marginalia: I take issue with the aesthetic annotating that garners attention on Instagram and Pinterest, but there is value in underlining quotes and jotting down notes or definitions in the margins. This can be a fun activity in itself, separate from reading but related to the joy of research (that I talk about below).

• share out loud: or online, as is more likely in my case. Keeping a reading practice to yourself is important; oversharing is not. Even still, I think we push ourselves to think more critically when we’re inviting others in, and this invitation allows them to share a new perspective that will inform and expand our own thinking. But, we can be choosy about what we share.

remain curious

Recently, I had a conversation with friends about how you’d define intelligence, an unquantifiable thing. I said that all intelligent people share a natural curiosity about the world and that without that ability to hold multiple perspectives at once, one could not approach the world intelligently³.

Many of us read to immerse ourselves in worlds and lives that are not our own. I’m suggesting we immerse ourselves in our real lives too, teaching us to appreciate a text more and perhaps even from a different perspective.

Nothing you can do online is more fulfilling than a rabbit hole. We tend to think of research as a task, particularly one reserved for academia, but it’s also incredibly entertaining.

Celine Nguyen

goes into great detail about the why and how in her essay research as leisure activity and this line sums it up best:

There’s something deeply compelling to me about the idea that research—in some form—can be done by anyone with a serious commitment to intellectual inquiry.

research as leisure activity

My own methods of light research:

• If I don’t know a word: look it up, and write it down.

  • the etymology of words is fun too, and once you begin to learn root words, you expand your recognition beyond the vocabulary you thought you had. I keep etymonline.com bookmarked and is one of my favorite websites. The history of language is actually incredible.

• If I’m unsure about important historical context, research it. Honestly, Wikipedia is fine!

  • My favorite endeavor into historical context while reading was with Matrix by Lauren Groff, a novel about the nun Marie de France that was so thoroughly researched I felt I owed it to the author to get the full experience by doing research myself. Somewhere in the margins of my copy lies an explanation of 12th-century toilets.

• Are there works that the book references or that reference the book? Read, watch, listen to those. By this I mean any other form of media a book itself mentions, as well as film adaptations, book reviews, literary criticism, or other works to which a novel is culturally relevant. I think one of the best things about Spotify is those hyper-specific playlists that the girlies make based on certain books.

Despite a tumultuous reality in which I would be more comfortable allowing my privilege to shield me, I am trying to stay curious about the world and the context in which books exist. Part of this involves paying attention to the news and current events, which I firmly believe we have a responsibility to witness (to a manageable extent, not doom-scrolling), but every bit of earthly joy and humanity, too. I want to pay attention to nature, to the people I meet, everything I consume, my feelings about it all.

And there is so much to read out there besides books, all of which has the potential to make us smarter, more well-rounded thinkers. Of the countless articles, essays, and journals I encounter daily, I read a very small percentage. Who has the time, I tell myself. Everyone has a Substack, everyone fancies themselves a writer. The internet is shouting at me. Still, it is worth sifting through the cacophony of competing voices to find those that resonate with you.

I am trying to think less about myself. I’m trying to view the things I consume through a lens that has nothing to do with me. I am endlessly frustrated by the way so many online readers deem a book “good” or “bad” based on whether they found it relatable or aligned with their values. I am confused by book influencers proclaiming a book is or isn’t worth reading based on their personal experiences — how could any of us have the right!

And to touch on the anti-intellectualism of it all (yes, still, yes, always) we are increasingly incapable of seeing a book’s worth if its message isn’t spelled out for us, and we cannot handle a book making us uncomfortable, whether that’s through morally gray characters or pushing us to shift our world view. God forbid we have to think it over and come to a conclusion ourselves. God forbid a book be open to interpretation. God forbid a book reflects the complicated, multitudinous world it exists in.

find what is truly interesting

Interesting is a subjective word. I could yap all day about black holes, for example, and watch my friends’ eyes glaze over as they retreat into their own fascinations. I love that we all have our niche interests. This is not a detriment to a reading life.

I want to note what I love, or what I feel has swallowed me whole, and lean into it. This is how we discover ourselves, and how we develop our own tastes and preferences outside of what’s trending on social media or sitting atop bestseller lists.

It can be tempting to pick books off of The Lists or the “popular now” display at the bookstore; it’s easy and we get to be part of something bigger, or at least we’re part of something culturally relevant. Often, these books are very good and I would never say they aren’t interesting. I’m a basic reader, and some of my favorite books have been wildly popular ones. However, limiting my selections to the popularity contest that only big marketing budgets can win is just consumerism. It doesn’t get to the core of what I find interesting, and it can’t, because bestseller lists are not giving me enough variety. Ironic, when we are living in a time of too many choices.

But even with options, it’s hard to be discerning when we’re being told who to be and what to do every time we log on. The aestheticization of reading means we do not trust our taste if someone more popular or more cool has taste that seems better.

I miss the days of walking into a bookstore, reading the descriptions of books I’d never heard of, and mulling over which I wanted to take home with me. Not one review or external opinion, other than perhaps another writer’s endorsement on the cover, to influence my interest. Now, I cannot walk into a bookstore without preconceived notions of the majority of the titles, whether they were hyped or not.

When someone asks me if I’ve read a book, my answer is almost always, “no, but I can picture the cover.” I’ve scrolled past it dozens of times, maybe even read a review or two, but couldn’t tell you about it. As much as I’ve loved making friends online, and as much as readers on the internet have broadened my horizons, my experience on Bookstagram has completely changed the way I read.

While we should keep our minds open when determining what is interesting — it can’t only be one genre or one background — we should also let ourselves read the weird shit that doesn’t necessarily play well on the internet or that our friends might not understand. And then we should research the hell out of it. Be weird, be free, and read.

Thank you, as always, for reading. If you’re also struggling with feeling incredibly stupid every time you pick up a book, at least you’re not alone! Come talk to me about what you’re doing to feel smarter! Help me!

1. it’s also an incredible metaphor — stars, of all the symbolic things in the universe, being so reductive.

2. unless it’s for a galley copy where giving a rating is more useful, especially for those I get through NetGalley.

3. I realize that earlier I called myself curious, and I hope you do not think I am implying I am of above-average intelligence because of this. Curiosity and intelligence are not a two-way street. Flat-earthers are also curious, in their own way. All intelligent people are curious, but not all curious people are intelligent, or something.