Book Polygamy
Can't Help Myself
I sleep with books, multiple books.
Right now, I’m sleeping with The 5 Types of Wealth, and Rooms of Their Own: Where Great Writers Write.
I also spend time with different books throughout the day. I’ll have breakfast with Why Design Matters or Art for Money. Around lunch, I’ll have a brief daily encounter with Good Prose, and if I want to distract myself in the afternoon, I’ll go see The Book of Japanese Folklore.
The long holds, held gazes, and fingers brushing the pages are now enjoyed by multiple books throughout the day.
I am now a Book Polygamist.
Remember Book Chugging?
A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece called Book Chugging. I railed against the culture of performative reading that turns books into pieces of content that we gorge down our brains, as if we were at a frat party trying to impress our crush.1
The second part of that piece presented an alternative way to read, which I called Book Tasting. It encouraged “slower, intentional, and present enjoyment of what you are reading. It dismisses the need for speed, and prioritizes enjoyment and active engagement.” It took me a couple of years to follow my own advice.
The idea of going slow and steady with a book is alluring, the virtue easy to grasp. But everything about our current environment prizes speed and efficiency. The fable of the Turtle and The Hare is memorable, but the moral of the story is dismissed as a fantasy, not practical in a world where speed always wins.
Speed Demons
We are a culture primed for speed. Whether it’s getting to inbox zero, hurtling through daily action items, beating the Google Maps time estimate on our commute, making a meal under one episode of Friends, or watching TikToks at 3x speed—in our Drive to Survive, speed is a virtue.
It's also the very thing that burns us out. Ask anyone who has ever taken a sabbatical or an extended break from the corporate world, and one of the first things they notice is how primed for running on overdrive their nervous system is. These become our defaults: the reflex to respond immediately to that Slack message, the need to get through family time quickly so you have time to do one more thing for work before going to bed. Expediency bleeds into all other areas of our lives, and we don't notice life turning into a blur because we think we are doing the right thing. Achieving! Performing! Executing!
Our speed-first culture has also influenced our reading habits. There are about a dozen book summary apps and services, like Blinkist, which has become the SparkNotes of the iPhone era. The gist is now worth more than the prose.
If you actually have to read a book, good luck having the attention span to finish it. Our shortened attention span has become a big enough issue that even elite universities are adjusting the amount of reading they assign because students don’t arrive prepared to read books.2
Worse yet, reading is basically dead among teenagers. The American Time Use Survey found that teens aged 15-19 read only 8 minutes per day.3 My main suspicion is that reading's delayed gratification feels too slow for a generation that spends close to 6 hours daily on apps designed for instant dopamine hits.
The recognition about the subtle ways we are hurried through this precious and singular journey called life that has led me to finally take my own medicine and change my reading habits.
How I Read…Now
It took me nearly two months to finish reading Debbie Millman’s Why Design Matters. The book features transcripts from interviews of Debbie’s eponymous podcast, which profiles interesting artists and creatives. I decided I was going to read one interview a day, no less, no more. I usually did this after breakfast, turning it into a daily reading ritual. And I started writing quotes and observations about each artist interviewed.
It was because of my slow, intentional reading that I went down the rabbit hole of legendary designer Milton Glaser; immediately started reading Esther Perel's State of Affairs after reading her interview; and took a drawing class from cartoonist Lynda Barry after being inspired by her words.
This new way of reading alkalinizes my life, bringing a chemical balance to the speed by which I experience the world. Part of reading intentionally has been a departure from treating books as levels in video games to be completed in a sequence, but different views of a kaleidoscope offering new insights and wisdom. I’ve come to embrace my book polygamy as a way to experience the world more richly.
I’ve also abandoned the idea that I have to read. As a writer it can feel like heresy to not make reading a part of your craft. But it’s all about the framing: I don’t read because I have to read. I read because being a writer is my highest purpose, and reading is part of mastering the craft. Reading aligns with my values willingly, not by force.
I'm also reading slowly and interacting with the text. I fill the pages with post-its and annotations, and keep notebooks where I write down quotes, passages, and summaries of what I learn.4 If I only get through five pages in 20 minutes, I no longer berate myself, nor do I imagine myself with a 'dunce' hat because I'm a slow reader. I've surrendered to the fact that no matter how many speed reading courses I've taken, I'm not a fast reader, but instead of that being a weakness, I revel in my molasses-like speed.
Expand Your World
Not everyone needs to be a book polygamist. You may prefer monogamous devotion and throw yourself fully into the latest Sarah Maas fantasy novel, or the practical guidance of Atomic Habits. Whether it’s one book or a few, revel in the intimacy with words.
Because here's what happens in that intimate space between reader and text: We discover universal truths wrapped in stories of dragons and wizards. We find practical wisdom that reshapes our daily lives. We recognize ourselves in strangers' memories of love and loss. But with each new book, we expand the very boundaries of our thought. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein understood, the limits of our language are the limits of our world – and in an age where our thoughts are increasingly compressed into tweets and Instagram Reels, the act of deep reading becomes a form of resistance.
This is why I've embraced my literary promiscuity.5 Each book I invite into my life expands my world and its resolution. Most importantly, in our culture of perpetual acceleration, this might be the most radical act of all: to slow down, to savor, to let words and ideas take root and bloom in indeterminate inflorescence.
On your way out:
-Thank you to for your help with this piece.
-I’ll be making some slight changes to this newsletter in the coming days. Stay tuned!
Not quite a frat party, but during my exchange in Italy, our exchange class went to an “unlimited wine dinner.” In the hopes of impressing an Italian girl named Valentina (of course), I competed against a Canadian guy chugging a carafe full of wine. Two lessons there: Never compete against a Canadian/Australian/Irish in any drinking game. Women aren’t generally impressed if you can chug wine, unless you are in Game of Thrones, probably.
Writing down long quotes/passages is my own lite version of copywork, which is a tactic writers use to “adopt” the style of another writer and through writing it out, get a feel for why the syntax or words on a sentence resonated.
Alternative subtitle for this piece: “Promiscuous boy” -Nelly Furtado
"Ask anyone who has ever taken a sabbatical or an extended break from the corporate world, and one of the first things they notice is how primed for running on overdrive their nervous system is"
I kid you not, my first 2 months of sabbatical I only knew how to measure my worth by having a productivity spreadsheet that mirrored the same style as the one I kept for myself at work. And I re-watched all the TV shows that made me anxious, like Breaking Bad and Severance. It was like I had to feel that way to feel normal.
Ooooooo he's promiscuous for paperbacks