How to read books

For the past two years i’ve started paying attention to what and how much i read. Forward till today, i’m flabbergasted at how insightful such a small tweak can be. In the article below i want to share my approach and the key learnings I got out of this whole journey.
How it all started
I’ve decided to set annual goals and a tracker of the number of books and the types of books (fiction/non-fiction) I have to read. Initially I’ve had my doubts as besides a few vanity metrics I had little clarity on why I am doing this and where it’s supposed to lead me.
I was simply following an assumption that if you pay a little more awareness to your routine habits you could discover something of value.
Hence, I’ve created a basic google sheet and laid out the list of books I want to read. To have more transparency — i’ve also tracked whatever else I could track like the number of pages, book format (e.g. audio/paperback), reading month e.t.c. The only thing i did afterwards was to update this sheet once every 1–2 months.
The results were quite surprising.

Here are the best bits that i’ve learned over the past two years of sticking to this practice.
1 — I’ve never read that much
Over the course of those two years I’ve read 50+ books. Literally from cover to cover. With the busy lifestyle and demanding work I was still able to carve out some time to reading daily. The main driver was the sheer sense of adding new scores to the spreadsheet.
A little bit of stats
I’ve finished 73% of the planned to read books and dropped 27% — and I’ll explain you later on why that’s totally ok
Deeper dive into the metrics
27% of those books were fiction
73% were non-fictio
And that is the balance i want to shift towards fiction. Sometimes you can learn more from a good work of fiction than from a multiple pop non-fiction books (the sole purpose of which is author’s self-promo).
64% of books i’ve consumed through audio
36% through reading paperback
Yes, I consider an audio source as a totally legit way of consuming a book. However, it might not suit everyone due to modality preferences (audio/visual/sensory). Personally, I have an annual Audible subscription and totally love it.
2 — You try to resolve your own questions while reading
Each book is a dialogue between you and the author. Those “Aha!” moments when you discover an insight/a new angle to look at the known problem in reality are answers to the questions you’ve been asking yourself for some time either consciously or unconsciously. If the question was posed unconsciously, you are shattering the “glass walls” that you were not aware even existed.
3 — Drop the books that do not speak to you … and fast
Drop the books that do not answer your questions. There are millions of books out there, your time is limited and if the book doesn’t resonate you will not remember up to 95–99% of what you read a year after. Literally. It is a waste of time.
How this works? The hippocampus takes bits of information from your prefrontal cortex (short-term operational memory) and converts those signals into long-term memories. But for that to happen, you need to give your hippocampus a hand by paying honest attention. That usually doesn’t happen when you’re bored of your mind and your brain literally discards the information that you’ve read as not important.
That’s why you can remember random bits from books — those were exactly the times that what you’ve read resonated with you.
3 — Each book is a framework
Let’s face it. You will not remember roughly 95% of what you’ve read a year after. Your long-term memory will drop most of the details as not important and the characters in the book will fade with time. Even the long-term memories are not fixed and evaporate over time (approx 50 years), but that’s a topic for a different discussion.
What remains are the bits of the framework that you’ve distilled after reading a book. Framework in that context is a set of principles that you’ve internalized and added to your existing beliefs and behaviour patterns.
E.g. Matthew Walker — Why We Sleep
Q: What’s a good duration of sleep
A: Sleep less then 7–8 hours and you’ll die prematurely
Wow that’s very clear and resonates with me
Q: Are night owls/ morning larks a habit or a physiological trait?
A: It’s a fixed physiological trait and for efficiency it’s better to adapt your work cycles to your circadian rhythm and not the other way around
This is a simplified example, but you get the point. Typically such a framework consists of 5–10 key bits that you’ve internalized and stored in the long-term memory. Having such a framework allows you to still brag that you’ve read a book even after a few years. But most importantly, compilation of such frameworks allows you to lead life with more awareness.
4 — Improved decision making
Lens through which I look at the world has changed. It’s difficult to attribute it solely to the books as there’s no direct causation. However, many times I’ve experienced random ideas pop-up that were a by-product from a vast array of such internalized frameworks.
I’ve experienced shifts on multiple levels:
complexity of the world has increased — there are much more shades and I’m less prone to black&white biases;
empathy towards people and understanding and accepting the points of view, which are completely foreign of my own;
ability to make more informed decisions while knowing the limitations of the brain and the subconscious.
But most importantly, my self-awareness has increased, I’ve changed my attitudes towards what I eat, how I sleep, train and balance work and life.
All in all, this was a great ride. I still plan to stick to this practice and plow through more books at a faster pace (while dropping the ones that do not stimulate me neither mentally, nor emotionally) and see where this leads me further...