Reading 1 book a week for 52 weeks

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1. There’s a lot of annoying stuff and noise in our digital world; reading helps to cut through this noise because competent authors are fairly reliable sources
2. This challenge is awesome because it changed the way that I think, have conversations and do university; it made me appreciate the depth and complexity of the beautiful but mad world around me
3. Reading diversely helps with intellectual maturity, humility, and deep understanding, but can provide no material gain; in fact it usually costs a lot of time and a moderate about of money
4. Reading can get in the way of living life, but it shouldn’t because there is so much in life you cannot learn from a book
5. Reading shouldn't get in the way of learning from others; there is nothing worse than a patronising voice who thinks they know stuff because they’ve read books
6. There are genuine tips here that helped me with my reading along the way

I wanted to complete this challenge because I wanted to learn about the world. We live in a world bombarded with information (1) and a lot of it is bad and noisy information. Time, money and genetics aside, all behaviour is belief driven (interesting side, your genetics determines to a large degree whether you actually find reading interesting (2). For me personally, though, the biggest barrier to my learning and education has all too often been a consistent negative self-belief. My main problem was that I held myself back with the belief that I wasn't clever or smart enough to engage with the big ideas. Well, age 23 and come lockdown, I wanted to leave this belief behind - I wanted to get educated. I wanted to read the things that had been written! Reading was my way of cutting through the noise and getting educated.

Probably you don’t need to read a book a week to exactly experience these things; this is just how it is for me. The most profound effect I have experienced as a result of this challenge is how my thinking has changed and how this then relates to university work, and conversations. Now, ideas seem to connect in my mind easier, linking together and finding connections to other related ideas. Improved thinking is a great form self improvement because it is built-in. Built-in self improvement is invaluable because I carry it around with me wherever I go, no-one can take it away from me, and I can have access to it in all my future social interactions: with work, in interviews and in conversations.

Reading widely helped me realise something often attributed to Socrates: I know nothing. Reading books revealed to me the fact that there is so much out there to know, and so much that I do not know. It also taught me that all the things I do not know are the birthplace for all my new knowledge. So, it's true that I don't know anything; but it's also true that the knowledge is out there waiting in books for me to go out and read! The idea that I could learn about the world through reading to me was very empowering (3).

My favourite effect is what one psychologist (4) calls the righteous mind: we all think we’re right and generally seek out information and people that confirm our beliefs. Yet, reading diverse things teaches you to step outside of what you know and listen to the other side. More often than not - though not always - I’ve read something from the “other side” and changed my mind because their arguments actually make sense.

The truth is that all of us are stuck inside our own brains. Reading is one way that two minds can meet. When we read we temporally stepping outside our own isolated brain, and briefly step into the brain of another. Realising that we have righteous minds, myself and yourself included, is a step I believe people must make if they are ever going to be intellectually mature. Reading, I think, massively helps with this process.

Sometimes I talk to people and realise they have not reached intellectual maturity. They are convinced that the Conservative or Labour Party is terrible or evil. That if the “other side” had the control, then the world would be a better place. Perhaps it would, but intellectual maturity means realising that if there is some truth in my point of view, then there is likely some truth in somebody else's point of view. Further, it means that I cannot meaningfully criticise something I don't understand (5). So I might think there are problems with capitalism, but have I ever read a book about the economy or economics? Or, have I ever tried to understand what conservatism is, or why people might like it, or why it exists in this world? Intellectual maturity means understanding the contradictory arguments in order to build a stronger argument, often synthesising multiple points of view, recognising that one idea: Marxism, Conservatism, Science etc., is unlikely to hold the full truth or solution.

Intellectual maturity is more of an ideal to aim for, rather than an everyday practice because it's so easy to jump to conclusions. And we do need conclusions, it's just important to realise the fragility of single minded knowledge when other valid viewpoints also exist.

Knowledge requires communication between diverse people, but also diverse ideas

Here, I think, reading can help. I learned to love stepping outside my mind, and into the world of others. Interestingly, this is a key idea in psychotherapy and empathy in general.

Later, we'll see that reading can (at least, has the potential to) engender empathy

Something else reading lots has done is instil intellectual humility in me. We live in a world with limitations - mortality being the main one. All our decisions have alternative choices and costs. If we do something we pay a price, and we also pay a price for doing nothing (6). When we are lonely we want a relationship; we solve the problem of loneliness by getting a partner, but this solution creates a new problem: maintaining a healthy relationship. Even our solutions to problems, then, generate new problems. Fortunately, problems are worth solving because some (maintaining relationships) are better than others (loneliness).

Unfortunately, there are some problems that are perennial - they continue to exist over time. Our solutions do get better over time, but we do not eliminate these problems completely. Governing a country fairly, conflict between people and ensuring that there is enough work, housing, food for everybody within a society, are examples of these. They have always existed in human societies and probably always will because they are incredibly difficult and dynamic problems.

Many, many people have attempted to address these ills in the world in most places at most times. They exist today not because of an unjust world but because we are human, and we live in a world with limitations and costs placed on all of us, continuously. Reading books helps to give a sense of the depth of the world and how difficult it is to answer some of our most pressing problems. It also reveals the ingenious thinkers and ideas that have made our world more equal, safer, and how good ideas help create a better world to inhabit (7).

The world gets better because we apply competent ideas to it, and reading demonstrates how past ideas have failed, while others have succeeded in remarkable ways.

In business, ideas get evaluated in terms of their success. In a free market, bad ideas or scammers will tend to get rooted out of the market by losing money; business simply has no mercy and moves on. On the other side, better ideas and products will make profit, continuing business (8). Better still, in a consumerist society, people can withhold their custom and directly hold businesses to account. It's not a perfect system, but its better than in the world of ideas.

Ideas are very rarely held to account in the same or even in a similar way. Nazism is a good example of an idea held to account, we simply recognise it as wrong. Or do we? In the West, mostly yes - although there are Neo-Nazis in relatively small numbers, but they are generally considered extreme. In India, however, Hitler's work Mein Kampf is a best seller and Nazism receives support in the millions. This is partly because the Nazi symbol idealised the Aryran race, bastardising the original Buddhist symbol. The Aryans were a nomadic people of Northern Eurasia. They are important figures in Indian history and Hitler's work has been seen as glorifying Aryan history, and hence the ideas are popular.

We learn from history in different ways, depending on what it means to us, what we've been taught, and what we've read.

Marxism is another example of an idea often not held to account. This is despite the fact that Marxist ideas are responsible for more deaths than Nazism, and yet their ideas are still believed in the minds of educated men and women across the world (9). These ideas are particularly believed by intellectuals, the very people who are paid for their proficiency in evaluating ideas.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, citing intellectuals before him, points towards the fact that ideas are thought up in the minds of humans, often in a dusty professor's study, and then implemented at scale. In dictatorships, single ideas can be implemented to the detriment of millions. Decision makers in Hitler's Germany, Mao's China and Stalin's Russia (10) were responsible for the deaths of up 100 million people. Even in modern democracies like the United Kingdom, the idea to defend Western values, in the war against terror, has led to the death of about 1 million Iraqi's.

Reading is an essential mechanism for spreading good ideas, critiquing bad ones, and attempting to learn from history. Around 2,500 years ago, Herodotus, the old-school Greek historian, wrote about the Peloponnesian war for this very reason. Despite the countless wars since Herodotus, humans have made admirable progress. In Western Europe, it's been about 26,000 days since the Second World War. Each day we live marks our longest ever continuous and historic streak of peace - it continues, one day at a time.

There exists an excellent argument to further suggest that we are, as a human species, living in the most peaceful time ever; violence has long been in decline.

One of my favourite ideas about reading is that it allows us to walk metaphorically in the shoes of others. Pinker (11), citing others, discusses the fact that when books began to get spread around and stories told through print, we walked for the first time in the shoes of the slave, of the person persecuted for religion.

The best example I can think of is All Quiet of the Western Front (12), where the reader is taken on a journey to Germany in the First World War, German teenage schoolmates are called forward to fight against the British and Allies. The German author shows us how young German teenagers who had aspirations at schoo were sucked into the mindless, bloody and shocking killing fields that were the trenches. It highlights the futility of war, the tragedy of it all and shows us the humanity of the so called evil other side. It also shows us the massive complexity in the world because so many Germans and Brits today will have had family members who lost their lives fighting in this war - to say nothing of the Second World War. Similarly, Kiterunner show us Afghanistan, and Huckleberry Finn - Slavery.

It is so important to walk in the shoes of another, even if only through a story.

One great American historian (13) advised his readers that they probably wouldn’t get much in the way of material gain, but that readers would come to appreciate the deep complexity and beauty in the world. Books are the places where our greatest human minds have sat down and tried to work some of this stuff out, and you can read about it! Reading like a madman has taught me that if I want to learn about statistics, evolutionary theory, the world wars, why the Europeans conquered the native Americans (and not the other way around), animals, human nature, psychology and mental health - then I will have much to gain by going out and reading a book.

I think about reading, as others do, as a conversation. Reading is the meeting of minds. I sit down with Dawkins (14) and Darwin (15) to learn about Evolutionary Biology, I listen to a gay man discuss his hardships growing up in a world that doesn’t understand him (16), and join the adventure of an 18 year old who one decided to walk from Holland to Turkey back in 1933 (17). I love joining these conversations and actively extracting out what is relevant, interesting, or meaningful to me. I’m no expert, but I do not allow negative self-belief to stop me joining in their conversations.

• I got a bit obsessed with reading and probably acted too seriously for a year trying to get this done. I also wanted to do really well in my degree, and purposely avoided seeking out romance to pursue my “serious” reading. I’m really glad I read the books, but moving forward I would prefer to have more of a balanced life where being silly, having fun, and experiencing relationships can meaningfully happen alongside reading like a maniac and getting the benefits described above.
• It takes time. You’ll have to read in the morning or the evening every night, and practice doing a bit less socialising. Discipline = freedom. Well, it kinda does. If you want to read 52 books in a year, some kind of schedule will only help, more below in the “Tips” section. I did this while studying for a part-time masters degree.

• We all have limitations and constraints to work within. During this challenge at one stage I was claiming benefits - getting paid by the government - while studying and using the leftover time I had from studying to read books, rather than go out and seeking work experience. This might be morally dubious, but I was working within my limitations and rationally choosing how to use my time and resources. I think doing this with serious commitments like kids and regular work would be much more difficult, but not impossible.
• It isn’t free. Unless you download the books for free of course. I got free audiobooks from YouTube and created a few Audible accounts to get free trials. Otherwise I bought books. I also sold some books back on eBay which made a loss, but did make some money back. It is also possible to illegally download basically any book you want; look it up, if you want.
• They take up space. A Kindle or something similar is a great way to read and to save space. Kindles have built-in function which allows you to tap on a word which takes you instantly to it's definition. This saves a lot of time and I highly recommend it. I also love reading classic books, but these do add up; knowledge gets heavy and somewhat expensive!

A German philosopher once said that reading too much was an impediment to learning (18). This is because there are things you simply cannot learn from books, and sometimes what you read in books can actually blind you to the world. Schopenhauer urged people to think for themselves before filling their minds with the ideas of others. Similarly, Plato imagined a world where philosopher-kings ruled, but not before they went out into the world and learned by doing. When reading things, the reader has a responsibility to think for themselves and evaluate the truth of the ideas on the page.

For example, readers of the Communist Manifesto must decide if they agree with the proposition put forward: working people will use violence to create a more equal and better world (19). This is a favourite question of mine to members of student Marxist groups because violent, bloody and ruthless revolution characterise all former Communist states - although this often began with educated people. Learning new things and thinking for yourself are different things and ultimately, both are pretty difficult. Being aware of the difference is helpful for intellectual growth.

There is nothing worse than somebody who thinks they know shit cos they’ve read some books, and who thinks too much of themselves because they’ve read books. Reading is great, but don’t be a dick about it, patronise people or forget to go out there and live - because what you can learn from books is a only small section of what life has to offer. Substituting living for reading for me is not a good idea. You will not learn to ride a bike, listen to others with empathy, stand up for yourself, have great sex, or have meaningful relationships by reading books. It’s important to remember that all the people who have written knowledge down also lived lives where they went out there and engaged with the world.

Listening to others who haven't read lots is often a good idea, because they will probably teach you things you cannot otherwise learn. One of my favourite books is Faust (20), because one of the key themes describes the fact that you cannot learn everything from books and you simply must go out into the world to learn as well, even if you have to sell your soul to the devil. Orwell (21) describes something similar, where he criticises upper class left-leaning people for being snobbish to others (working-class type people), rather than actually taking an interest in them and broadening their own knowledge. If you actually cared, he said, you'd show an interest, ask questions, and want to find out about their lives - not lecture them.

A key libertarian idea was once put forward by the economist Hayek which coincides well with psychotherapy: knowledge is distributed in society. If 100% knowledge exist in the society, no one person can command more than 1% of that knowledge at any given time. People in society have all sorts of unique and interesting knowledge because it's scattered about between them. This is why free market ideas are so powerful and convincing - they encourage people to make their own decisions based on the relevant information they have access to. This idea converges brilliantly with the virtue of why it's so important to listen to others, a key insight of modern psychotherapy (also an ancient idea).

I used spreadsheets to monitor my reading progress and divided up each book to work out how many pages I would need to read a day to finish it in a week. For example, Evolutionary Psychology: a beginner’s guide is 165 pages long. 165/7 = 24 pages a day.

In truth, I learned to love the spreadsheet and enjoyed chopping up the books into chunks to read. I read using a pen as a marker and followed the words with my eyes. This helps to concentrate because our eyes are attracted to motion, and makes reading for me more efficient and ultimately easier.

Above, pomo = pomodoro.

This refers to the pomodoro technique (22), in which you read or do something for 25 minutes then take a 5 minute break. This technique was developed by psychologists exploiting the research finding that we tend to remember things in the beginning (primacy) and the end (recency), forgetting stuff in the middle. By chunking focused time into 25 mins, you create more beginnings and endings, making it more likely you’ll remember stuff. It also acts as a useful way to break stuff down. This explains why cramming without breaks ain't a good way to study. However, if it feels good, you're probably in a flow state, and should keep going without interruption!

Improving reading speed can improve comprehension because you are more focused. Also, we learn to read through "sub-vocalisation" - saying the words in our head as we read. But you don't need to do this, and can practice reading through recognising the words without saying them. In my experience, this works for easier things to read but some works simply deserve to read slowly and not sped through. There is no point in speeding through a book if you finish it without much understanding of what just happened. That said, it is worth trying to improve reading speed and judging for yourself how well you understand stuff when speeding up.

Reading is an active process; generally, the more effort you put in, more notes you take, more you think about what your reading, actively ask questions about what you're reading, use a pen as a marker for reading, test your reading speed, the more you'll get out of reading!

Often people say that they "don't have the time" for X. I think this is a mistake somewhat because we actually create or make time for things - time doesn't happen passively.

We carve out time for the things that we want or need to do in the day.

To read lots of books, I had to carve out the time - create the time - somehow, and actively seek it out. Being a young student, who doesn't need to make that much money a week to support myself, this was doable. I am sympathetic to people with more responsibilities, but I think there always ways to actively create time for things, including reading more books!

"I don't have time for X" in my mind often translates to "I am actively choosing to pursue other activities instead of doing XYZ".

My favourite books are written by people who attempt to bridge Art and Science, Psychology and Philosophy, Culture and Biology.

We are so lucky to live in a time where artists and scientists regularly publish their work to wide audiences. And because they are able to access and disseminate their ideas fast and at cheap prices, they are able to receive more timely feedback. I suspect this means that the standard of writing - and hence reading - has vastly improved. For example, Darwin's On the Origin on Species was written for a lay audience. I read it and it's pretty damn difficult although I can understand the gist. Some modern science books have vastly improved in writing style which makes things easier to understand and better to read!

In my understanding of human history, there has never been a better time to read books and educate yourself. I loved the whole challenge and would recommend it to anybody interested in trying it! It has made a huge impact on how I think, see the world and communicate with others.

As above, even reading 5, 10 or even 1 book a year more than you do currently is a great way to broaden your horizons! Generally, there can be a lifetime's worth of knowledge in a single book so reading it cover to cover can be incredibly beneficial. I have often read a book with the intention of learning about X and instead learned about Y! You only get this unintended benefit by reading cover to cover.

In a noisy world, read good books.

For me, I want to read 52 books again this year. But I want easier books! And I will write 1 blog post a week. Because all this reading has given me many thoughts, and now - I want to write!

1: Kwik, Limitless (2020)

2: Plomin, Blueprint: how our DNA makes us who we are (2018)

3: Adler & Van Doren, How to Read a Book (1972)

4: Jonathon Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012)

5: Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order (2021)

6: Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (2000)

7: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2012)

8: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: things that gain from disorder (2012)

9: Thoms Sowell, Intellectuals and Society (2015)

10: Isaiah Berlin, The Purpose of Philosophy (2000)

11: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2012)

12: Enrich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1928)

13: Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas Of All Time (2002)

14: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (2016)

15: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (2006/1859)

16: Joe Perez, Soulfully Gay (2007)

17: Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (1977)

18: Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1962)

19: Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (2000/1848)

20: Goethe, Faust (2012/1790)

21: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

22: The Pomodoro technique, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNBmG24djoY&ab_channel=MedSchoolInsiders

1. Enemies: a love story
2. Superforecasting: the science and art of prediction
3. The descent of man
4. Birdsong
5. The adventures of huckleberry finn
6. All quiet on the western front
7. Beyond order
8. The birth of the mind
9. The happiness hypothesis
10. The coddling of the American mind
11. Evolutionary psychology: a beginner’s guide
12. The power threat meaning framework
13. On tyranny
14. Social constructionism
15. Explaining postmodernism
16. Nietzsche and the Nazis
17. Basic economics
18. Guns, germs and steel
19. The black swan
20. Freakonomics
21. Faust
22. Kafka: short stories
23. Nano comes to life
24. Soulfully gay
25. The bell jar
26. On writing
27. Rebooting AI
28. 10 arguments to delete your social media accounts right now
29. Beyond freedom and dignity
30. My life with the chimpanzees
31. The story of philosophy
32. A history of the internet and the digital future
33. Human universals
34. The greatest minds and ideas of all time
35. Thinking through cultures
36. The structure of scientific revolutions
37. Psychology in crisis
38. Thinking fast and slow
39. Blueprint: how DNA makes us who we are
40. Henry V
41. How to read a book
42. Digital minimalism
43. Drugs without the hot air
44. Why the germans do it better
45. When in germany, do as the germans do
46. The brain
47. The idiot
48. Eothen
49. The seven human needs
50. What is life?
51. On bullshit
52. A day in the life of ivan denisovich

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