One simple method for reading more books

Jul 09, 2024

Eliminate sources of pleasure besides reading

I go through periods when I’m reading a lot (like now) and periods when I’m reading very little (like the full month it took me to get through Wings of the Dove). During the reading-very-little eras, I sometimes think I’m facing an issue of distractedness or lack of focus, and I wonder Isn’t there some course of study or set of exercises I could undertake that would render me able to focus even on things that are very difficult and/or boring to read?

Short answer: such a course of study doesn’t really exist. Usually when I look through books on the topic, they recommend meditation, mindfulness, and various life-hacks to banish digital distractions. And I diligently pursue these tricks (sometimes) and get some modest results, I’ll go from reading a half hour a day to reading, like, forty-five minutes a day. But during my reading rampages, I’ll often (according to the stats function on my e-reader) be reading two or three or four hours in a day. Like, this is way beyond the kind of increase you get from simple life-hacks. You’re not gonna 3x your reading by just putting your phone in a different room when you read.

So what’s the difference? What’s my trick?

I think it really lies in one thing. During my lots-of-reading periods I reorganize my life to banish forms of pleasure besides reading.

This of course takes lots of discipline, and this discipline inevitably relaxes (or I discover some new form of distraction that slips through my cracks), but it’s during those several-week-long periods that I’m able to do my most difficult reading. To be more specific, there is no way I could’ve read Proust if I hadn’t quit playing video games that year. It’s not that someone can’t theoretically balance reading Proust and exploring the wastelands of New Vegas—it’s just that in practice Fallout: New Vegas is so much more engrossing than Proust that you’re simply not gonna do the latter if you have the option of doing the former.1

Despite all our rhetoric about the high-minded pleasures we get from the written word, I think we all know that reading isn’t nearly as absorbing as scrolling Twitter, playing video games, re-watching The Office, or obsessively checking one’s Substack stats.

And that’s probably a good thing! All four of those activities have a slot-machine-like quality: they give intermittent, unpredictable rewards. This makes them addictive. Reading doesn’t give a reward—instead you create the reward yourself, by entering into some kind of communion with the book. It’s a pleasure of a fundamentally different kind.2 Reading is a pleasure, but it’s neither an intense nor a reliable one. And yet, reading is more rewarding than many pleasures that are ultimately much more intense. We read not merely for pleasure, but to enrich ourselves.

Forcing yourself to read books can kind of work, but it’s a struggle—what’s easier and more profitable is to stop yourself from doing anything fun that’s not reading books. If you starve your brain of other amusements, eventually it’ll be like…I might as well read a book.

In trying to formulate these thoughts I kept thinking of the 4th-century B.C. Chinese philosopher Lord Shang. This is the minister who reorganized the Qin state, creating the militarized instrument that the First Emperor would use to re-unify China and bring to a close the Warring States period. The thrust of Lord Shang’s advice was that a state becomes strong through two activities: agriculture and fighting. But both activities are taxing and frightening, and people would generally prefer not to engage in them.

These two [tilling and fighting] are something that a filial son would find hard to do for his parents and a loyal minister would find hard to do for his ruler. Now if you want to encourage the multitudes to do whatever filial sons and loyal ministers find difficult, then I, your minister, think that it is impossible unless you coerce them with penalties and encourage them with rewards….Hence, my teaching causes those among the people who seek benefits to gain them nowhere else but in tilling and those who want to avoid harm to escape nowhere but to war. Within the borders, everyone among the people first devotes himself to tilling and warfare and only then obtains whatever pleases him. Hence, though the territory is small, grain is plenty, and though the people are few, the army is powerful. He who is able to implement these two within the borders will accomplish the way of Hegemon and Monarch.

Similarly, people just want to enjoy themselves and be absorbed in something. If there are easy routes to absorption at hand, then they’ll take them. But if they ban themselves from watching TV, playing games, posting on or using Twitter, checking their stats, checking their email, idly texting their friends, or buying stuff online, then their only path to absorption will be through reading.

Limit the amount of time spent writing

Incidentally, when other distractions are eliminated, a writer’s biggest distraction can often be the act of writing itself. After doing this for twenty years, I often find writing to be easy, pleasurable, and absorbing. It’s simple to plunge into the act of writing something, just for the sake of writing, without a plan, project, ambition or goal. During the month I was avoiding Wings of the Dove, I wrote reams of stories, blog posts, and journal entries. For this reason I try not to write except during working hours—any idea that’s any good will keep until then, and oftentimes an attempt to write outside my normal hours is nothing more than attempt to distract myself from a book I really ought to be reading.

At times I’ve considered reorganizing my day so that I read during business hours—turning reading into my job—and write only during my spare time, but I haven’t yet been brave enough.

On mentally incompetent rulers

A pleasure I’ve recently forced myself to forgo is the pleasure of commenting on current affairs, but I will note that America is not the first nation that’s faced the problem of a ruler who’s mentally unfit to rule.

The Memoir of Lady Hyegyeong is a set of four memoirs written by a Korean noblewoman (wife of a Crown Prince, daughter of a Prime Minister, mother and grandmother to two kings). She is writing to exonerate various disgraced members of her family and to educate her grandson and future rules of Korea. She was not writing for publication—the books were distributed in manuscript form only amongst her family, and although their existence and their contents were known, they were only published in (I think) 1940.

If you pick up the book, I recommend reading only the fourth memoir (the memoir of 1805) and possibly the first one (the memoir of 1795). The key thing about this woman, which any Korean would probably know, was that her husband, Crown Prince Sado, was reputedly insane and was killed in a bizarre and gruesome manner by his father, the King. Afterwards, Lady Hyegeong and her family fell into disgrace and were persecuted for years (an uncle and a brother of hers were executed on what she claims are trumped-up allegations of corruption / treason). The persecution ended when her son came to power, but started again when he died and left a regent to rule during the minority of his son, her grandson.

The details of Sado's insanity and the reason for his execution were shameful and kept clouded in secrecy, which makes the first three memoirs pretty confusing. The good stuff comes in the fourth, which details the nature of his insanity. Apparently, he would just...kill people. Serious Nero stuff. He cut off a palace eunuch's head and displayed it to her. He beat his favorite concubine to death. He would kill animals, palace staff, eunuchs, rape and kill women. He would disappear and wander the city disguised as a commoner. He owned lots of weapons and carried lots of weaponry at all times.

The Prince often summoned blind fortunetellers. When they said something he did not like, he killed them. Many medical doctors, astronomers, and servants were also killed or injured. It reached the point where every day many dead bodies and victims of injury had to be carried out from the palace. Both in and out of the palace, people were terrified and angry, not knowing when they might meet their death or where they might find safe haven.

Finally his own mother pleads with his father (the King) to end her son’s life:

Lady Sŏnhŭi went to see him there. In tears, she said, “The horrible disease ever worsens; there is no hope. As a mother, this humble person can hardly bear to say this, but it is only right that Your Majesty secure the dynasty by protecting your sagacious person and the Grand Heir. Please make this decision.” She continued, “With the affection of a father, Your Majesty might hesitate to do this. But it is all disease; he is no criminal. Though he cannot be saved, he cannot be blamed. Your Majesty must settle this

The Crown Prince’s father ordered him into attendance and had a rice chest (literally a chest for storing rice) presented to the prince. He asked the Prince to climb into the rice chest. Then he sealed the chest and had it carried upstairs and covered with blankets—the Prince died nine days later.

This was apparently done because the other accepted method of killing wayward royals (forcing them to drink poison) would've carried connotations of criminality and would've resulted in the execution as well of the Prince's children and wives, including the boy who would become the future king. Thus, this gruesome method of killing was an act of veiled mercy. These are the dynamics that Lady Hyegyeong carefully elaborates upon in her fourth memoir. She explains that Sado was an ill man, and that all pitied him, and that this execution was carefully aforethought by his father.

The book sheds some light, I think, on the dynamics of other famously messy royal courts, particularly that of the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius. Both of them disposed of numerous potential heirs. Both of them fell prey (reputedly) to powerful advisors who either dispatched or tricked them into dispatching potential heirs. It's fascinating that even in relatively strong monarchies, there are so many undercurrents that shape court politics, and that it's possible to be, say, the mother of the heir to the throne, and yet still be poor, still be heavily constrained in where you can live, and still be unable to protect your relatives from being executed. The portrait of court politics is unrivaled—I've never read anything like it—and I think any student of history would enjoy it. I did find the middle two memoirs to be a little too detailed, too into the weeds, too concerned with exculpating figures we've never heard of. And the first memoir, which details her early life and married life, is marred by vagueness about Sado's behavior. I recommend reading the fourth and then the first.

What's interesting is that this memoir is so different, in tone and content, from the three most famous memoirs by politically-powerful East Asian women: Sei Shonagan, Lady Murasaki, and the Sarashina diarist were all influential women in court, serving in powerful ceremonial roles, but their diaries are literary and allusive, concerned almost entirely with impressions and glimpses of daily life. Lady Hyegyeong's memoir is, in contrast, kind of like the memoir you might imagine Katherine of Aragon or Jane Seymour or Marie Antoinette writing. Careful and self-interested, but full of worldly detail.

Woman of Letters

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