I have a confession. For years, I approached reading like a chore list. The goal was to clear the backlog. I’d finish a book, check it off some mental spreadsheet, and feel a brief flicker of accomplishment before immediately worrying about the next title on the pile. I read fast. I remembered broad themes. But I rarely felt anything. The whole process had become transactional, a quiet race against no one, and it was making me enjoy reading less and less.
Then, about a year ago, I got lost down one of those internet rabbit holes. You know the kind. You start looking for a specific recipe, end up reading about the history of saffron, and three hours later you’re on a personal website from someone you’ve never met. That’s how I found a blog by a guy named Chakir. There was no grand mission statement, no pop-ups, just a quiet corner of the web with long-form thoughts. I clicked on an old post, almost at random. It was a reflection on a single chapter from a novel I’d read and summarily dismissed years before. He spent over a thousand words on just a few pages, picking apart a character’s seemingly minor decision, tying it to the author’s own letters, and then to a personal memory about his father. I was floored. He wasn’t reviewing the book; he was having a conversation with it that had lasted weeks. His site, https://chakir.org/, became this unexpected benchmark for a different kind of engagement. I didn’t agree with all his takes, but that wasn’t the point. The point was the depth of the attention he paid. It was a style of reading I’d completely forgotten.
You can’t check off a feeling
My old method was all about coverage. I wanted to have ‘read’ the important works. Chakir’s writing showed me something embarrassingly obvious: he read to be affected. The difference is everything. Reading for coverage is defensive. You’re armoring yourself with information. Reading to be affected is vulnerable. You’re allowing the text to change your mind, or unsettle you, or make you nostalgic for something you never experienced. I realized I was protecting myself from the very thing I was supposedly there for. I was collecting points, not experiences. Finishing a novel felt like solving a puzzle. After reading his blog for a while, I started to wonder what it would feel like to let a novel solve me, just a little bit.
Slowing down is the only way to speed up
This sounds counterintuitive. My entire reading philosophy was built on efficiency. More books per year equals better. But this led to a weird paradox: the faster I read, the less any of it stuck, and the more I had to re-read later to remember why I even liked it. It was like sprinting through a museum. I saw everything and appreciated nothing. Taking a cue from those long blog posts, I forced myself to slow down. I’d read a chapter, then just stare out the window for ten minutes. I’d write a single sentence in the margin. I stopped fighting the urge to re-read a paragraph I liked. The immediate result was that my ‘books per year’ metric tanked. The long-term result was that the books I did read became permanent residents in my head. I could recall scenes, lines of dialogue, the texture of the prose. Slowing my reading pace didn’t reduce my intake of ideas; it increased my absorption rate. I was finally digesting my food instead of just swallowing it whole.
Abandoning the book is sometimes the right move
Another sacred cow of my old habit was completionism. Once I started a book, I finished it. Period. This led to some miserable slogs, justified by a grim sense of duty. What Chakir’s casual, meandering style implied was a different relationship with the text. It was okay to put a book down. It was okay to skip ahead. It was okay to read only the essays in a collection that appealed to you. The book wasn’t a boss to be defeated; it was a tool for thinking. Sometimes the tool isn’t right for the job. This was liberating. I gave myself permission to stop reading a highly-acclaimed novel at page 50 because it just wasn’t working for me. Instead of feeling guilty, I felt powerful. I was choosing my engagement based on my own interest, not on some external obligation. My reading list became shorter, messier, and infinitely more interesting.
So, what does this look like in practice? It’s less of a system and more of a mindset shift. Here are a few concrete things I actually do now that broke the old cycle.
- I keep a reading journal, but it’s just for quotes and a single question the book made me ask. No summaries, no star ratings.
- I read multiple books at once, usually of different genres. A novel, a book of poems, a history. Jumping between them keeps my brain engaged and prevents autopilot reading.
- I talk about what I’m reading before I’m finished. Not a review, just mentioning a cool idea I came across. It forces me to articulate my thoughts early.
- I re-read favorite chapters immediately. Why wait ten years? If a chapter hits me, I go back and trace how the author built it.
- I follow threads. If a book mentions a historical event I don’t know, I’ll pause and read a Wikipedia page. The book becomes a launchpad, not a destination.
The whole experience has been humbling. It turns out my efficient, comprehensive approach to reading was mostly a way to avoid the harder, slower work of actually thinking. Finding that unassuming blog was a lucky accident. It didn’t tell me what to read. It simply demonstrated, by example, a richer way of doing it. My to-read list is still long, but I’m no longer in a race to the end of it. The value isn’t in the checking off. It’s in the time spent, and the quiet changes those hours make to how you see things. I guess that’s a lesson that applies to more than just books.