I used to feel ashamed of being a "slow" reader — now I'm grateful for how naturally my mind interrogates or befriends an interesting text. It's a shame most of us are taught to read under the perverse assumption that the purpose is to "consume" "material." https://twitter.com/naval/status/1184549088949350401

What almost nobody understands is that reading "for comprehension" (what a joke) is a social experience. What they teach you in school is the equivalent of bad pick-up artistry. It's reading for people who hate books but occasionally need something from them.

The right pace to read at is conversational. It's not the same for every person, but it *has* to be a pace that allows your mind to get a word in edgewise. Go faster than that, and you won't even notice that you don't know what the fuck is being said to you.

Nearly all books are wrong for you at any given time. Most are really badly written, and some of them don't have anything useful to say in the first place. The ones worth reading are worth reading *when you're in the mood for that particular conversation.*

If you don't read very much despite "wanting" to, it's probably the case that you need to re-learn what it feels like to enjoy reading something. In practice, this means that when you find yourself wanting to *stop* reading, you stop. Good reading is mostly about *not* reading.

The typical successful adult human is so broken that they could read 30 pages from the middle of a dictionary and not find the experience fundamentally different from reading whatever it is they're reading to signal to other successful adult humans that they enjoy reading.

If you want your brain to be a burro, the easiest way to do that is to take something long and pointy and give your frontal lobes a few stirs. If you want a vibrant life of the mind, you have to sometimes do things because you actually fucking want to do them. Reading especially.