Everybody wants to read more books. Well, not everybody. There are a certain few people who prefer that their brain remain in a mushy, smoothie-like, and semi-comatose state, but most people want to read.
But to read more, you need to want to read. Otherwise you’ll just end up reading articles on how to read more books or books on how to read more books.
Much like the other posts I write, this post is the result of a long and persistent bother with the kind of books people read around me. When I get bothered, I must bother other people about my bothers—it’s a rule. A disturbing pattern I’ve noticed in the choice of books that people read around me, in the groups that I am part of, and on social media feeds is that people are reading all the same superficial, fluffy bullshit books that you don’t want sensible people to know you’re reading. The books that you hide from your smarter friends. The books you read by smuggling them to read in the Odonil-scented environs of your Indian-style toilet.
After seeing this disturbing pattern over and over again, one fine day, a phrase popped into my other genius and philosophically inclined magnificent brain, and this was “escalate your reading.”
Why?
Think about the absurdity of what’s happening. People are avoiding reading harder books by reading easy books, but it takes roughly the same amount of time and effort to read a 300-page emotional fluffer or a 300-page business book.
Don’t be a pedantic math guy trying to poke holes in my otherwise bulletproof logic, but you get what I’m saying. People are doing hard things to do easy things. Despite me having an underdeveloped brain and being bad at math, this logic of reading more easy stuff to avoid reading hard stuff makes no bloody sense to me.
Reading should be like taking a hostage. Imagine you’ve taken someone hostage to make money—which I wouldn’t recommend, by the way. There are far easier ways to make money, like writing a book titled How to Make Money, How to Make Money in 21 Days, The Subtle Art of Being Rich Quickly, or Be Rich Now, Poor Later. Writing such books is far easier than actually taking somebody hostage, holding them at gunpoint, negotiating with cops, and successfully escaping.
But assume you take a hostage. You don’t just keep the hostage and make no demands, right? That would be stupid. It’s like reading a self-help book without actually helping yourself. You’d be the worst hostage taker in the history of hostage taking. What you have to do once you’ve taken a hostage is steadily escalate to get what you want.
Until you get what you want, you can probably kill one or two old people because what good are old people? They’re easier on your conscience to kill—which again, I wouldn’t recommend. But if you do want to kill people, I’d recommend old people and McKinsey consultants. Other people—it’s bad to kill.
Reading should be like that. You have to escalate steadily.
This leads to an important question: why even read?
If you’d asked me this question a year ago, I would have said some crap like reading makes you better, smarter, wiser, empathetic, or some shit like that. But I’ve become a little smarter since then because some of my underdeveloped brain regions have started getting a bit more oxygen.
My default answer whenever this question comes up now is: reading is an individual pursuit, and everybody gets something out of a book. Reading is like alchemy, a mad chemistry experiment. As Carl Sagan put it:
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Think about what reading is. All you see when you open a book are squiggly lines arranged in a particular sequence. That’s it. But these squiggly lines arranged in a particular sequence have the ability to unleash the most delightful thoughts and reveries, lead you to time travel to distant lands, and evoke the full spectrum of human emotions in you.
Words are like very unstable chemical compounds; when they come in contact with your sense of self, your beliefs, values, ethics, morals, fears, hopes, dreams, and insecurities, you get violent and unpredictable chemical thought reactions. What you get out of a book will be deeply personal, and it won’t be the same as what other people get out of it. Unless it’s a book about 35 ways to sit on a toilet for smooth and successful evacuation of bodily effluvia.
For example, I just finished reading Fredrik Backman’s My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises. It’s a wonderful story of an eight-year-old girl called Elsa who loses her grandmother and learns about grief, love, friendship, and herself in the process. It’s a breezy read, and I actually started thinking about my grandparents differently after reading it. But I can imagine a certain kind of person reading this heartwarming novel and then deciding that grandmothers are disgusting and then becoming a psychopathic serial killer going on a grandmother-killing spree. So reading doesn’t always make you better. There are a lot of weirdos out there.
At the very least, reading holds a mirror to yourself and helps you see the shape of your ignorance. And if you read widely, you can be a little less dumb in life, and that’s the best one can hope for. Good books take you to places you couldn’t have imagined, to meet people you otherwise wouldn’t have, and to have conversations you would have never dreamt of. At the very least, books are enablers. They give you permission to discover new things.
I keep going back to the Heraclitus quote: No man crosses the same river twice, for he’s not the same man and it’s not the same river. Reading is like that. Every time you pick up a book—hell, even if it’s the first time—you’re a different person than you were yesterday.
Good books can speak for themselves. They don’t need some random idiot like me to extol their virtues. You just have to open them.
But this is only possible when you escalate your reading.
Earlier in the post, I shat heavily on self-helpy, fluffy airport toilet bestseller books, but please don’t get me wrong—I don’t have anything against the 8 billionth book with the title The Art of How to Shit Well.
I really don’t.
In fact, we need garbage books that otherwise wouldn’t even be fit to be used as makeshift tissue paper to wipe your ass. Because it would be an insult to both your hands, your butt, and the stuff coming out of it. Traditional self-help books, breezy young adult romantic novels, and superficial spiritual bullshit books—they all have utility value. They’re like gateway drugs.
These images are from this insightful post by Joe Hovde.
Lest you misunderstand drug addicts, becoming a drug addict takes a lot of learning and hard work. You don’t just wake up one day and start shooting heroin. It takes work and planning; you need to learn chemistry. It’s far harder than people realize. Drug addicts are a little misunderstood for their innate knowledge of chemistry, neurochemistry, and neurobiology.
To become a serious drug user, you start with something simple, like weed. You smoke weed for the first time and cough like somebody poisoned you. But over time, you get used to it. You have your dozy trips, then you escalate to hash, maybe ecstasy, a bit of LSD, shrooms, then coke, meth, heroin, and so on and so forth.
And then you start to realize there’s a lot of time being wasted between you ingesting a substance and getting high. You start learning biology and realize the gap between your mouth or nose and your digestive system is too long. It’s delaying your high. And then you discover you can take drugs directly up your butt. So instead of snorting coke from your nose, you can snort it from your butt. The logistics of ensuring the drugs enter your butt and reach the headquarters where the reactions are processed—whether you use a spoon or a holi pichkari—is up to you. It’s personal, and I don’t want to comment on it.
Reading is similar. You start with self-help books. You read 28 of them and then realize it’s called self-help. Not other people will help. Which means at some point you actually have to start helping yourself. Some people go through their entire life not having that realization, but you are smart. You figure out it’s self-help.
As an aside, how many fucking books will it take for you to help yourself—the self in self-help—to know that you have to wake up in the morning, take a shit, not forget to wash your ass, that you have to fold your bedsheet, be grateful, think positive, believe in yourself, be authentic, live in the moment, and that you have to follow your passion, regardless of whatever it is, even if it means becoming an incompetent serial killer, a burger flipper at McDonald’s, a shitty poet, or a terrible farmer?
You just have to follow your passion. And most importantly, you can do it. Do what? Nobody knows. But you can just do it. It doesn’t really matter what, where, how, or when. None of that shit.
How many more religious and spiritual books do you need to know that all you have to do in life is do fewer bad things and more good things? I mean, all of religion can be boiled down and summarized to that. What’s the point of reading 25 spirituality books? Unless it has very specific instructions on lying naked next to a goat—not really doing anything untoward, but in the hopes that this lying naked with a goat might appease certain spirits and unlock certain spiritual energies that might lead you to becoming one of the richest people on the planet.
Then you beat yourself up for wasting 5,000 rupees on 30 self-help books. You immediately start having thoughts about going to your terrace, taking a shit, and using these books for cleaning purposes. Because keeping them on your shelf where other people can see them is not really good for your reputation.
And then you slowly start reading moderately challenging books. And your reading life becomes much more wonderful.
Look at the data. Most popular books tend to fall into health, self-help, or spiritual and religious categories. Not that all books in those categories are bad, but most of them are written by disingenuous grifters. If you read the Mahabharata or the Bible or the Quran, you’ll probably get more out of it than reading some idiot who got fired, became a monk, and wrote some idiotic book.
The self-help, spiritual, and religious books are gateway drugs. You need to let your addiction deepen. You need to crave stronger substances. You can either be a guy who smokes weed for the rest of your life or be the guy who becomes a hardcore drug addict who snorts coke from his butt. Reading should be a little like that.
There are genuinely wonderful books that can help you learn new things, make sense of the world, and, perhaps more importantly, help you ask better questions. I don’t think we can expect anything more from books than that, because that is the ultimate gift books can give us.
It still blows my mind that ultimately words are just squiggly symbols, squiggly lines that we have given meaning to, and that certain arrangements of these symbols can shatter our delusions, unmoor us, and push us to think differently. If you don’t let this happen, then what you’re doing is depriving yourself of the greatest gift that books can give you.
I’m not writing this because I only read Tolstoys, Dostoevskys, Hemingways, Shakespeares, Chaucers, and Baudelaires. I have many of the same airport bestsellers collecting dust on my bookshelf. I started from the same place.
But what ended up happening is I realized there’s only so much those books can give, and there are better books to be read—define “better” however you want.
How does that happen? I like the metaphor of going down weird and wonderful rabbit holes. And to go down those rabbit holes, you need to pay attention to the ripples in your inner universe.
A ripple is a split-second opening in your psyche and imagination where your brain stops craving certainty, stability, and a preference for things as they are. There’s an opening where it’s okay with you exploring new things, and you need to pay attention. A ripple is nothing but an invitation for resonance. It’s a marker for attention, a sign from your brain telling you, “Ooh, that’s interesting.” It’s an invitation to open new doors and go tumbling down different rabbit holes.
Whenever you read something, pay attention to the ripples. Pay attention to where the most interesting thing resonates with you. Follow those threads as they unspool, and you’ll end up going down the most delightful and rewarding rabbit holes. You need to have an open mind and pay attention to the ripples because that’s where the good stuff meets your intent and interests.
Wonderful things happen when you notice the ripples inside your head and then chase them to the ends of their circumference.
I’ve pretty much read random things throughout my life. I used to read novels like Dan Brown whenever I could afford them, but that’s all I could afford for a long time. Somewhere along the way, I even lost that.
It took me years before I realized not reading books was making me dumber and stupider. I only realized it because the stupid pandemic (I think it was during this time; my memory is hazy) forced humanity as a whole to stop running on the hedonic treadmill and take a break from constantly saying “synergy” and “circle back.” That’s when we were forced, for the first time in a long time, to look inward and see the creatures that we all had become.
This revelation that I had stopped reading scared me. So I started ordering all sorts of random books that famous people were recommending, books from bestseller lists, and Amazon’s algorithmic recommendations. Some of these books were genuinely terrible, but nonetheless.
In that chaos, I picked up an introductory philosophy book, which awakened an interest in philosophy. That was a ripple. It led me to discovering Stoicism, which led me down the path of learning what the Stoics had to give. Which led me to discover Seneca’s letters, which led me to build a website to showcase them.
Similarly, in my random online sojourns, I discovered Shaun Usher’s brilliant website, Letters of Note, which awakened interest in historical correspondence. I’d long wanted to create a site to discover letters on my own and post them online, which led me to create Paper Lanterns. Reading about finance awakened an interest in behavioral finance, and I’ve been tumbling down that rabbit hole ever since.
I was reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and came across one line from the poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, which, along with this interview of poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, led me to start reading poetry.
Emmenez-moi, chemins! …
(Carry me along, oh roads …)
wrote Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, recalling her native Flanders (Un ruisseau de la Scarpe). And what a dynamic, handsome object is a path! How precise the familiar hill paths remain for our muscular consciousness!
—
Poetry is the language that sits really close to feelings that defy language. Poetry nudges some of our feelings of joy or confusion or desire toward feelings that we can recognize and describe. I take solace in the fact that it’s poems that we turn to in big moments of change — like the loss of someone or a marriage or the birth of a child — because poems are resourceful for finding terms that remind us of what we live with but don’t always bring into speech. — Tracy K. Smith
It’s truly been one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done because I can sense this desperate need for poetic sensibility in all of us, and it can only come from reading poetry—it can’t come from anything else.
A random visit to my local bookstore led me to notice Salman Rushdie’s book Knife, which led me to buy all the books he’s written, and it’s something I intend to read. During one of my random doomscrolling sessions on Substack, I came across a post about a year-long read-along of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and it truly is one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life. I’m pretty sure I’ll say that on my deathbed. This awakened an interest in the literary classics.
Similarly, Henry Oliver’s posts and notes on Middlemarch led me to buy that book. After this awakening about just how phenomenally good the classics are, I’ve bought a bunch of classics. I intend to make 2026 the year of reading all the classics, for my own pleasure.
Perhaps the best recent example of how a ripple can lead to a rabbit hole starts with my discovery of the concept of public domain. In trying to read more, I came across the concept of public domain, i.e., that literary works after a certain period go out of copyright. This was new to me. As I started thinking of reading more classics, I discovered a lot of them are available for free on places like Project Gutenberg and Archive.org. This shocked me. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that the vast majority of humanity’s collective knowledge is freely available in the public domain, without any copyright restrictions.
One thing led to the other, and I developed an immense sense of respect and gratitude for all the works in the public domain. Much to my dismay, I discovered that despite being one of the oldest civilizations, India suffered from a deep and disturbing sense of cultural apathy. All our works in the public domain are more or less neglected. There’s very little work being done to preserve them and make them easily accessible online.
One thing led to the other, and I ended up building a website called Dhwani to gather links to all the Indian works in the public domain and make them easily discoverable. This is another example of my resonance meeting a ripple. In all of these cases, these were ripples I paid attention to.
There’s no real use to reading the same superficial bullshit that most people read and recommend.
What makes reading complicated in the 21st century is that there’s never been a greater supply of distractions to steal, pilfer, and filch your time and attention than at any point in history. The lame and ironic tragedy is that sitting in a quiet corner of your house with a book, throwing your phone aside, and getting lost in a wonderful book almost seems like a revolutionary act.
These digital platforms have also distorted some of the incentives we have for reading. Pay attention to how people share what they’re reading. Reading has almost become a performance. In most corners of the internet, there is absolutely no difference between a stripper twerking and a person sharing the cover of the book they’re reading. Both are performances. The stripper makes money, and the performative bookstripper gets paid in attention, likes, retweets, whatever nonsense.
What a tragedy.
To read is to escalate. You can’t keep the hostage without making demands. You can’t stay on weed forever and call yourself a serious drug addict. You can’t read the same superficial books and expect to discover new worlds.
Pay attention to the ripples. Follow the resonance. Escalate your reading. Because if you don’t, you’re depriving yourself of the greatest gift that books can give you—the ability to shatter your delusions and push you to a better place.
That’s all reading asks of you. Pay attention. Escalate. And let the squiggly lines work their magic.
What’s the point of living life if you don’t read the great epics—be it the Western canon or the great Indian classics? What’s the point if you’re never moved by the euphonies of Keats or the sonnets of Shakespeare, if you’re never stirred by the fragmented despair of T.S. Eliot or shaken by the blood-dimmed prophecies of Yeats, or if your jaw never drops in awe at Coleridge’s opium-induced visions? What’s the point if you don’t feel the dissonance in Dickinson’s verse or leap with joy into Wordsworthian reveries, if you never discover the multitudes within you after reading Whitman, if you never wrestle with the grim existential torment of the Russian masters?
What’s the point if you never encounter the great philosophies of the Greek Stoics, the Epicureans, the Buddhas, and the Zen masters? What’s the point if you never go back in history to know your story and meet your people, if you never commune in sorrow with your great forefathers? What’s the point if you never let the Romantics move you or the cynics unsettle you?
What’s the point if you never dive deep into the human self and marvel at its strangeness, if you never gawk at the mysteries of the universe, if you never open a book and enter another world entirely? What’s the point if the poet in you never awakens?
What do you think?
Featured image: “The Bookworm” by Carl Spitzweg