For the past couple of years, I’ve always had three books going at the same time. It helped me read about 100% more than I did before, when I was reading only one book at a time.
On a coffee break, a friend who knows this asked me: “Don’t you feel guilty? Reading a couple of books at the same time?”
Then, with a playful grin, he added: “Isn’t that cheating?”
It was a silly accusation. But I desperately wanted to defend myself.
“No, no, no,” I said. “I only read one novel at a time. I don’t cheat.”
We had good laugh about it, but the question stuck with me.
For someone who read one book at a time for over 20 years, why did I make the shift? Why did reading only one book stop working?
Turns out, my friend was right. I was cheating. Just not the way he thought.
In this post, I discuss why this system works and how it doubled the number of books I read without sacrificing enjoyment.
Key Takeaways:
- Our mood changes throughout the day due to biological rhythms and emotional shifts. With it, our attention span and reaction time change too. These changes influence not just how well we read, but what kind of reading feels right at any given moment.
- Reading a dense non-fiction book late at night, when focus is fading, isn’t as productive, or enjoyable, as reading a novel that demands less mental energy. The same goes for the reverse: reading light fiction during sharp morning hours feels like a waste.
- Reading becomes much more enjoyable and productive when the right book matches the right time of day.
- Instead of forcing through one book and getting frustrated when mood shifts, reading multiple types of books that match natural rhythms helps cover more ground and enjoy every single one.
- This is why I read three books at a time: one novel (ebook, read at night), one narrative non-fiction (ebook, read early in the morning), and one demanding non-fiction (physical book, read in the afternoon).
- With this three-book system, I can easily read 50+ books a year and enjoy each one of them.
The full full blog post is available here.
Other 4 articles I wrote this month
10 Most Powerful 48 Laws of Power Quotes (And What They Actually Mean)
Top 15 Must-Read Risk Management Books for Everyday Life
How to Organize Research Papers: A Simple System that Saved My PhD
How to Choose the Best Colors for a Scientific Presentation?
Greenwood is an epic family saga that follows the Greenwood family across four generations, tracing their connection to forests, wealth, and environmental collapse from the past into a climate-ravaged future. The story shows how inheritance, exploitation, and care for the natural world shape both personal lives and collective survival.
What stands out to me about this book is how different it is from most novels that come out these days. The story has an almost everlasting quality to it, more like old Russian and American literature. It leaves a lingering taste after reading and resonates with me long after I’ve finished it.
The full book note is available here.
Other 3 book notes I wrote this month
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Interaction of Color by Joseph Albers
The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel
Quote of the Month
And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? “It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie,” he said, “or a lot of lies to cover a single truth.” (Page 108, The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel)
One Big Idea I’m Thinking About
I come back to the same idea that I shared in the previous issue. But now it’s more polished. Here it is:
In many phases of our lives, we’re told that we should find the thing we’d do if we had all the money in the world. If we can turn that thing into a career, we’re told, we’ll never have to work a single day in our lives.
While there is some truth in this idea, I think it often misleads us. When we try to answer that question, we tend to be carried away by social norms. We look for the answer within the set of options that are already visible, legible, and commercially available.
Take sports as an example. No one is born to play basketball specifically. People are born with certain physical and cognitive traits: coordination, endurance, spatial awareness, competitiveness. Basketball is simply one of many structured systems that can express those traits effectively. It is a tool, not the core.
The problem is that we often mistake the tool for the essence. We say someone was “born to be a basketball player,” when in reality they discovered that basketball was a particularly good vehicle for their underlying capacities.
When we reach our 30s and try to apply the same logic to our own lives, the task becomes much harder. By that point, our understanding of ourselves is filtered through careers, job titles, and socially recognized roles. The deeper traits that once drove our choices are now obscured by what I think of as a communication layer, the language we use to describe ourselves in ways that make sense to the world.
As a result, instead of asking what our core capacities are, we ask which existing roles we might fit into. And in doing so, we risk searching for ourselves in the tools we’ve learned to use, rather than in the underlying values and abilities that made those tools appealing in the first place.
Some of the books that I want to read to falsify this claim are:
- Frames of Mind, Howard Gardner
- Mastery, Robert Greene
- The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker
- The Birth of the Mind, Gary Marcus
- Mindset, Carol Dweck
- Range, David Epstein
So far, I’ve read one: Range by David Epstein, and planning to read all the other five this year.
Reader Question
What’s one destructive habit I need to leave behind in 2026, and most importantly, what should I replace it with?
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