I wanted to read more, so I started using bookwyrm at the start of this year. My SO and I set up a challenge - 12 books this year. It works and I am now at 8/12. I read fiction but also a lot of political literature.

Through some exciting fiction books you just read through - it’s run, you get sucked into it and want to know what happens in the next chapter. Finding those is generally luck and really depends on your taste. The last book I read through this was was Lying on the Couch by Irvin D. Yalom. He is a famous psychologist that writes fiction, it’s pretty easy to read but also has its depths. If you’re interested in psychoanalysis, it’s nice literature, I have read about 5 books from him.

Now, the “hard books” are different. There are different kind of hard books, some are very well written, others need a lot of background knowledge, others are just plain boring.

An important aspect for those books for me is, what is my motivation to read them? Do I think they are classics you need to have read, do I think the topic sounds interesting, or is it already part of a field I am familiar with?

In the latter case I will suck it in no matter what, at the moment I am reading a book about life in the early modern period in the holy Roman Empire.

I have another one from Herfried Münkler, a German political scientist which us particularly hard to read because you need so much background knowledge. I read it page by page, but only if I feel like it. There is no sense in forcing myself, I will experience the typical “reading but not understanding”. I often read 1-2 pages because the content is so dense, and enjoy if I understood a topic. To give another example for the more international audiences, I read How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. It is from the first Trump presidency so a bit outdated, but it was a really exciting read, I learned a lot about the US political system. I read through it within 2-3 weeks.

Now regarding the classics you need to read: Fuck that. There is so much classic literature that might be important, but it’s just too boring or annoying to read. There are a lot of exceptions, but they are hard to find. The last one I read and was really happy about (also because it’s short) is The Stranger from Albert Camus.

Okay, but here my absolute advice for serious reading: Never force yourself to read through a book you don’t like. I am a bit of a perfectionist person myself and it was really hard to put a book away, but oh boy, reading is so much fun since I am doing it! I have about 7 books I started and I read them in parallel. One of then I haven’t touched in 5 months and maybe I will never read it. Another one just takes time like the Münkler one and I will read through 3 others in the meantime. But fuck this “I need to finish a book I started”, sentiment.