How to Read a Book (or More) Per Week

“I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns … the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, `Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading’.” 

Virginia Woolf
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

First: Get more done in less time – and make time for reading

Everyone has the same 24 hours. People prioritise time differently, and some waste more time than others. Either take the advice in this video, or just stop being so lazy and full of excuses.

Next: Techniques to increase your reading speed – and identify what slows you down

Reading Technology

Not all modern technology is a dysgenic curse upon this world. Reading technology is the only advancement, the rest are dysgenic regressions which will destroy us in the end.

You can zip through books at great speeds. You can use your eyes and ears simultaneously, or even just your ears, and get audiobooks and ebooks pouring into your brain faster than you ever imagined possible. This is the dawn of a new you. May you bless us all with your light.

Audiobooks

  • The Audible library is large and cheap (~$7 per credit / per book).
  • The Librivox project of volunteer-recorded Public Domain works is large and free.
  • Many or most Librivox and other audiobook versions are available on YouTube. You can download YouTube videos as MP3 files with sites like bestconverter.net.

    Example: Prophetic Brave New World is an 8 hour audiobook. Listen for 34 minutes in the morning, and 34 in the evening, and you’ll be done within the week.

    Listening at 1.5x speed (or 2x or 3x) is comfortable, so zipping through most books is faster than you expect. Go for a 1 hour walk while listening at 2x speed, and you’re a quarter through the book.

Text-to-Speech (TTS)

  • Amazon Kindle devices have a Text to Speech play button in every book (with rare exceptions, if publishers disable it). Some of the e-ink Kindle devices don’t have TTS, so check before buying.
  • Balabolka – Windows Text-to-Speech app: runs in the background and reads aloud any text you copy to the clipboard anywhere on your computer. It can open ebook files and read them to you – fast.
  • Enable on Mac OS – Text-to-Speech is already built in to Mac OS.
Your iPhone/iPad Can Read Any Kindle Books Aloud At Any Speed:

The pleasure of reading…

“…is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgement when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain,that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women,and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows,and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.”

Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?