On This Project

MoreThanReading began as a personal inquiry. An attempt to understand why some books change us and others pass through without leaving a trace.

The question is not rhetorical. There is a meaningful difference between reading and reading — between the motion of the eye across a page and the deeper, stranger process of genuine understanding. Most of us do the first without fully achieving the second, most of the time.

I became interested in this distinction after noticing a pattern in my own reading: I would finish books I had been eager to read, close them feeling satisfied, and then discover weeks later that I remembered almost nothing of substance. Not just the details — the arguments themselves had dissolved. I had read the book without reading the book.

The Project

MoreThanReading is an attempt to think through this problem in public. It is not a productivity system or a method for reading faster. It is closer to a sustained inquiry into what reading is — what it demands, what it offers, and why so much of it fails to produce the effects we hope for.

The essays here address different aspects of this inquiry. Some are practical: how to take notes that help rather than hinder understanding, how to build a reading habit that survives contact with a busy life. Others are more philosophical: what it means to understand something through reading, how a text works on a reader over time, what we actually mean when we say a book changed how we think.

Together, they try to articulate what it would mean to take reading seriously — as an intellectual practice, as a form of attention, as a way of building a mind.

On the Writing

The essays here are written slowly and revised carefully. I believe that the quality of thinking in a piece of writing is inseparable from the quality of its sentences — that the care you take with language is also care taken with ideas. I try to write the way I want to read: clearly, unhurriedly, without wasted motion.

I publish infrequently and only when I have something worth saying. This is a deliberate choice. There is already too much to read. I would rather add a little slowly and carefully than a great deal quickly.

On Influence

The thinking here has been shaped, unsurprisingly, by a great deal of reading. By Montaigne, who modeled a kind of essayistic thinking I find endlessly useful. By Mortimer Adler, whose How to Read a Book remains the most serious attempt I know at a systematic account of deep reading. By Annie Dillard, whose The Writing Life articulates something about the relationship between language and attention that I return to often.

It has also been shaped by research in cognitive psychology — in particular, work on memory, attention, and the mechanisms of learning — which tends to confirm what careful readers have always known intuitively: that reading is an active process, that depth of processing determines retention, and that there is no substitute for sustained attention.

A Note on the Name

More Than Reading is not a claim about reading more books or reading faster. The name points instead to a way of approaching reading — as something deeper than consumption, something that engages your whole mind rather than something that simply happens in the background.

If there is an idea behind it, it is a simple one: to take reading seriously. To give it attention. To allow it to be slow. And to notice what begins to change when reading becomes more than a habit, and turns into a way of thinking.