{"id":18412,"date":"2026-05-21T13:33:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T21:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=18412"},"modified":"2026-05-21T13:33:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T21:33:06","slug":"how-to-read-better-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/21\/how-to-read-better-books\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Read Better Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last fall, I wrote an essay<\/a> about how anyone can train themselves to read at least one book a week. One key idea is to focus on reducing friction in the reading process\u2014nothing stops us from reading books like a book that feels like a chore to read.<\/p>\n

\u2028Focusing on increasing the sheer quantity of your reading is generally underrated, especially because reading comprehension and retention are strongly coupled to your background knowledge. You\u2019ll read better if you read more. And so, to a first approximation, if you read more books on a topic, you\u2019ll automatically read better.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019ll give an example. Recently, I\u2019ve been reading Martha Nussbaum\u2019s, The Fragility of Goodness<\/a>. The book has an interesting philosophical premise: the good life, indeed even being<\/em> good, may be contingent on factors outside of our control. She argues the early Greek tragedians understood this, and Western philosophy has spent the last two thousand years trying to deny this possibility.<\/p>\n

The book is interesting and fits into some of my broader reading goals of learning about what it means to live a good life, happiness and so forth.\u2028\u2028 <\/p>\n

But the book is also challenging to read. This isn\u2019t due to faults in Nussbaum\u2019s prose, but because she assumes the reader brings so much knowledge to the book. She draws lessons from Agamemnon<\/em> and Antigone<\/em> assuming the reader is already familiar with these plays. (I was not.)<\/p>\n

While unreadable academic writing is practically a cliche, I think this stereotype masks a more fundamental problem: Many topics are deep. To write about them while also repeating every bit of background knowledge informing the conversation would be incredibly tedious. At close to 600 pages, Nussbaum\u2019s book wouldn\u2019t be enhanced if she expanded it to meet popular nonfiction\u2019s assumption of readers having minimal knowledge on the topic. This means to understand The Fragility of Goodness<\/em>, you need to have already read a lot.<\/p>\n

Thus, if you want to read better, start by reading a lot. Quantity and quality reinforce each other, because as you read more, even with only partial comprehension, you build the reference points that allow you to tackle deeper and better books.<\/p>\n

The Perils of Path Dependency<\/h2>\n

That reading better books requires reading more books sounds innocent enough\u2014until you realize that knowledge is not a generic commodity. The more you study within a particular topic, the more adept you get at reading that topic. Indeed, if you study particular arguments<\/em>, they crawl into your thoughts until you can\u2019t easily separate them from yourself. You become better at seeing one side of a debate, but the other side becomes illegible.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019ve become sensitive to this problem in my own work. My last book, Get Better at Anything<\/a>, was originally going to be called Do the Real Thing<\/em>, and I planned to focus on the research on learning transfer. \u2028\u2028I had encountered some interesting research on the relatively low degree of transfer of learning<\/a> when researching my first book, Ultralearning<\/a>. To clarify, the common finding among psychologists is that people who learn a skill tend to get good at it and skills closely related to it. Any benefits of having learned that skill drop sharply as we move to more distant skills, and the benefits learning it brings to completely unrelated skills are hard to distinguish from zero.<\/p>\n

I thought this was fascinating and under-discussed. The implication of this, to me, was that we should spend more time doing things closer to what we want to get good at, trying to avoid artificial and substitute activities with vain hopes of transfer.<\/p>\n

As I started researching, I got deep into some theories of learning which made almost exactly this argument: Jean Lave<\/a>\u2019s work on situated learning, Allan Collins and John Seely Brown\u2019s work on cognitive apprenticeship<\/a> and classic education reformer, John Dewey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Only after about six months of deep research did I begin to stumble upon the critiques of this viewpoint. Essentially, the critiques offered a theory that neatly explained the findings on transfer, but rejected the takeaway that I was building my initial book around: that doing the real thing is generally best.<\/p>\n

In particular, I was persuaded by the work of John Sweller\u2019s cognitive load theory<\/a>, Siegfried Engelmann\u2019s Direct Instruction<\/a>, John Anderson\u2019s ACT-R<\/a> theory. Together, they argue that complex skills are often best learned first in parts; that observation, not pure practice, is essential; and that reverse-engineering expertise is fraught. While direct practice still matters, it is best done in an environment with clear explanations, guided coaching and, quite often, drills that bear little resemblance to the skill you want to improve. <\/p>\n

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The result was a tricky pivot to write a completely different book from what I had initially set out to write, including a stressful six-month research detour where I forced myself to read a lot more books and papers than I\u2019d care to recall.<\/p>\n

The lesson I took from this, and indeed one I seem to have to learn more than once, is that knowledge is path-dependent. The books where you start your reading have an indelible influence on where you end up. It can take heroic levels of reading to undo the effects of a poorly chosen initial book.<\/p>\n

This is the dark side of the knowledge dependency I articulated above. Because you retain and understand more when you know more, you end up being better able to understand and assimilate viewpoints that already \u201cfit\u201d with what you know.<\/p>\n

When Reading More Makes You Know Less<\/h2>\n

\u2028Some topics, due to lay interest, are notorious for this problem of path-dependency.<\/p>\n

Consider nutrition. Of all the topics I discussed in my Foundations<\/a> project, nutrition<\/a> spurred the most long-winded rebuttal emails. And this was despite the fact that I was, to the best of my ability, simply parroting the expert consensus. A lot of non-nutritionists, it seems, have heterodox views about diet and have a lot of \u201cknowledge\u201d to back it up.<\/p>\n

How can I be so sure I\u2019m the one who\u2019s right? After all, I\u2019m also a non-nutritionist who\u2019s read a lot of books. Perhaps I\u2019m the one with weird beliefs and my correspondents are correct in pointing out my errors.<\/p>\n

This is certainly possible, and, based on my theory above, I wouldn\u2019t necessarily know if I was wrong. But, while I cannot claim omniscience, I do know that at least some of my critics were wrong, because they were espousing opposite theories! Indeed, I got a handful of pointed critiques from both plant-based devotees AND carnivore-adjacent low-carbers.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to suggest that either of these diets are necessarily unhealthy. From a practical point of view, perhaps it is best that we each simply follow whatever works for us. But a religion stops being merely personal when one begins to proselytize. If you\u2019re not simply arguing \u201cthis is what works for me\u201d but \u201cthis is what everyone should do\u201d, personal anecdote stops being an effective rebuttal to accumulated scientific research.<\/p>\n

\u2028Ironically, from a purely intellectual perspective, a lot of people who have gone deep into the rabbit hole here actually know less than they would if they hadn\u2019t read anything at all. Meaning, if they simply had absorbed the vague popular sentiments about eating healthy (which, to be clear, are also biased), they probably would be closer to the orthodox viewpoint than after reading a ton of books.<\/p>\n

While I may sound like a know-it-all scold here, I\u2019m very much including myself in this critique. If you are interested in learning and knowledge, you should always be somewhat wary of the possibility that you\u2019ll invest a lot of time and effort and end up with views that diverge even more strongly with our best estimate of \u201ctruth\u201d than if you hadn\u2019t begun reading in the first place.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve previously made the case for believing expert orthodoxy<\/a>, but my argument here doesn\u2019t hinge upon it. It\u2019s certainly possible to reject the standard position in a field after having carefully deliberated on all the evidence. But the conclusion you arrive at shouldn\u2019t depend on which book you read first<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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My Heuristics for Reading Better<\/h2>\n

So how can you read better books?<\/p>\n

As already mentioned, many of the best books aren\u2019t written for beginners. They depend on the reader already having considerable background knowledge for proper understanding. If you haven\u2019t learned arithmetic and algebra, calculus is going to feel confusing and painful.<\/p>\n

This means reading great classic books on your own, without a companion course or tutor, is sometimes a struggle. You simply haven\u2019t acquired enough knowledge to fully appreciate them yet.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t try. But it may take multiple re-readings and many detours to other books to squeeze all the juice out.<\/p>\n

What counts as \u201cbetter\u201d is relative to your knowledge base. Just as the \u201cbest\u201d ski slope isn\u2019t necessarily the steepest, but the one that matches your abilities, the best book for you may not be the same one an extremely well-read person would reach for.<\/p>\n

And yet \u201cbetter\u201d isn\u2019t purely a matter of personal preference. Some books provide excellent starting points into a long and satisfying journey into a world of ideas. Other books offer a detour that will cause you to get lost in the brambles.<\/p>\n

Some strategies that have worked for me to help sort these two apart are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Start with textbooks<\/strong>. I\u2019ve praised the virtues of textbooks<\/a> before, and I\u2019ll say it again. Most people who want to actually end up with knowledge (and aren\u2019t just looking for entertainment) would do better to read a textbook rather than a general-audience nonfiction book. If textbooks are too expensive or boring for you, more popular general survey books are also usually good. For instance, most \u201cFor Dummies\u201d books are a smarter read than most of the glossy bestsellers covering the same topics.<\/li>\n
  2. Use ChatGPT and Wikipedia<\/strong>. AI certainly has its weaknesses. Sycophancy is rampant so if you ask leading questions intended to \u201cprove\u201d your hunch, you\u2019ll too often get it. But, if you\u2019re genuinely curious about whether a given point of view is standard within a field, AI doesn\u2019t do a terrible job. (It\u2019s a lot better than, say, Quora.) Wikipedia is also really good here too, but, because it is organized by encyclopedia topics rather than specific questions, it can take more work to find an answer.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Read in projects<\/strong>. Don\u2019t get one book, get ten. If you have a bunch of books on a topic, then as long as you read them relatively close together in time, you\u2019re more likely to average out their arguments than if you read only one book and allow it to take up too much real-estate in your head.<\/li>\n
  4. Look for critics<\/strong>. Some risk of path-dependency can be prevented by actively seeking out rebuttals to stress-test your viewpoints. This, too, can be AI-accelerated since \u201cfind me the author\/papers that best argue against XYZ\u201d is a fairly simple AI request that used to require a lot of searching.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    But the methods we use are downstream of our motivations. The way to read better books is, fundamentally, to be deeply curious about what other people think, curious enough to want to spend a lot of your time working to understand them. If you\u2019re motivated by something other than curiosity\u2014a desire to prove a point, to be part of a \u201cteam,\u201d or to simply be entertained\u2014you\u2019ll probably get what you\u2019re looking for, it just may not be knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    How to read harder books (and how to not get fooled by bad ones).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18412","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-personal-development","7":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow to Read Better Books - Scott H Young<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/21\/how-to-read-better-books\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How to Read Better Books - 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